From left: Patrick Coburn centre, with Richard Ingrams, left and Ian Hislop of Private Eye magazine

I WAS interested to meet The Independent journalist Patrick Cockburn at the Bloomsbury Street book shop Bookmarks on Tuesday night at a warm-up for the discussion on Paul Foot’s book The Vote.
Patrick is the offspring of two of my heroes. The campaigning 1930s journalist Claud Cockburn and his wife Patricia.
And Claud had many similar qualities to Paul Foot.
He set up and managed the scurrilous political gossip rag The Week in the 1930s, which was a precursor to Private Eye – Paul’s home for many years – and also filed some incredible reportage from the Spanish civil War.
Over a glass of wine at the launch Patrick Cockburn revealed one of the reasons he was there.
“Paul was an avid collector of my father’s newsletter and his family have inherited some back copies,” he said.
I hear the Foot family now intend to hand over some of those issues to Patrick for safe keeping – a piece of nice symmetry, I feel.

CONSIDERING my invitation to the Oscars was lost in the post, I was more than happy to see a group of actors who really are worth the plaudits on Wednesday night.
I popped into St Michael’s Community Church Hall in Greenland Street, Camden Town, and found a 10-strong cast put in a performance that was worthy of a little golden statue. The players were drawn from Camden’s homeless community for a pilot six-week theatre project, organised by Father Nicholas Wheeler and Liz McCall from St Michael’s Church on Camden Road.
A delighted Father Nicholas told me after the performance that it was important that people see “that the homeless community has a lot to teach us and a lot to give.” Sandra Bojang, 53, who is currently living in a bed and breakfast after being made homeless, said that the acting classes had given her “something to live for”.
She told me: “It has given me a lot of confidence and helped me get my self-respect back. I’m just upset it’s over now.”
How refreshing to see actors who have a real story to tell, unlike their bronzed Los Angeles counterparts who are more interested in flashing flesh through designer dresses and bawling ‘look at me’ through unnaturally white teeth than dramatizing the human condition.

How the ballot boxes were won

THE thought flashed across my mind as I sat taking notes at an industrial tribunal in Bloomsbury into a claim by a doctor against the management of Barts hospital.
Tribunals would never have been set up in the 1970s if trade unionists hadn’t campaigned for them .
It’s the same with our right to vote – that, too, was gained after decades of campaigning by the disenfranchised in the 19th century, namely, the Chartists, and later the Suffragettes.
The launch of a book by the late campaigning journalist Paul Foot on this subject drew more than 200 people on Tuesday at the TUC’s headquarters, Congress House, in Bloomsbury.
Praise was heaped on Paul by Tony Benn and the poet Michael Rosen who said that when he was at school he used to be asked to answer the question: Why did the Chartists fail?
Mr Rosen said: “But of course, they didn’t fail – it was their endless campaigning that helped to get us the vote.”
I have fond memories of Paul – not only because I had got to know him over the years when he used to live in West Hampstead but because he supported journalists at the old Camden Journal after it was close down by its management in 1980.
When the journalists rebelled he marched with them in protest through the streets of Camden, along with Lord Jock Stallard and Holborn MP Frank Dobson, and spoke about freedom of the press at a packed rally at St Dominic’s church hall in Kentish Town.
It was these same journalists who bought the title from the owners and founded the New Journal in 1982 – a newspaper Paul was always fond of.

• PAUL Foot’s book, The Vote – how it was won and how it was undermined, is published by Viking-Penguin, £25.

Trevor goes after inequality in the medical profession

Trevor Phillips

I AM glad to see that Trevor Phillips, chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, is pursuing the medical establishment over signs of racial discrimination in the profession.
I wrote last week about how an underclass – mainly of Asian doctors – has arisen in the profession called Staff and Associate Specialists who are below consultants and rarely reach the top jobs.
Often they are seen as the ‘workhorses’ in hospitals, doing the work of consultants but never drawing the same pay.
Trevor Phillips has written to a top medical committee asking them to change their ways, according to a report in the current edition of the BMA News, a weekly published by the British Medical Association.

Putting civil liberties under house arrest

I WONDER if there’s any pillow talk between the children’s minister Margaret Hodge and her husband Henry over the anti-terror bill now trundling through the Commons.
Margaret Hodge (pictured) may feel a bit embarrassed that several solicitors in her husband’s firm in Camden Town, have signed a statement – along with hundreds of lawyers, writers and actors and artists – lambasting the government’s proposal to put suspects under house arrest as a blow to our liberties.
Among the members of Henry Hodge and Allen who signed on the dotted line are Anna Fairclough, Zubier Yazdani, and Gwyneth Edwards.
They’re in the good company of Dame Helena Kennedy who lives in Belsize Park, actor Simon Callow of Camden Town, human rights lawyer Geoffrey Bindman and several members of his firm in King’s Cross.