A talent to offend

Britain's most notoriously scurrilous magazine is celebrating its 40th birthday. Appropriately, it's doing so amid a storm of accusations that, this time, it has finally gone too far. What is Private Eye's role, asks David Lister, in the new age of anxiety?

Forty years ago next week, a group of Oxford undergraduates started a satirical magazine. Most of them had known one another when they were at one of the country's top public schools, Shrewsbury. It was only a short time before they had an audience among the political and media elite, who admired them enormously; nearly as enormously as they admired themselves.

Thirty-nine years ago, they received their first writ. Thirty-eight years ago, two of the old school chums – Richard Ingrams and Christopher Booker – fell out, and in a palace coup Booker was ousted as editor to be replaced by Ingrams, who lasted a good long while before handing over the reins to Ian Hislop.

Next week Hislop will be lauded in the congratulatory tributes. The press that so enjoys being the object of the Eye's lampoons will churn over the characters, columns and campaigns that have enlivened Britain's most successful satirical magazine.

There are other mini-anniversaries from those early days that may not get a mention. So let us not forget...

...The time when Ingrams ended an early association between the Eye and TV's That Was The Week That Was and decided he would no longer work with David Frost. Frost, whom Peter Cook, Private Eye's owner, called "the bubonic plagiarist", allegedly upset Ingrams by retiring to the toilet, leaving the door open and continuing to shout instructions. Ingrams described it as a "traumatic experience".

...The time Dr Jonathan Miller, satirist and physician, wrote an anonymous satirical piece about "pooves"; the anonymity being spoilt by the Eye putting Miller's name and photograph above the article, making a furious Miller fear he would be struck off.

...The time, in the early Sixties, when Peter Cook bravely identified the Kray twins as terrorising much of London, and then, "under the guiding principle Publish and be Absent", went to Tenerife.

...The critique delivered by its founding editor, Christopher Booker, who criticised the magazine for "the practice, from time to time, of publishing stories, purporting to be entirely factual and without any saving grace of humour, which are based on dubious evidence, which no serious attempt is made to check, and which turn out in the end not to be true".

Private Eye's early columns, and the worship and loathing it inspired, bear a remarkable similarity to the product and its reputation today. Its location is virtually the same, in London's Soho; the editorial set-up with a tiny permanent staff filtering news and gossip from the B-list celebrities and A-list journalists invited to the regular Private Eye lunches – once a semi-secret event, now an institution. But now an invitation denotes you as a networker and player rather than, as in years gone by, a slightly seedy gossip.

The most obvious difference is that the present-day product is far more obsessed with Fleet Street, and there is a greater discipline, which seems to preclude the delightful spectacle of senior insiders, Booker-like, publicly condemning the magazine. The days are gone when the Eye was a continuation of the Salopian magazine (Ingrams, Booker, Paul Foot and Willy Rushton worked on the Shrewsbury school magazine before Private Eye). Hislop has friends in the office, such as the diarist Francis Wheen, but Hislop is boss. The magazine is a very professional venture.

There is, though, one other notable difference between the Private Eye of today and the magazine of the Sixties. It is a difference that threatens to put a cloud over anniversary celebrations and to open up a question that goes beyond Private Eye; can satire about the political Establishment exist at a time of war and national unity?

Private Eye's most visible, influential and memorable feature is its cover, featuring the famous speech balloons, unchanged since almost the very first issue. (It is probably the only magazine that refused to change with the advent of desktop publishing, and still looks defiantly like a school mag.)

After the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, the Private Eye cover had a picture of President Bush with his adviser. The adviser whispers to him: "It's Armageddon, sir." Bush replies: "Armageddon outahere." By the purest standards of satirical comment, it didn't seem unreasonable. Bush, after all, was whisked to an underground bunker immediately after the attacks. But even Private Eye's broad-minded readership has taken offence.

Today's follow-up issue contains a page of protests from readers cancelling their subscriptions. There are congratulatory letters, too. But the pro- testing letters seem to indicate that there are boundaries even for a magazine that the Establishment has long tolerated as an unofficial jester.

"Pathetic Under-Sixth form sick humour – for God's sake, act like grown-ups." "Just what does it take for you lot to see compassion." "Take your heads out of your Oxbridge arses occasionally and realise that there are simply some occasions when you should resist taking the piss. Six and a half thousand dead in a terrorist atrocity is one of them." "To make fun of the death of some 6,000 people and their president in such dreadful circumstances is unforgivable."

The legend of Private Eye is that it has always fearlessly stridden on wrong side of the taste barrier. But that's not actually true. As Patrick Marnham's history of the organ recorded, the Salopian founders were squeamish when it came to international tragedies. The death of President Kennedy in 1963 was marked in the Eye (as, indeed, it was in the TV programme That Was The Week That Was) by an adulatory tribute. During the Vietnam War the magazine refused to identify with the student protest movement, despite a readership survey in 1968 that showed that 84 per cent of the readers were under 34. In the Falklands conflict, the Eye saved much of its satire for the media, a target that was to bear the brunt in future wars. Lampooning The Sun's Falklands stance, the cover urged readers to "Kill an Argy and win a Metro".

In the Gulf war, Saddam was a target which would offend no one. "Anyone who compares me to Hitler will be gassed," he screamed from the cover. The satire was much closer to home during the Balkans conflict, with "Winston Blair" wrapped in a Union Jack, speechifying that "Never in the history of human conflict have so many bombs hit so few targets."

None of the previous wartime japes has caused so much offence as this one, Hislop admits. He says of the controversial cover: "I go into it in the knowledge that there are some people who are not going to like it; but we did get letters of praise as well. The freedom to laugh is a not unimportant freedom, and it's debatable whether this is a war or a major crime. Those who are offended should read the magazine. The whole point about satire is to use comedy to make a point. But any criticism we made was about politicians or the media, not the 6,000 killed."

Hislop does not believe that the old Eye was more cautious in times of conflict. "People just make more fuss these days," he says. Perhaps he's right: in the Private Eye Book of Covers (published by Pressdram), you can find offensive, insensitive responses to tragic events going back 40 years. (Some of them are shown above.) In the past few weeks, however, there's been a widespread sense that the carefree post-war age which gave birth to Private Eye has come to an end, and that a subversive mindset is no longer necessarily appropriate for thoughtful people. Can Private Eye – or any form of close-to-the-bone political satire – survive in such an age?

Elsewhere in the small world of contemporary satire, others are wrestling with the same dilemma. Don Ward, owner of The Comedy Store, believes it is absolutely right to make jokes about Bush and, indeed, Blair. "We are a service business and we are obliged to get on with it," he says.

For the moment, the Eye itself has chosen to return to safer ground. The headline on today's cover says "Yes, It's War!" But the picture is of Prince William and Prince Charles saying: "We know where he lives" and "He can run but he can't hide". The target is not Bush or Blair, but Prince Edward.

For Ian Hislop, war or no war, Private Eye continues in its ignoble tradition. For what distinguishes Lord Gnome's 40-year-old magazine is not so much its flying the flag of humour in times of conflict. It is being hounded by Sue, Grabbit & Runne (as the Eye refers to all layers but its own) in times of peace.

Randolph Churchill, in 1963, was one of the first litigants to issue a writ. Since then writs have been an essential part of the Private Eye story, though never so worryingly as in 1976 when the millionaire publisher Sir James Goldsmith attempted to use the law of criminal libel to close the magazine down. Private Eye leant on its constituency of friends prepared to support it financially when it launched its Goldenballs legal fighting fund, and Goldsmith lost.

And so, as he prepares to celebrate the 40th birthday, Ian Hislop continues in the manner to which he has become accustomed. He has spent the last four days in the High Court; in Dickensian fashion he is having to answer a case that started 10 years ago and concerns an accountant who Private Eye suggested was overcharging.

At a time of uncertainty and anxiety, it is good to know that some things never change.