For 40 years Private Eye has enraged and amused. As it enters its fifth decade, can the magazine keep pace with the newer, darker satire of TV’s Brass Eye or is it trapped in its own tweedy past? asks Geraldine Bedell
Sneering, smug, homophobic, vicious and parochial: Private Eye has been accused of being all of these things, with some cause. On October 2 this cheaply produced and tatty-looking magazine celebrated its 40th birthday by chartering a boat on the Thames and inviting 80 people to lunch 40 years of a publication that gives every impression of having been written by a gang of public-school boys entirely for their own amusement.
Four of the Eye’s founders Richard Ingrams, Paul Foot, Christopher Booker and Willie Rushton met half a century ago at a public school (Shrewsbury), where they eventually ran the school magazine. The current editor, Ian Hislop, and his writing partner, Nick Newman, met more recently at their public school (Ardingly College) and, like Ingrams and Foot before them, went on to Oxford where they, too, ran a university magazine. Altogether, the Private Eye gang (“Yes, it’s a gang,” agrees Ingrams. “I don’t object to that. I’m all for having a gang.”) give the impression of being a mildly rebellious group of privileged boys who get a kick out of biting the hand that feeds them and have cleverly avoided having to grow up and get proper jobs.
There is a view that the magazine they have been producing for four decades is irrelevant to everyone except them and the handful of people about whom they gossip. Alan Coren, a former editor of Punch, thinks the Eye is of little interest to people outside the politico-journalistic loop. “I used it as a kind of handbook when I worked in Fleet Street, but now it’s only about 15% accessible to me.”
For those inside the loop who have been lampooned by it, however, the charges against it are graver. Clive James objected to a scattergun sadism that “sent people’s children crying home from school”. Piers Morgan has a similar complaint: “It’s run by rather bitter, mainly drunken, sad, twisted ex-public-school boys who actively enjoy being very unpleasant about people. Ian Hislop is a man of courage. Our kids were in the same class at school last year but that didn’t stop him hammering away with up to three pages on me in some issues. He over-compensated to prove to his mates that our kids being school friends wouldn’t curb his editing.”
This element of boys showing off to their friends can seem very exclusive. For 40 years the Eye has accommodated the revolutionary socialism of Foot and the conservative anarchism of Ingrams, as if being in the gang overrides all other differences. But this can be intimidating for outsiders. A woman journalist who once attended a Private Eye lunch says: “It was the most mortifying two hours of my life. Richard Ingrams made no effort to include me. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do to make him notice me. I didn’t have the juicy morsel of gossip I felt I needed.”
Hislop is conscious of the drawbacks of the collaborative, jockeying method of joke-writing that dominates at the Eye. He has consciously recruited young women to the investigative parts of the paper, hiring two young women straight off postgraduate journalism courses and Heather Mills, who has worked on the measles, mumps and rubella vaccination controversy and miscarriages of justice. But he acknowledges that women comedy contributors are thin on the ground. “They just don’t seem to offer stuff. Nothing to do with it mainly being a load of boys being pathetic in a room, of course.”
He isn’t, however, perturbed by the perception of Private Eye as the school magazine of the establishment. “Nearly all satire is written from vaguely inside the club. Juvenal was a slightly chippy upper-middle-class Roman. Swift was a C of E clergyman and Byron was pretty establishment.” So the magazine occupies a peculiar position. If you despise the very notion of the British establishment, you should despise Private Eye. But no one despises the British establishment more than the Eye.
And, of course, it’s also funny. Craig Brown, who now writes the parody diaries, remembers picking it up at 14 “and it was going on about these now slightly forgotten figures like Alan Brien, and I had no idea who they were in real life. But I completely responded to the humour.” The jokes are the reason it sells 188000 copies a fortnight, with a readership of more than 600000.
The first Private Eye appeared on October 25 1961 (there will be a cover-mounted CD on the November 2 issue to celebrate), written in the gang’s parents’ houses and distributed, effectively for free, in cafs in Kensington. When, around issue 11, its first backer, Andrew Osmond (a friend from Oxford) left to join the Foreign Office, Peter Cook bought him out. Cook turned out to be the perfect proprietor from the gang’s point of view, turning up occasionally to make brilliant jokes, but oblivious to the amateurishness with which the place was run. (One of the old guard’s objections to Hislop, when he took over the editorship in 1986, was that he put up some shelves.)
Once it became clear that the magazine could become a going concern, an office was rented in Greek Street in Soho, near the pub the Coach and Horses, where Private Eye still holds its lunches. (It was said that in the time it took the lift to get from the ground floor to the office, Tom Driberg, the Labour MP who came in once a week to compile the obscene crossword, could seduce any man. A notice in reception said: “No male member of staff will take the lift on Wednesdays.”)
Cook suggested the speech-bubble covers for the third issue; Pseud’s Corner, EJ Thribb, Lord Gnome and Dave Spart all made early appearances. Ingrams hired Barry Fantoni, who, despite not having been to school or Oxford with someone else, remains a stalwart, attending the regular jokes session with Hislop, Ingrams and Booker. (Hislop also has a separate jokes session with Nick Newman.) Ralph Steadman, Michael Heath, Bill Tidy, Hector Breeze and Nicholas Garland all began contributing cartoons.
Very early on Andrew Osmond asked a lawyer to look through an issue to see if any of the stories was libellous. He was told they all were. Private Eye’s first writ came with issue 25, after a little-known writer called Colin Watson was described as “a little-known writer”. He was eventually paid 750. Today as much as a quarter of turnover is still set aside each year for libel settlements. Hislop spent the morning of the 40th birthday boat trip in court at the opening of the latest action. This has been 10 years in preparation, so the costs are potentially ruinous. He talked in his speech on the boat of entering “our 41st and final year”.
Ken Tynan objected very early on that Private Eye lacked a point of view and its absence of coherent politics has been a charge against it ever since. But it has also been a strength. For one thing humour ceases to be surprising when it becomes politically driven. For another it has enabled the magazine to hold together disparate voices. As Ingrams’s biographer, Harry Thompson, points out, Foot wanted to change the world for the better; Ingrams wanted to stop it getting any worse.
With a remit simply to make mischief (or, as Hislop would put it, “to attack vice, folly and humbug”), Private Eye is free flagrantly to contradict itself. When Auberon Waugh was contributing stories about Harold Wilson’s connections with the KGB, Foot was writing counter-stories pointing out that these stories were being leaked by MI5.
The sandwich shape of the magazine, with the serious stuff and professional gossip at the front and back, and the jokes in the middle, allows the earnestness of investigative journalism to coexist with deflationary humour. The journalism lends the jokes a kind of respectability; the jokes mean the journalism gets read. Occasionally, they even work together. An Eye cartoon persuaded Stephen Ward that the magazine knew a lot about Profumo and Christine Keeler, and he turned up at the office to tell his side of the story. Private Eye made the running on the Profumo scandal, and sales rose from 35000 to 80000.
Other notable stories broken by Private Eye in the early years inclu- ded British Petroleum sanctions-busting in Rhodesia; the Heath government’s talk with the Irish Republican Army; the 1971 payola scandal, in which DJs were taking kickbacks to play records; and the Poulson scandal, which led to the resignation of the Home Secretary, Reginald Maudling. Most of these were down to Foot. In 1970 Michael Gillard joined to start the In The City column, which became required reading in financial circles. The maga- zine made implacable enemies of James Goldsmith and Robert Maxwell (whose last libel writ against the magazine demanded aggravated damages for suggesting he had embezzled Mirror Group pension funds).
In 1986 a farewell lunch was held for Auberon Waugh, who was leaving to edit the Literary Review. At the conclusion of his speech Ingrams announced that he, too, intended to leave and was handing over the editorship to the 26-year-old Hislop. The shock was enormous, the resentment violent. For weeks afterwards, Waugh affected not to be able to remember Hislop’s name, calling him “Hinton” and “Driscoll” and claiming the move was “in tune with the Eye’s misguided policy of seeking the custom of yobbo readers”.
Nigel Dempster, who had joined in 1972 to work on the Grovel gossip column, said: “I don’t think people like midgets, especially pushy midgets … he knows nothing about journalism.” Dempster called a meeting of the rebel faction, including Peter McKay, who worked with him on Grovel, and Waugh, at the Gay Hussar restaurant, where they put their case to Cook, who agreed to go off to Greek Street and sort out the mess. But Cook was so drunk that by the time he arrived he had forgotten what he’d come about. He caught sight of Hislop, slapped him on the back and said: “Welcome aboard!”
For some time before Hislop took over, Private Eye had been becoming more and more gossipy, waspish and gratuitously unpleasant. Dempster and McKay’s Grovel column set the tone, aggravated by the ossifying of Ingrams’s prejudices. Thompson says of Ingrams: “He takes nobody and nothing seriously, from kings to cab drivers, if they fall outside that domain of Old England that produced him and which he is prepared to spend his life defending.”
This Old England is hard to pin down, although clearly coloured by Catholicism, strict personal morality and the elevation of effortless amateurishness to a kind of behavioural code. Francis Wheen says: “When Ian goes on holiday, Richard and I edit it. Richard will immediately start putting in stories about gay vicars.” In the late 1970s and early 1980s, what Hislop calls “legover stories” swamped Private Eye, for no reason other than that people were found to have been sleeping with other people to whom they weren’t married. Ingrams was once heard to say that he thought all his readers should have access to the gossip available to the upper-middle classes.
It seems probable that he was being at least partly ironic; nevertheless, this spreading of gossip about posh people seemed for a while to be the chief function of Private Eye. The magazine must take some part of the blame for the cult of celebrity that has subsequently swamped the British press. Hello! may be an object of ridicule to Private Eye now, but Private Eye paved its way.
Hislop scrapped Grovel and brought back Foot, who had left, originally to join the Socialist Worker, in 1972. (Ingrams says that Foot returned “because he’d been sacked by the Mirror. It was his decision. I would have had him back any time.”) Wheen arrived at around the same time though he thinks he might have been hired by Ingrams to work, as most contributors do, a few days a fortnight.
In due course, Hislop further beefed up the reporting team, with Heather Mills and Tim Minogue, and introduced a range of columns with the obvious intention of broadening the Eye’s appeal. Today, the Eye offers regular news of railways, hospitals, television, agribusiness, advertising, universities and local government.
“If I come up with a story about say, the Natural History Museum, Ian will just invent a column called Museum News,” says Wheen. “One of the great things about the Eye is that it has a very high boredom threshold. We can just bang on about things until someone notices.That happened with foot and mouth.”
Hislop may not have had much experience of journalism, but his appointment seems to have vindicated Ingrams’s taste for putting people into jobs for which they are unqualified; in recent years, Private Eye’s journalistic record has been exemplary. “We broke the Death on the Rock shootings in Gibraltar,” Wheen recalls, “and led the field over arms to Iraq. We broke the Bristol Infirmary story after the doctor who writes the MD column was told by a colleague that the unit was known as the killing fields. We’ve done a lot of work on [measles, mumps and rubella], and we’ve argued that political considerations and bungling incompetence led to the arrests of the wrong people over Lockerbie.”
Hislop also vowed to bring down libel costs, where he has been rather less successful. He was immediately plunged into the Sonia Sutcliffe case, involving an allegation that Sutcliffe had accepted money from a Mail journalist to reveal details about her husband, the Yorkshire Ripper. She was awarded damages of 600000, prompting Hislop’s response: “If this is justice, I’m a banana.” (The damages were later reduced to 60000.)
His third aim was to make the magazine funnier. It’s not entirely clear that he’s done this: the standard was already rather high and, mostly, it’s the same people writing the jokes (although he did hire Craig Brown, whose diaries are brilliant). But there are certainly more funny pages. Nick Newman, who has been editing four decades of cartoons to celebrate the anniversary, has found many more to choose from in the later years.
Ingrams thinks Hislop’s editorship has been impressive chiefly “for what he hasn’t done”. There is certainly a bravery in standing still when other papers are getting makeovers every few years. Private Eye looks the same as it always did. The same people, by and large, write the jokes. And arguably, they’re the same jokes. Before The Fast Show was even thought of, Private Eye was honing its catchphrases. Polly Filla and Lord Gnome offer the same jokes every week, but get strangely funnier with repetition.
The lunches still take place upstairs in the Coach and Horses, and the food, according to Cristina Odone, who is an enthusiastic guest, remains “absolutely inedible”. (It is said of Richard Ingrams that his opinion of people drops if they can’t finish the dreadful stodgy puddings.) “It’s very male and there’s a wonderful atmosphere of unbuttoned macho joviality. They do this good-cop-bad-cop act,” Odone explains. “They ply you with wine. Richard doesn’t touch a drop. Ian does, but he just swills it around a bit. And then Francis Wheen gets drunk and you think he’s one of you, and it’s only by glass five that you realise you’ve spat out everything you weren’t going to say.”
One other thing that has happened under Hislop is that the atmosphere seems to have got happier. Newman remembers going to the 20th anniversary party and “there was a lot of barracking”. The party on October 2, by contrast, was cheerfully good-natured. Perhaps it’s a generational thing, perhaps a happy accident, but what Hislop called in his speech the “middle-aged bores”, among them, Newman, Wheen, and Brown, are likeable people. The “Old Bores” often gave the impression of cordially loathing one another, even while they were mutually dependent, and even though they would have died rather than admit to having any ambitions, let alone caring that their friend was trampling on them.
Now that Lord Gnome is 40, it’s inevitable that people have started wondering how much longer he’s got. Brass Eye’s satire is making more waves, right now, although Hislop is untroubled by the competition. “What Chris Morris does brilliantly is satirise the medium. I thought that the Brass Eye on paedophilia caught that surreal amorality of television when it is pretending to take issues seriously. But we are more print and the word.”
Some people buy Private Eye because it is subversive, others because it’s cosy. Others just can’t see the point of it. “Satire is never effective,” says Alan Coren. “The Taliban won’t be brought down by satire.”
“I hope,” says Hislop, “we might sometimes change the way people think.” And certainly, thinking about Osama bin Laden as the top world terrorist who has recently welcomed Hello! into his lovely cave makes him seem just a tiny bit less frightening. At its best, Private Eye includes its readers in its gang, where the most important thing is to laugh.