Announcing the Paul Foot Award Winner

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It's been a very, very bizarre year and journalism must feel this. The implosion of the Labour Party, war in the Middle East, the rise of right-wing parties, a toxic split in the British public, and an economic crisis. Looking back at the stuff Paul wrote for Private Eye, I mean he would have coped with all of this, none of it would have surprised him. And the important thing about Paul is he would not have despaired, um, particularly not about journalism. Paul was, um, for those who don't really know and imagine he was writing about the time of the Boer War . He uh worked for a long time for the Daily Mirror and for Private Eye. And the first thing I did when I was editor was um get him back um on the team. He was a great friend of Richard Ingram's um and uh Christopher Booker. They were at all at school together and they were that early private eye team. What Paul um brought was the focus on journalism. If you look at how much he wrote about Locker bie, for example, the air crash and then the fake terrorism story and the consequent fallout, the inflected blood scandal, Paul wrote about that. There's a yet another uh review of it last week. None of this goes away. Miscarriages. Um I was reading his um Scott report, the arms to Iraq. Would you believe it? Britain was exporting arms to a Middle East country and not admitting it. Certainly wouldn't happen now . Jonathan Aitken, his obsessive campaign against him um uh again which ended with a win, um the great sword of justice was blunted um and uh Aiken um had to um uh apologize, give up and then he went to jail. The great thing about Paul though, he took all this stuff incredibly seriously, but he wanted journalism to be fun and for it to be enjoyable and life-enhancing. And I remember with Jonathan Aitken, we were he'd sued us, we were in serious trouble. And I said, I'm thinking of putting in a fake apology. Paul thought was funny and said, Why don't you put it in? We did put it in. Jonathan Aitken didn't think it was funny . He renewed a claim for exemplary damages , which he may well have got. I don't remember the end of the story. Um the point of The point of the story is that the great thing about Paul, and it's the reason the prize is named after him, is he was passionate about journalism, but he wanted it to be enter taining, and he knew that to get people to read a story, particularly a story of any length, it had to be entertaining, accessible, um, and worth reading. And Paul, he could make you sad, he could make you furious, he could make you laugh, and he could make you care, which is quite difficult nowadays, and particularly when he was presenting his stuff to me. So what I'm going to do is announce the winner, invite them to come up and get their check, and then invite all of the people on the shortlist. So this is the moment, the pull foot awards 20 2 6 goes to Peter Gagan and Khadita Shari . So here we are with the winner of this year's Port Foot Award, Peter Gagan. Congratulations, Peter. Thank you very much, Andy. Uh would you like to thank uh God the Academy? I'd like to thank, you know well I would I'd like to thank all the wonderful people I worked with to tell these stories. First and foremost, someone who's not here, just Khadija Sharif who is my co-author with so many of these pieces. If it wasn't for Khadija, this story wouldn't it would never have been told and certainly not in the way it was told. So that was absolutely couldn't happen otherwise. And obviously huge thanks to everybody at Private Eye and all the judges and everybody else who took the time to go through a story like that. You also listen to a contribution from you know we're a newsletter. You know we're a small website, there's only three of us. To be able to punch at the same level as some of these incredible stories. It's just yeah it's phenomenal. Yeah. Um nothing for Kirst Dahmer and your thanks without whom ? Well maybe a small thanks to Josh Simons. Without whom we wouldn't be, you know, I wouldn't be standing here. The voters of Makerfield wouldn't the polls in a couple of weeks Maybe, maybe. Now, the other thing we should say, which we didn't say when we first interviewed you, this is not your first time on the short list of the poll photo board. It's time number it's it's time number three. Time number three. So I was yeah, I I think um my experience in the poll foot awards is a good example of, you know, fail and fail better. Uh as as my compatriot Samuel Beckett once said. Uh back in I think twenty eighteen, maybe twenty nineteen myself and my colleague Jenna Corduroy were long listed for an investigation we did into Aaron Banks. Whatever happened to him? Oh actually yes yeah you know who know um and a few years later we were shortlisted, myself and Jen and Lucas and were shortlisted for an investigation into the Cabinet Office's Freedom Information Clearing House, how they were you might remember that story, how they were suppressing FOIs from journalists, campaigners and others. And also that year I was also shortlisted with the Guardian as part of their investigations I've been doing with them into