Friday 23 November 1990

COURT JESTER

Paul Anderson, review of Words As Weapons by Paul Foot (Verso, £9.95), Tribune, 23 November 1990

“For many years," writes Paul Foot in the introduction to Words As Weapons, "I have castigated friends and relations (including my revered uncle Michael) who have published volumes of journalistic excerpts. Journalism, my argument ran, is by its nature ephemeral. Then Robin Blackburn of Verso wrote to me asking if I would be willing to publish a volume of excerpts from my own journalism. At once, I began to see the argument in an entirely different light..."

It's a good job he did. The argument that journalism doesn't bear collection is weak - what about George Orwell or James Cameron? - and Foot's journalism deserves to be put between covers if anyone's does. His weekly page in the Daily Mirror is a model of popular campaigning journalism, and his polemical column in Socialist Worker has long been the only good reason to buy the paper. His extended review articles for the London Review of Books, usually on some unsung scandal or another, have shone even in the dis­tinguished company they keep.

Nearly everything in Words As Weapons comes from the eighties, and most of it is from Socialist Worker and the LRB, with a sprinkling from the Mir­ror, the New Statesman and elsewhere. All the pieces are worth reading for their style and construction (the' book would make an excellent text for trainee journa­lists), but it is the longer articles from the LRB that really stand out.

Foot is a great teller of complex stories, and the 2,000-words-plus that the LRB's editor, Karl Miller, allows his writers has been used by Foot to great effect. Virtually everything here from the LRB, but particularly the articles on the Westland affair and the long-running saga of communist infiltration of Britain's security services, is as fresh as when it was written.

Foot is at his weakest when writing from the left on the Labour Party. He is often quite rightly damn­ing about the prospects of parliamentary reformism, and he's delightfully rude about Labour and trade union leaders. But he doesn't really have anything to offer as an alternative. He is, of course, a member of the Socialist Workers' Party, and is certainly its most effective speaker. Yet, although there are plenty of rhetorical calls for "socialism" and "revolution", Foot gives few clues about what he wants or how it could come about. There is certainly nothing here to con­vince anyone that his own tiny authoritarian Leninist sect could organise much more than a piss-up in the top room of a real-ale pub.

But perhaps that doesn't matter. As Robert Max­well has found, it's possible to get a lot out of Foot even if you treat his Trotskyist politics as harmless.