Ian Hislop, the editor of Private Eye, described Cobain’s work as “excellent – a real Footy campaign. Dogged pursuit of the uncomfortable but true.
Alan Rusbridger, Cobain’s editor at the Guardian, added: “Ian Cobain has followed the allegations of torture with determination, an obsessive eye for detail and stamina. His investigation has taken many months of digging and chasing. I'm sure Paul would have admired it. Investigative journalism is not yet dead!
Ian Cobain, writing in the Guardian and Guardian.co.uk, has covered a long-running investigation into Britain’s involvement in the torture of terror suspects detained overseas. He reported on the allegations of British complicity made by a handful of detainees or their lawyers and was able to locate and highlight the evidence that supports some of these allegations. He reported on the existence of a secret, government-sanctioned interrogation policy that underpinned what MI5 has been doing – a policy that led to suspects being tortured.
Last March, Gordon Brown told the Commons that the interrogation policy was to be rewritten and that it would then be made public. In June 2009 he was able to disclose the fact that Tony Blair was aware of this policy.
The Paul Foot Award Short List 2009
Jonathan Calvert
and Clare Newell
Sunday Times
Calvert and Newell of the Sunday Times Insight team exposed a number of financial and legislative abuses in the Lords which had previously escaped scrutiny in a body which retains its antiquated gentlemen’s club ethos. The stories have already had serious ramifications and point to an urgent need for a reformed second chamber.
Their revelations in January 2009 that peers were prepared to help lobbyists amend legislation in return for cash resulted in two peers being suspended for the first time since the 17th century. They also highlighted the widespread practice of peers clocking in to the chamber for a minute just so they can collect allowances. They also produced a series of articles which alleged that individual peers were defrauding the taxpayer by claiming allowances they should not have been entitled to, which have led to fraud investigations.
Sunday and Daily Telegraph
Ben Leapman’s investigation into MPs’ expenses began in 2004, and culminated in a series of articles published in the Sunday Telegraph and Daily Telegraph in May 2009. The story exposed MPs’ exploitation of parliamentary allowances to subsidise their lifestyles and multiple homes, and forced the disclosure of expenses details for every MP.
Leapman’s original request was made in January 2005, when the Freedom of Information Act came into force. After repeated refusals and appeals, his case, and that of two other journalists – Jonathan Ungoed-Thomas and Heather Brooke – was finally carried to the high court in May 2008, which ruled in favour of a full disclosure.
The Guardian
Paul Lewis’s investigation into the death of Ian Tomlinson at the G20 protests in the spring established that a police officer had struck Tomlinson with a baton and pushed him to the ground moments before he died near the Bank of England on 1 April. A key component of the story was a video filmed by a New York hedge fund manager on his digital camera, published online on Tuesday 7 April and in print the following day, showing the incident in full.
Lewis’s investigation relied in equal measure, however, on a reconstruction of Tomlinson’s last 30 minutes alive, drawn from oral, photographic and video evidence obtained from dozens of other witnesses he had tracked down through “crowd-sourcing”. Their testimony was included in a dossier contradicting the police’s version of events which the Guardian submitted to the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC). The commission immediately launched a criminal investigation. When a postmortem revealed Mr Tomlinson had died of internal bleeding rather than a heart attack, the TSG officer was questioned on suspicion of manslaughter. The CPS is considering whether to bring charges.
Yorkshire Post
Waugh’s exposure of cavalier spending at Leeds Metropolitan University involved examination of thousands of staff credit card statements and a wider investigation into the management culture surrounding the university. His exposure discrediting the takeover of Sheffield Wednesday football club uncovered links with a money launderer convicted through an FBI sting, a history of debts and a series of highly questionable links with businesses in Europe.
Waugh’s long-running investigation into Leeds City Credit Union, the country’s biggest, revealed wholesale mismanagement, complete with a chief executive attempting to run the institution as her own personal business.
The stories triggered the unraveling of the credit union’s chronic mismanagement which promoted the sacking of chief executive Sue Davenport and subsequently revealed huge under-reporting of bad debts requiring an emergency £4m bailout from public funds. West Yorkshire Police fraud squad are now conducting an inquiry.
Daily Mail
Shahrokh Mireskandari was one of the most high profile, outspoken and expensive lawyers in London, whose clients included foreign royalty and some of the richest men in the world. But he came to wider attention representing Assistant Commissioner Tarique Ghaffur in that officer’s litigation against the Metropolitan Police, promising publicly to bring down the upper echelon of the force, then led by Sir Ian Blair.
The investigation, using dozens of sources, into Mireskandari’s background on both sides of the Atlantic revealed his criminal past and the bogus nature of his qualifications and claims of experience. It also showed his close and mutually beneficial cultivation of Met Police Commander Ali Dizaei and Keith Vaz MP, chairman of the Commons home affairs select committee. Since the articles appeared Mireskandari and his senior partner have been suspended by the Law Society and the offices of Mireskandari’s West End firm Dean and Dean have been raided by the Solicitors Regulation Authority and closed. He faces a disciplinary tribunal hearing later this year.
The Paul Foot Award Highly Commended 2009
Susie Boniface
Sunday
Mirror
Nuclear test veterans campaign
Martin Hickman
Independent
Quest for palm oil for British consumers, devastating
the rainforest.
Dan McDougall
News
of the world / Observer
Exploitation of child workers for British high street
retailers.
Melanie Newman
Times Higher Education Supplement
£36m corruption at London Metropolitan University.
David Rose
Vanity Fair and Mail on Sunday
Campaign for former Guantanamo prisoner Binyam Mohamed
The Paul Foot Award was set up jointly by Private Eye and the Guardian in memory of the journalist and left-wing campaigner who died in 2004. The 2009 prize was presented at The Spin Bar, Millbank Tower, on Monday 2 November, with £5,000 going to the winner. Five runners-up received £1,000 each. The evening was recorded for the eyePlayer - Footie would have been proud.
The judges were Clare Fermont, Bill Hagerty, Ian Hislop, Richard Ingrams, Simon Jenkins and chairman Brian MacArthur. (Alan Rusbridger stood down as a judge to prevent any conflict of interest.)
Submissions are now open
The Private Eye Paul Foot Award for Investigative and Campaigning Journalism recognises the UK’s most brilliant, talented and determined journalists working in the fields of investigative and campaigning journalism today, and was set up in memory of revered journalist Paul Foot, who died in 2004.
The winner of the Private Eye Paul
Foot Award 2026 will be awarded £8,000 at an Awards Ceremony on 1st June 2026 while shortlistees will receive £1,500 per entry.
Download the Entry Form here »
Submission Criteria
Entries must be received by noon, Tuesday 17th March 2026 - submissions received after this date will not be considered.
The submission must be journalistic work published in a UK-based newspaper or magazine, including digital-only publications; broadcast content is not eligible. Eligible entries must have been first published between 5 March 2025 and 28 February 2026, inclusive. Submissions may be produced by an individual journalist, a team of journalists, or a publication, and may comprise a standalone article, a multi-part investigation, or a campaign. Journalists may submit more than one entry, provided each entry is made using a separate application form.
A maximum of two entries may be submitted per journalist or team.
How to submit a nomination
Entries must be submitted as PDFs by email only to: awards@private-eye.co.uk with the email subject The Paul Foot Award 2026.
Applications will not be considered complete until all items listed below have been received.
- An entry form (completed electronically; handwritten forms will not be accepted).
- Cover letter (maximum 2 A4 pages): This may include an overview of your investigation or campaign, for example a brief history or context, key challenges, and major milestones.
- PDF copies of submitted article(s) in the format in which they originally appeared (print or online). For multi-part investigations and campaigns, please attach each article as a separate PDF, along with a separate A4 document listing all relevant articles and their publication dates. If your campaign ran over an extended period, we recommend including only a selection of key coverage as PDF attachments, while listing the remaining articles on the A4 document.
- Please number the articles and record how many you have attached. Links will not be opened.
- For team entries: Please nominate a single person as the point of contact and list all entrants in your order of preference.
Queries
Any queries should be directed to Anna Zanetti at Midas PR.
Tel: 0758 312 7515
Email: Anna.Zanetti@midas-group.com
