Private Eye

''Private Eye'' is a British fortnightly satirical and current affairs news magazine, founded in 1961. It is published in London and has been edited by Ian Hislop since 1986. The publication is widely recognised for its prominent criticism and lampooning of public figures. It is also known for its in-depth investigative journalism into under-reported scandals and cover-ups.

''Private Eye'' is Britain's best-selling current affairs magazine, and such is its long-term popularity and impact that many of its recurring in-jokes have entered popular culture in the United Kingdom. The magazine bucks the trend of declining circulation for print media, having recorded its highest ever circulation in the second half of 2016. It is privately owned and highly profitable.

With a "deeply conservative resistance to change", it has resisted moves to online content or glossy format: it has always been printed on cheap paper and resembles, in format and content, a comic as much as a serious magazine. Both its satire and investigative journalism have led to numerous libel suits. It is well known for the use of pseudonyms by its contributors, many of whom have been prominent in public life – this even extends to a fictional proprietor, Lord Gnome.

History

The forerunner of ''Private Eye'' was ''The Salopian'', a school magazine published at Shrewsbury School in the mid-1950s and edited by Richard Ingrams, Willie Rushton, Christopher Booker and Paul Foot. After National Service, Ingrams and Foot went as undergraduates to Oxford University, where they met future collaborators including Peter Usborne, Andrew Osmond and John Wells.

The magazine proper began when they learned of a new printing process, photo-litho offset, which meant that anybody with a typewriter and Letraset could produce a magazine. The publication was initially funded by Osmond and launched in 1961. It is generally agreed that Osmond suggested the title, and sold many of the early copies in person, in London pubs.

The magazine was initially edited by Booker and designed by Rushton, who drew cartoons for it. Its subsequent editor, Ingrams, who was then pursuing a career as an actor, shared the editorship with Booker, from around issue number 10, and took over from issue 40. At first, ''Private Eye'' was a vehicle for juvenile jokes: an extension of the original school magazine, and an alternative to ''Punch''.

Peter Cook – who in October 1961 founded The Establishment, the first satirical nightclub in London – purchased ''Private Eye'' in 1962, together with Nicholas Luard,
and was a long-time contributor.

Others essential to the development of the magazine were Auberon Waugh, Claud Cockburn (who had run a pre-war scandal sheet, ''The Week''), Barry Fantoni, Gerald Scarfe, Tony Rushton, Patrick Marnham and Candida Betjeman. Christopher Logue was another long-time contributor, providing the column "True Stories", featuring cuttings from the national press. The gossip columnist Nigel Dempster wrote extensively for the magazine before he fell out with Ian Hislop and other writers, while Foot wrote on politics, local government and corruption.

Ingrams continued as editor until 1986, when he was succeeded by Hislop. Ingrams remains chairman of the holding company.

Style of the magazine

''Private Eye'' often reports on the misdeeds of powerful and important individuals and, consequently, has received numerous libel writs throughout its history. These include three issued by James Goldsmith (known in the magazine as "(Sir) Jammy Fishpaste" and "Jonah Jammy fingers") and several by Robert Maxwell (known as "Captain Bob"), one of which resulted in the award of costs and reported damages of £225,000, and attacks on the magazine by Maxwell through a book, ''Malice in Wonderland'', and a one-off magazine, '' Not Private Eye''. Its defenders point out that it often carries news that the mainstream press will not print for fear of legal reprisals or because the material is of minority interest.

As well as covering a wide range of current affairs, ''Private Eye'' is also known for highlighting the errors and hypocritical behaviour of newspapers in the "Street of Shame" column, named after Fleet Street, the former home of many papers. It reports on parliamentary and national political issues, with regional and local politics covered in equal depth under the "Rotten Boroughs" column. Extensive investigative journalism is published under the "In the Back" section, often tackling cover-ups and unreported scandals. A financial column called "In the City", written by Michael Gillard under the pseudonym "Slicker", has generated a wide business readership as a number of significant financial scandals and unethical business practices and personalities have been exposed there.

Some contributors to ''Private Eye'' are media figures or specialists in their field who write anonymously, often under humorous pseudonyms, such as "Dr B Ching" who writes the "Signal Failures" column about the railways, in reference to the Beeching cuts. Stories sometimes originate from writers from more mainstream publications who cannot get their stories published by their main employers.

''Private Eye'' has traditionally lagged behind other magazines in adopting new typesetting and printing technologies. At the start it was laid out with scissors and paste and typed on three IBM Electric typewriters – italics, pica and elite – lending an amateurish look to the pages. For some years after layout tools became available the magazine retained this technique to maintain its look, although the three older typewriters were replaced with an IBM composer. Today the magazine is still predominantly in black and white (though the cover and some cartoons inside appear in colour) and there is more text and less white space than is typical for a modern magazine. Much of the text is printed in the standard Times New Roman font. The former "Colour Section" was printed in black and white like the rest of the magazine: only the content was colourful.

Frequent targets for parody and satire

While the magazine in general reports corruption, self-interest and incompetence in a broad range of industries and lines of work, certain people and entities have received a greater amount of attention and coverage in its pages. As the most visible public figures, prime ministers and senior politicians make the most natural targets, but ''Private Eye'' also aims its criticism at journalists, newspapers and prominent or interesting businesspeople. It is the habit of the magazine to attach nicknames, usually offensive or crude, to these people, and often to create surreal and extensive alternate personifications of them, which usually take the form of parody newspaper articles in the second half of the magazine.

Frequent and notable investigations

''Private Eye'' has regularly and extensively reported on and investigated a wide range of far-reaching issues, including:

* The utilisation of tax havens by large corporations and the failure of government in tackling the problem.
* The revolving door from politics to lucrative corporate roles.
* The MPs' expenses scandal and ongoing abuses of the expenses system.
* Conflicts of interest in general, but particularly between public officials or politicians and big business, the arms trade, etc.
* Human rights abuses by countries with whom the government continues to carry on business.
* Phone hacking and other improper practices in the mainstream press.
* The deaths at Deepcut army barracks between 1995 and 2002, particularly that of Cheryl James in 1995.
* The investigation into the Lockerbie bombing of 1988.
* The contaminated blood scandal of the 1970s and 1980s.
* The Post Office computer scandal, where the Post Office's faulty Horizon computer system led to many innocent postmasters and postmistresses being falsely imprisoned for alleged fraud. The accused were finally absolved in 2021.

Notable columns

A series of parody columns referring to the Prime Minister of the day has been a long-term feature of Private Eye. While generally satirical, during the 1980s, Ingrams and John Wells wrote an affectionate series of fictional letters from Denis Thatcher to Bill Deedes in the ''Dear Bill'' column, mocking Thatcher as an amiable, golf-playing drunk. The column was collected in a series of books and became a stage-play ("Anyone For Denis?") in which Wells played the fictional Denis, a character now inextricably "blurred iththe real historical figure", according to Ingrams.

''In The Back'' is an investigative journalism section notably associated with journalist Paul Foot (the ''Eye'' has always published its investigative journalism at the back of the magazine). Private Eye was one of the journalistic organisations involved in sifting and analysing the Paradise Papers, and this commentary appears in ''In the Back''.

''Nooks and Corners'' (originally ''Nooks and Corners of the New Barbarism''), an architectural column severely critical of architectural vandalism and "barbarism", notably modernism and brutalism, was originally founded by John Betjeman in 1971 (his first article attacked a building praised by his enemy Nikolaus Pevsner) and carried on by his daughter Candida Lycett Green. For four decades beginning in 1978 it was edited by Gavin Stamp under the pseudonym ''Piloti''. The column notably features discussion of the state of public architecture and especially the preservation (or otherwise) of Britain's architectural heritage.

''Street of Shame'' is a column addressing journalistic misconduct and excesses, hypocrisy, and undue influence by proprietors and editors, mostly sourced from tipoffs – it sometimes serves as a venue for the settling of scores within the trade, and is a source of friction with editors. This work formed the basis of much of Ian Hislop's testimony to the Leveson Inquiry, and Leveson was complimentary about the magazine and the column. The term ''street of shame'' is a reference to Fleet Street, the former centre of British journalism, and has become synonymous with it.

The ''Rotten Boroughs'' column focusses on actual or alleged wrong-doing in local or regional governments and elections, for example corruption, nepotism, hypocrisy and incompetence. The column's name derives from the 18th-century rotten boroughs.

There are also several recurring miniature sections.

Special editions

The magazine has occasionally published special editions dedicated to the reporting of particular events, such as government inadequacy over the 2001 foot and mouth outbreak, the conviction in 2001 of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi for the 1988 Lockerbie bombing (an incident regularly covered since by "In the Back"), and the purported MMR vaccine controversy (since shown to be medical fraud committed by Andrew Wakefield) in 2002.

A special issue was published in 2004 to mark the death of long-time contributor Paul Foot. In 2005, ''The Guardian'' and ''Private Eye'' established the Paul Foot Award (referred to colloquially as the "Footy"), with an annual £10,000 prize fund, for investigative/campaigning journalism in memory of Foot.

In-jokes

The magazine has a number of recurring in-jokes and convoluted references, often comprehensible only to those who have read the magazine for many years. They include euphemisms designed to avoid the notoriously plaintiff-friendly English libel laws, such as replacing the word "drunk" with "tired and emotional", or using the phrase "Ugandan discussions" to denote illicit sexual exploits; and more obvious parodies utilising easily recognisable stereotypes, such as the lampooning of Conservative MPs as " Sir Bufton Tufton". Some of the terms have fallen into disuse when their hidden meanings have become better-known.

The magazine often deliberately misspells the names of certain organisations, such as "Crapita" for the outsourcing company Capita, "Carter-Fuck" for the law firm Carter-Ruck, and "''The Grauniad''" for ''The Guardian'' (the latter a reference to the newspaper's frequent typos in its days as ''The Manchester Guardian''). Certain individuals may be referred to by another name, for example Piers Morgan as "Piers Moron", Richard Branson as "Beardie", Rupert Murdoch as the "Dirty Digger", and Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Charles as "Brenda" and "Brian" respectively.

The first half of each issue, which consists chiefly of news reporting and investigative journalism, tends to include these in-jokes in a more subtle manner, so as to maintain journalistic integrity, while the second half, generally characterised by unrestrained parody and cutting humour, tends to present itself in a more confrontational way.

Cartoons

As well as many one-off cartoons, ''Private Eye'' features a number of regular comic strips:
* ''Apparently'' by Mike Barfield – satirising day-to-day life or pop trends.
* ''Celeb'' by Charles Peattie and Mark Warren, collectively known as Ligger – a strip about a celebrity rock star named Gary Bloke, which first appeared in 1987. A BBC
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