Paul Foot handing out copies of his famous Daily Mirror page [Mark Crick]

I HAVE a scratchy childhood memory of standing outside the Daily Mirror’s offices with my dad, Paul Foot, as he enthusiastically handed-out copies of what is probably my favourite of his many stories – but one that was never published as intended.

In 1993, Paul tried to use his weekly page to expose the “callous sack­ings and victimi­sations” at the tabloid he had joined as “Britain’s Top Investigative Writer” just after I was born in 1979.

With the headline “Look in the Mirror”, the page was spiked by the editor David Banks, who described it as a “finely polished suicide bullet”.

I remember the story made the main news later that evening and seeing Paul – in his corduroy trousers and, unusually, a tie – being funny about having been put on sick leave by his employer despite “plainly not being sick”.

It was a typical Paul Foot page: a mixture of hard facts and quotes revealing hypocrisy and injustice, warm solidarity with the people affected and laced with brass-necked cheek.

Margaret Renn worked with Paul at the Mirror for most of the 1980s and in her new biography – published this week by Verso on the 20th anniversary of his death – she quotes former editor Richard Stott: “It was a squalid end to a column that had been unique and one of the finest investi­ga­tive pages Fleet Street had ever produced.”

I think my dad is often thought of as a needling investigator focusing on very important and seri­ous affairs. But I don’t remem­ber him taking him­self, or life, too seriously.

He had a wonderfully playful sense of humour. If you heard him speak or read his pieces you would be left quivering with rage, but also roaring with laughter at the absurdity of it all.

Paul Foot with Tom

I would have been 13 when we were outside the Mirror office in Holborn that day. I had been whisked down there after being picked up from the William Ellis School gates, in the battered old brown Mini he drove about so haphazardly, in what I expect he felt was some sort of two-fingers up to the Establishment.

I would get whisked off on these sorts of adventures a lot during my childhood. He was a fun and devoted dad to me, and also my half-brothers, John and Matt, who grew-up in Cannon Hill, West Hampstead.

I remember him giving me a collection of his 1990s work for my 21st birthday, when he was rather grandly named Journalist of the Decade, and wondering how he managed to invest so much time in me while working so hard?

After he left my mother and our flat in Canfield Gardens, South Hamp­stead, he used to pick me up three times a week from school and take me to play hours of table tennis, or tennis at Golders Hill Park – he went to his grave having never let me beat him. But not at golf.

Yes – one chapter of this life in politics, noticeably absent from Margaret’s incredibly detailed book, is that this champion of the people was also a paid-up member of Hampstead Golf Club, without doubt the poshest and most pompous place I have ever been in my life. The dented brown Mini was regularly parked there, jarringly alongside the rows of luxury cars.

After he died in July 2004, I received a very formal letter stating the club flag had been flown at half mast out of respect.

There is online footage and recordings of his political speeches and spine-tingling lectures, about the poet Shelley, Thomas Paine, the Paris Commune’s Louise Michel, Chartists, Levellers and Suffragettes. He had this knack for bringing historical characters to life in a way you didn’t get at school. It made you want to go and find out more for yourself.

Paul with his uncle, the former Labour leader Michael Foot

He unashamedly indoctrinated me as a child with cash bribes to learn political poems, some of which I can still recite almost word for word.

I remember his toe-curlingly clinical attempt at sex education. He loved a sly nose pick and would wolf down an entire bag of Wine Gums in seconds, or his favourite, the sickly sweet Pontefract Cakes.

Foot children would often get a bucket at Christmas “to get your head stuck in”, or a pencil, wrapped up in a big box as if it was a PlayStation. A good joke ahead of the big reveal.

He liked to take me into the smoky bookies as a kid to put an outrage-inducing bet on the England football team losing every game in the World or European Cup group stages. I have continued this unpatriotic tradition each tournament without any financial success.

We played endless games – cards, chess, Scrabble – and he spoiled me rotten, no doubt out of guilt after leaving my mother, Rose.

Paul did not embrace the digital age. One favour­ite family anecdote is him asking after the fax was installed in his study: “Yes, yes, but how does the paper get down the wire?”

And if he was screening calls against bores with the answer machine, you would hear the start of his absurdly grave recorded message: “THIS. IS. A. MACHINE.”

Matt tells a good story about how Paul wrote to him after some potentially devastating A-level results with a letter filled with fake statistics about how few people had done as well as he had. And after I was turned down for a part-time job at Finchley Road Waitrose – THREE TIMES – he completely convinced me that I had been blacklisted on account of his affiliation to the Socialist Workers Party.

Paul with Clare Fermont

For all this talk about Paul’s lifelong pursuit of the truth and justice, he was also a master of the white lie. And the not-so-white lies too. He was no saint, and he made mis­takes and, at times, let people down.

We all in the family have memorised stories about Paul that we tell each other over and over again, like babbling residents in a care home.

But the reality is that none of us can properly remem­ber him anymore. What can be recalled but can’t be brought back – the gaping hole for 20 years now for us all – is the how he made you feel.

Simply put, he cheered everyone up.

Fooling about was very much in his repertoire. I remember him cackling away to himself at his desk, dream­ing up headlines and puns about the people he was writing about, his silly voices and impersonations.

It was hard not to get sucked in by his warmth and sheer enthusiasm for life.

The comedian Mark Steel used to do a bit about him eating soup – “Mruumphh! This really is the most wonderful soup, ever!”

It was just soup, Paul. And I think out of that affection for his character evolved a kind of Cult of Paul Foot that obsessed over his memory for years after his death.

It has been conflicting growing up with this near universal affection for my dad who in many people’s eyes could do no wrong, the kind of hero worship that I suspect would have made his skin crawl.

After a stroke in the late 90s, he spent a few weeks in a coma dead-eyed, hooked up to bleeping machines. He was in a rehab ward at the Homerton for months after.

I remember talking to him on a visit by his bed for ages about my latest teenage non-developments, before he leaned over and asked: “And who are you?”

In a fine meringue mess

Almost miraculously, his brain did fully recover and he returned to work at the ramshackle Private Eye office in Carlisle Street, Soho. You knew he was in if his stick was propped up on the rail at the bottom of the stairs.

He couldn’t move his left leg or drive for a long time, so I used to take him in and back to his home in Stamford Hill where he lived with Clare Fermont – his one true soul mate and a second mother to me – and their daughter, Kate, who seems to me the best of all humans out there right now.

His heart finally packed up in Stansted Airport, on the way to a holiday with those two, in Ireland. He was never one for going abroad anyway.

I found out he had died, aged 66, while hanging out in the July sun with my mates at one of our favourite football spots on the flat-ish field in Primrose Hill, near the Elsworthy Rise entrance. I don’t think any of us in the family fully recovered from the napalm delivered to our brains that day and I still get a shudder when I walk past that part of the park.

And so reading Margaret’s book was a perhaps uniquely unsettling experience.

I wanted to concentrate on the magnificent detail about all his inspiring campaigns, over many decades, or this strange early life story, very different to my own.

A boy born in Palestine and into extraordinary privilege – his father Hugh, Lord Caradon, the UK’s permanent rep to the United Nations, who lived for many years in an actual Cornish castle where, according to the book, the Queen literally once popped round for tea – who grew up in various colonial outposts before being sent to boarding school where he suffered brutal beatings from a psychotic headmaster.

What did he worry about, what were his demons?

But the reality was that I read it with a cold sense of impending doom; each page edging closer to a bleak recall.

But then again Paul, the relentless optimist that he was, would have no doubt reassured me: “At least your head’s not stuck in a bucket.”

• A review of Margaret Renn’s Paul Foot: A Life in Politics will be published next week