Paul Foot died in July 2004. He wrote 60 pieces for the LRB – on subjects including Leon Britain, the Birmingham Six, MI5, Tiny Rowland, Neil Hamilton, Gordon Brown and (often) Shelley.
MORE BY THIS CONTRIBUTOR
RELATED ARTICLES
22 October 1992
‘No view on it’
19 March 1981
Crazy America
24 May 2001
Tiananmen Square
21 September 2000
On Nobrow: The Culture of Marketing, the Marketing of Cultre by John Seabrook
12 December 1996
Après the Avant Garde
12 December 1996
Dashing for Freedom
12 May 1994
Sucking up
RELATED CATEGORIES
Terrorism, Weaponry, Aviation, 1900-1999, 1946-1999, 1980-1989, Current affairs, Media and journalism
Vol. 16 No. 1 · 6 January 1994
pages 8-9 | 3128 words
Taking the blame
Paul Foot
- Trail of the Octopus: From Beirut to Lockerbie – Inside the DIA by Donald Goddard and Lester Coleman
Bloomsbury, 325 pp, £16.99, September 1993, ISBN 0 7475 1562 X
- The Media and Disasters: Pan-Am 103 by Joan Deppa, Maria Russell, Dona Hayes and Elizabeth Lynne Flocke
Fulton, 346 pp, £14.99, October 1993, ISBN 1 85346 225 X
The American investigative columnist Jack Anderson has had some scoops in his time but none more significant than his revelation – in January 1990 – that in mid-March 1989, three months after Lockerbie, George Bush rang Margaret Thatcher to warn her to ‘cool it’ on the subject. On what seems to have been the very same day, perhaps a few hours earlier, Thatcher’s Secretary of State for Transport, Paul Channon, was the guest of five prominent political correspondents at a lunch at the Garrick Club. It was agreed that anything said at the lunch was ‘on strict lobby terms’ – that is, for the journalists only, not their readers. Channon then announced that the Dumfries and Galloway Police – the smallest police force in Britain – had concluded a brilliant criminal investigation into the Lockerbie crash. They had found who was responsible and arrests were expected before long. The Minister could not conceal his delight at the speed and efficiency of the PC McPlods from Dumfries, and was unstinting in his praise of the European intelligence.
You are not Logged In
- If you have already registered login here
- If you are a print subscriber using the site for the first time please register here
- If you are not yet a subscriber you can subscribe here
- If you are a member of a subscribing institution or University library please login here
- If you have an Institutional print subscription and online access is not included, find out about our Institutional online subscriptions
This article is also available for purchase from the London Review Bookshop. Contact us for rights and issues enquiries.
- print this article
Letters
Vol. 16 No. 2 · 27 January 1994
From Donald Goddard
It was a pity that Paul Foot fell at the final fence in his otherwise impeccable canter over the course of the Lockerbie scandal, as set out in Trail of the Octopus, the book I wrote with Lester Coleman (LRB, 6 January). In the last paragraph of his review, I am accused of making assertions before I prove them, of inventing conversations to which neither Lester Coleman nor I could have been privy (that’s the serious one) and of making too much use of flashbacks.
In controversial matters, I usually follow standard advocate’s procedure by first stating my position and then supporting it with the available evidence. In a case bedevilled by five years’ worth of political manipulation, lies, special pleading and confused media coverage, I felt readers were entitled to know unequivocally where I stood and then to judge for themselves to what extent that position was justified by the facts.
In all 320-odd pages of Trail of the Octopus, there is not one word of manufactured dialogue. The use of direct speech in the way Foot wrongly ascribes to me is, to my mind, as reprehensible a practice as reviewing a book without reading it properly. I report only one verbatim conversation in which Coleman did not actually take part, and that was a brief exchange between his mother and an FBI agent, relayed by her to Coleman in precisely the terms set down. I feel entitled to a retraction on that one. The quite groundless suggestion that I touched up the facts could well taint a reader’s response to the rest of the evidence set out in the book. As for the use of flashbacks, for better or worse, to provide the book with a narrative frame, I chose to interleave chapters of Coleman’s story, told chronologically, until the one merged with the other.
But I have to say my disappointment was offset to some degree by Foot’s magisterial put-down of David Leppard who, without declaring a personal interest, recently criticised Bloomsbury in the Sunday Times for daring to publish Trail of the Octopus at all.
Donald Goddard
London N1
