Private Eye's Literary Review: "A 17-year-old writing in his public school's magazine 50 years ago"

As I usually point out before criticising Private Eye, to establish my credentials, I have bought every issue of the magazine since I went to university in York in October 1978. (Before that I couldn't, because no one stocked it in Market Harborough.)

The Eye's strength at the moment is its investigations. The humour, by contrast, increasingly feels like the product of a sausage machine: feed in the week's events, turn the handle and out it comes. And as for the columnists and regular features, they are often a source of weakness.

I've had a go at The Agri Brigade and Pseuds Corner in the past - the former, I will admit, has recently been very good on the NFU's (and the Lib Dems') campaign against restoring inheritance tax to any holding of farmland, no matter how large.

So let's turn to the Eye's Literary Review, which a couple of issues ago was on to something when, in the course of a review of Ali Smith's Gliff, it complained about the stereotyped and simplistic view of politics held by many literary types.

I love the coverage of culture in the London Review of Books, but I've not forgotten the regular contributor who complained in 2011 that George Osborne was trying to pay off the national debt in one parliament.

Literary Review complains of Sally Rooney and of a caricature Conservative minister in Alan Hollingshurst's Our Evenings. 

I've not read that book, but it's worth pointing out that Tory politicians have discovered the power of intentionally becoming a caricature of yourself. Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg are the obvious examples to cite, but the first Tory to employ the tactic was Ann Widdecombe.

My reason for writing this post is the sheer awfulness of the column's conclusion:

In fact, the orthodoxies of the modern leftie novel are becoming just the slightest bit tedious, and this reviewer put down Glyff with the thought that, really, voting Conservative may have something to be said for it.

It the author was aiming to hit the tone of a 17-year-old writing in his public school's magazine 50 years ago, then he scored a bull's eye. But why would you want to sound like that? And why should we value the opinions on literature of someone who does?

Having a mate called Danny whose nickname is Danzo, "cuz he’s the king of Lanzo"

If you were lucky enough not to have come across this, er,  unique Guardian article 'The rise of Britishcore: 100 experiences that define and unite modern Britons', do not click this link.

It was suggested to me by on Twitter that the author must be the son of someone on the paper to have got it published.

The new Private Eye shows that was almost right: he's the long-term partner of someone there.

When the editor saw this article, the Eye goes on, she gave orders for it to be buried in the depths of the Guardian's website. But I recruited a team of professional cave divers to help me this afternoon, and we found it.

Why the New Yorker's article on Lucy Letby was blocked in the UK

The new Private Eye has an article on Lucy Letby that the magazine was unable to publish at the time of her second trial.

I don't know if there's anything in it that hasn't appeared in the press since that trial concluded, but it is well written and leads you disquieted about the prosecution and verdict.

During this trial, an article on the case on New Yorker site was blocked in the UK. Here the barrister Alan Robertshaw, whose legal videos I have praised before, explains why.

He also reveals some shenanigans over a jury member that threatened to derail the trial, though they turned out to involve what seems to be a malicious accusation.

Do wealthy evangelicals think there's a separate heaven for the privately educated?

You may know the story of Mary Whitehouse's fellow campaigner John Smyth QC. The new Private Eye reminds us:

In a purpose-built garden shed at his home in Winchester, Smyth administered sadistic beatings to his victims until they bled. When his criminal abuse was first revealed to church leaders in 1982, Smyth was hustled out of the country to Zimbabwe there he is set up his own network of Christian camps were at least 90 children were abused and one died.

And the Eye reveals that Justin Welby, the current Archbishop of Canterbury, was one of those who funded Smyth's religious camps in Zimbabwe, even though "he had been warned he was up to no good".

As a young man, Welby helped at the Iwerne Trust's camps in the UK, and Smyth was a leading light of the organisation.

This link between them appears to have stymied the Church of England's efforts to investigate Smyth's activities. The church has now apologised 15 times for delays to the inquiry.

Four of Christ's disciples were fishermen, but to get invited to a Iwerne Trust camp you had to be a pupil at an exclusive public school. It makes you wonder if wealthy evangelicals hope there will be a separate heaven for the privately educated.

Anyway, the best guide to the Smyth affair is Bleeding For Jesus: John Smyth and the cult of the Iwerne Camps by Andrew Graystone.

No, Nimbys can't stop all housing development with just a petition

Listeners to the latest Private Eye podcast risk coming away from it believing it's possible to stop new houses being built on a local open space simply by getting up a petition.

I suppose it's London's domination of political media that leads to such odd beliefs being held by intelligent people,

The left is convinced that Nimbys stop all development. The right believes it's the planning laws that have that effect. Both are mistaken.

Come away from the capital to Middle England and you will find small towns surrounded by successive rings of new development and local council that are wary of turning down planning applications because of the costs they will pay if the developers win an appeal.

But holding simplistic beliefs means you needn't get to grips with deeper, harder questions. One example: is the security that people need when it comes to their home compatible with private landlordism?

And there are more such questions to be answered if you want to go in for a new building spree.

First, where will the skilled labour come from? The British building industry has long been complaining about shortages.

Second, how will you force developers to bring houses on to the market at a rate that reduces prices and thus their profits? Oliver Letwin is good on this.

These questions do sound difficult, so let's just mock Nimbys instead.

The Agri Brigade: Another pisspoor Private Eye column

Pseuds Corner isn't the only poor column in Private Eye: I was pleased to see the current issue has another letter from a reader criticising The Agri Brigade.

If the Eye has an, if you will, eyedeology, it is centred on opposition to the way big business is given vast sums of public money with little or no accountability for how it is spent. 

Yet this principle is reversed when it comes to agriculture, as The Agri Brigade is devoted to the idea that farming should be subsidised and that no one outside the business should criticise what farmers do.

It reminds me of the late Sir Richard Body's account of fighting a hopeless industrial seat for the Conservatives in 1950. He was taken to meet some farmers on the rural fringe of the constituency for a briefing on agriculture.

There he was told the line to take: British farming is the most efficient in the world, and that's why it deserves to be subsidised.

Ian Hislop inherited The Agri Brigade from Richard Ingrams when he took over as editor. If I remember rightly, under Ingrams it gave the point of view of small farmers - the National Farmers Union was seen as the voice of big farmers and referred to as No F***ing Use.

That touch of radicalism has been lost and these days it may as well be written by the NFU. Nor has it been free of the original sin of the Eye: public school snobbery. I remember The Agri Brigade finding Margaret Beckett's love of caravan holidays endlessly amusing.

I'd like to see an environmental column in the Eye that was written with the public good in mind, rather than the interests of one industry.

But then, as I have bought every issue of the Eye since I went to York in 1978 (you couldn't buy it in Market Harborough in those days), I feel I'm entitled to moan about it from time to time.

Why does "Back to square one" date from the early 1960s?

Barney Ronay often appears the Private Eye's Pseuds Corner. That's because he writes intelligently and allusively about football, and nothing reveals the Eye's roots among public school boys of the 1950s more clearly than that column.

For the Eye, being dismissive of football is still an important social marker - you prefer rugby, of course - and artistic or other esoteric interests are to be teased out of your classmates in case they affect their ability to run the Empire in later life. (As I once blogged, it took the public schools decades to notice the dwindling of the British Empire.)

I'm saying all this because I'm now going to disagree with Ronay, who tweeted today after the prime minister warned us all against "going back to square one":

"Back to square one" is a phrase from early radio football comms when paper with squares on was used to convey where the ball was. It meant passing back to your own defence. In an irony lost on Rishi all successful modern teams go back to square one constantly

I'm not convinced by the logic of this gotcha. With my philosopher's head on, as Glenn Hoddle would say, I distrust the idea that an expression's meaning is decided by its derivation, so that it can "really" mean something other than what we all think it means.

Because, as Wittgenstein wrote, "the meaning of a word is its use in a language". There's no hidden, 'real' meaning to be discovered. (Incidentally, my philosophy professor at York was called Ronald Atkinson. It didn't seem funny at the time.)

I also doubt this story about "back to square one" coming from its use in early football commentaries. The question of its derivation was once debated in the Guardian, and this produced a pretty convincing debunking from a George Brindley:

As a boy in the 1930s, I regularly listened to such broadcasts while following the movement of the ball on a football-pitch chart in the Radio Times which was divided into eight squares. Captain H B T Wakelam gave the commentary while Charles Lapworth would murmur "Square 3" . . . "Square 5" . . . as the ball moved about the field. Wakelam never mentioned the squares, and Lapworth said nothing else. The phrase "back to square one" was never used. 

On the 50th anniversary of broadcast commentaries in 1973, an article in the Radio Times credited the phrase to these commentaries, but one has only to look at the diagram to see that the phrase could have no relevance: "back" to one team would be "forward" to the other; the restart after a goal was never in square one; and a pass-back to goal could also be "back to square two", "square seven" or "square eight".

My hunch was that it came from Snakes and Ladders or a similar game, though even the meanest snake won't drop you back on square one. So I turned to the British Newspaper Archive, expecting to find lots of 19th-century examples.

But it turned out to be very rare in those days, and you are as likely to find "back at square one" or "back in square one" as the phrase we are looking for.

And there was absolutely no sign of the expression catching on between the wars, as we would expect if the theory about it coming from early football commentaries were true. I expect suspect we have found another instance of the rule that all popular etymology is wrong.

What really surprised me is that the expression took off in popularity at the beginning of the Sixties and has never looked back since. The Ngram below confirms this.

Should we be looking for a forgotten television quiz or radio panel game where "Back to square one" was a catchphrase? Because something at that time caused it to become suddenly popular.

What does the panel think?

"For me he's written that too well. If he'd just dashed something off, he'd have beaten the keeper."

"He's trying to compete at the top level and he's taken way too long over moving the game on. It's embarrassing."

Later. Thanks for to a reader for sending me the link to an edition of Balderdash and Piffle from 2006 that considers the derivation of 'back to square one'. It examines and rejects the football theory, as well as another about the phrase coming from the game of hopscotch. It finds a 1959 example of the phrase that mentions the game of Snakes and Ladders, but the fact the author has to spell out his meaning suggests the phrase was not much in circulation then.

Besides what interests me now is the reason for the sudden popularity of the phrase from 1970. I shall go back to the British Newspaper Archive for clues.

True Tilda, Private Eye and rendering dialect in print

When I was quoting from Arthur Quiller-Couch's True Tilda on this blog, I harvested them from the Project Gutenberg plain text version.

There you will find this introductory note:

This was one of the most enjoyable e-texts that I have prepared but also one of the most difficult. Many of the characters use the working class slang and dialect of 100 years ago and the author sticks to this consistently throughout the book. At times there seems to be as many apostrophes as characters!

This attempt to render dialect phonetically was still going strong in the 1950s and is wearing to the modern reader. I'm told the approved technique in fiction these days is to do with the odd phrase early on and then trust your readers to remember how that character speaks.

But it's still a live issue, as a letter in the current Private Eye shows:

May I be the 94th reader from "oop" north to take issue with your WhatsApp group writer's irritating phonetical spelling of the f-word in Lee Anderson MP's recent posts? It follows the trend of, presumably, RP-speaking writers to needlessly illustrate literally someone's accent.

Many northeners will read "fook" with the long "oo", obviously, so it's a bit weird for us.

The other thing with those posts, of course, is that WhatsApp posts are generally typed, so the delightful Mr Anderson would hardly with the the word phonetically, would he?

English is not a phonetic language, whatever your accent, so the idea that we assume a character has an RP accent unless otherwise indicated tells us something about our society.

The Sins of G.K. Chesterton by Richard Ingrams

Writing in the latest issue of the London Review of Books, Peter Howarth reviews a book on G.K Chesterton by the former Private Eye editor Richard Ingrams.

Chesterton, who died 1936, was a journalist, controversialist, theologian and literary critic - his book on Charles Dickens is well worth seeking out for observations like this:

In such a sacred cloud the tale called The Christmas Carol begins, the first and most typical of all his Christmas tales. It is not irrelevant to dilate upon the geniality of this darkness, because it is characteristic of Dickens that his atmospheres are more important than his stories. The Christmas atmosphere is more important than Scrooge, or the ghosts either; in a sense, the background is more important than the figures. 

The same thing may be noticed in his dealings with that other atmosphere (besides that of good humour) which he excelled in creating, an atmosphere of mystery and wrong, such as that which gathers round Mrs. Clennam, rigid in her chair, or old Miss Havisham, ironically robed as a bride. 

Here again the atmosphere altogether eclipses the story, which often seems disappointing in comparison. The secrecy is sensational; the secret is tame. The surface of the thing seems more awful than the core of it. 

It seems almost as if these grisly figures, Mrs. Chadband and Mrs. Clennam, Miss Havisham, and Miss Flite, Nemo and Sally Brass, were keeping something back from the author as well as from the reader. When the book closes we do not know their real secret. They soothed the optimistic Dickens with something less terrible than the truth

Though he was most at home with tight deadlines and in the pubs of Fleet Street, there hung about Chesterton a reputation for unworldliness. So much so that some of his Catholic co-religionists have urged his canonisation.

Peter Howarth writes:

The Chestertonians’ appeal eventually resulted in a six-year investigation by the diocese of Northampton into whether there was sufficient evidence of Chesterton’s ‘heroic virtue’ and of miracles arising from his intercession. But in 2019, the bishop announced that things would be taken no further: there was too much evidence of antisemitism and, surprisingly, too little of ‘a pattern of personal spirituality’ in G.K.’s life.

And according to Howarth, Richard Ingrams follows other modern biographers in seeing Chesterton's antisemitism as the result of the malign influence of his brother Cecil and Hilaire Belloc (who was briefly a Liberal MP):

After Auden discerned the pair’s ‘pernicious influence’ in his 1970 selection of Chesterton’s prose, biographers and commentators have discovered how much the resentful obsession with rich Jews and Liberal politicians was primarily Belloc and Cecil’s. 

Ingrams supplies detail about just how nasty the pair were to G.K., too. The witty debater and brilliant controversialist was, in private, incapable of resisting Cecil’s tests of his family loyalty or Belloc’s bullying demands for a pulpit.

I think I shall read Ingrams' book as I have always had a soft spot for Chesterton, though the idea that we can simply blame his antisemitism on other people sounds a little like wishful thinking.

And if you share my interest in G.K. Chesterton and Belloc's distributism, which is described by howarth as

a libertarian and localist politics that sought to evade socialist centralisation and capitalist wage-slavery alike by keeping as much wealth as possible at household level

then you could look at David Boyle's Back to the Land: Distributism and the politics of life.

Foreign affairs reporting at its finest

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A letter in Private Eye complains that Lord Gnome's organ began a report on restrictions imposed by the Iranian government with the words:

The Iraqi government imposed widespread internet blackouts to try to contain the unrest that followed the death in police custody of Mahsa Amini...

This reminds me of the story about the subeditor working a freelance shift on a newspaper who called out: "What's your house style? 'Iran' or 'Iraq'?"

The new Private Eye: Just fancy that

This isn't a caretaker cabinet, it's a piss-taker cabinet.

— Jonathan Calder (@lordbonkers) July 9, 2022

Private Eye's Remote Controller is no cricket fan

It seems churlish to complain about an issue that covers the great Market Harborough bungalow mystery, but the Eye TV column this time is piss poor.

Take its author Remote Controller's description of Andrew Flintoff as "the last-but-one 'next Botham'".

The rest of us stopped talking about "the next Botham" almost 20 years ago when, er, Andrew Flintoff established himself as a test-class allrounder. 

He didn't stay at the peak of his form for many summers, but while he did he was a key member of the side. And because that peak included the classic 2005 Ashes series, Flintoff will be remembered for just as long as Botham will.

And then there is this gem about the series Freddie Flintoff's Field of Dreams:

This series is also disfigured by the BBC's belief that the most important scores in sport now are chromosome counts and position on the A-B-C1-C2-D-E scale.

If you love cricket you want everyone to be able to play it. Indeed, part of the Tory love of the game comes from the soothing picture of the Lord of the Manor and the labourer meeting as equals on the field of play.

And if you want England to do well you want wide participation too, because if the game is confined to the higher classes then there will be a smaller pool of talent to draw on.

But for Remote Controller maintaining privilege seems to be what matters. Because if we do nothing the game will be increasingly dominated by the products of private schools.

He must have loved the Noughties, when England tried Alex Loudon (Eton) and Jamie Dalrymple (Radley) before running out of ideas and being obliged to turn again to Graeme Swann (some ghastly comprehensive somewhere).

The Great Market Harborough Bungalow Mystery makes the new Private Eye

Rotten Boroughs in the new Private Eye has picked up the story about secrecy at Harborough District Council that I recently mentioned on this blog.

In that post I quoted the Leicester Mercury:

Harborough District Council came under fire last year over a decision to buy a bungalow, in Granville Street, Market Harborough, for £920,000 when property website Zoopla had it valued at an estimated £303,000.

The council said at the time the purchase was to enable an affordable housing development in the area at nearby Naseby Square. An internal audit into the Naseby Square scheme has now been completed but the council is refusing to share the findings with the majority of its elected representatives.

As Private Eye says, it's all very odd.

28 February in Liberal England history

So what has this blog been concerned with on what is usually the last day of February?

2021

Rosalind Franklin, the neglected pioneer of our understanding of DNA, turned out to be the great niece of the Liberal Party leader Herbert Samuel. 

2020

This was, I had worked out, the 51st anniversary of my only West End appearance in the Danny La Rue show Queen Passionella and the Sleeping Beauty - I was one of the children asked up on to the stage halfway through::

My strongest memory of the evening, apart from my own performance, is of Danny La Rue coming out in front of the curtain, as himself, and announcing that someone had died and singing his own signature tune "On Mother Kelly's Doorstep" as a tribute to him. 

I have tried to make sense of this memory in recent years, assuming that the person who had died was the writer of the song. But on investigation he turned out to be George Stevens, and he died in 1954. 

Then a few days ago I heard Barry Humphries on Desert Island Discs. One of the records he chose was "On Mother Kelly's Doorstep, as sung by Randolph Sutton. 

Sure enough, Wikipedia tells us that Sutton made a famous recording of the song and died on 28 February 1969. Which dates my first and last West End performance to within a day or two.

In fact, as I say at the end of this post, it dates it exactly to 28 February 1969, when I would have been eight years old.

2019

Francis Young wrote a guest post on the undiscovered treasure trove that is the work of forgotten Victorian folklore collectors:

The digitisation of local newspapers and Victorian pamphlets, making them searchable, is bringing much lost folklore recording to light, and we are currently living through a golden age of folklore research – not because there is still traditional folklore to be collected (in most cases there is not), but because folklore collected over a hundred years ago is finally emerging from the shadows.

2018

I did not post on 28 February, but the day before I had posted a picture of the wonderful Musical Ruth in sharing the news that there would be no Arts Fresco street theatre festival in Market Harborough in the summer.

2017

Good news! I had found another video about the disused railway from Oswestry to Welshpool.

2016

I compared The Boy in Striped Pyjamas with I Am David - a book that I read as a child in the 1960s:

The Boy in Striped Pyjamas reflects the modern belief that moral education involves the young being taught about the Holocaust and being able to recite the correct lessons from it. It also reflects the high status we give to victimhood. ...

I am David was written in a different era. It is not about death, but about escape, moral growth and the finding of happiness.

2015

Dangerous Minds had posted a new documentary on Nick Drake and his music. In posting it on here I quoted them:

Other than a few childhood home movies, no film footage of Nick Drake exists. So director Berkven had to create a sense of Drake through other means. That he succeeds is quite remarkable. 

He is enormously helped by Nick’s mother Molly. Her own music uncannily evokes her son’s and creates a deeply emotional dimension to A Skin Too Few.

2014

Cat of the Day came from here in Little Bowden.

2013

Richard Ingrams believed Ian Hislop  had been editing Private Eye for too long and I agreed with him:

Perhaps part of the Eye's appeal is precisely that it is the same every time. But while I still value its reporting and gossip, its humour pages do seem stale. Perhaps it needs some new contributors, if not a new editor?

But he ignored both of us.

2012

I remembered a ghost story from Much Wenlock in Shropshire:

This photograph shows Raynalds Mansion in Much Wenlock, where I went several times in the 1990s for the Festival at the Edge. The half-timbered front dates from the 17th century, but the building behind it is much older.

One year I joined a guided walk around the town. Outside Raynalds Mansion we were told the story of some children who were evacuated to the town and housed here during World War II.

On the first morning they came downstairs and demanded to know who the children in funny clothes they had been playing with were.

2011

These were the days when blogging still seemed important and Liberal Democrat Voice ran interviews with party bloggers. Today was my turn:

I realised that I was not a Socialist ... when Boxmoor County Primary School demanded a letter from your parents before you were allowed not to have custard with your pudding.

2010

28 February fell on a Sunday this year, so I posted a music video. And a rather good one too.

2009

This was the era of blog carnivals, including the Carnival of Modern Liberty, which I once hosted here.

This time it was the turn of Liberal Conspiracy and James Graham.

2008

And this was the era when the Liberal Democrats had their only weekly newspaper and I wrote a column for it.

This week it was about Michael Martin, the Commons speaker who was undone by the scandal over MPs' expenses:

Labour backbenchers broke the modern convention that the position should alternate between the Labour and Conservative parties to install him. In 2000 there was a strong feeling amongst them that a house with a large Labour majority should have a Labour Speaker. Such a partisan launch to his career was never going to make things easy for him when the time came to rule on contentious questions.:

2007

I had gone all intellectual, contributing the entry on Karl Popper to the newly published Dictionary of Liberal Thought.

2006

It was time for an anecdote about Sir Alan Ayckbourn, who is famous for living in Scarborough and opening all his plays there:

Ayckbourn was walking along the front there one day, when he was accosted by a stranger.

Mr Ayckbourn, isn't it?

It is.

I was looking at the paper the other day and I noticed that you have two plays running in the West End.

Yes, that's right.

I hope you don't mind me saying so, but you must be doing quite well out of that.

Yes, I suppose I am.

Mr Ayckbourn, there's one thing that's always puzzled me. If you got all this money, why don't you live in Bridlington?

2005

I had been to the Commons press gallery:

On the way I passed the Fathers 4 Justice demonstrators (Batman, Robin and Captain America) who had found a perch on the Foreign Office building in Whitehall.

My taxi driver said he supported their cause but not their tactics. He said that if everyone just ignored them they would have to stop this sort of stunt.

He also pointed out that Robin was wearing a coat over his costume, so he was not as heroic as all that.

The first Boris at 10 Downing Street

The 'Dear Bill' letters were a regular feature in Private Eye throughout Margaret Thatcher's years as prime minister.

Purporting to be the private correspondence of her husband Denis, they gave an inside view of life at 10 Downing Street. 

The Bill of the letters was generally taken to be William Deedes, the editor of the Daily Telegraph and former Conservative minister.

If Denis wanted to know what was going on he would seek out the mysterious Boris. He was generally to be found in the cupboard under the stairs talking to Moscow on the radio.

Over a snifter of his mother's plum brandy, Boris would fill him in on the events of the day.

Now we have another Boris at number 10 and today the son of a KGB officer took up the peerage that this Boris has awarded him.

Francis Wheen on David Steel and Cyril Smith

Private Eye produces a regular podcast called Page 94.

The latest edition looks at the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse and allegations aginst politicians.

In particular, and with the help of Francs Wheen, it looks at David Steel's odd defence of his lack of action over Cyril Smith.

But it would be unfair to blame Steel alone for this. Liberals of my generation all read the report of Smith's activities in Rochdale in Private Eye, believed it and did little.

Celebrating Auberon Waugh

Poor Jeremy. He is his own worst enemy, but with friends like these he really has no need of himself. The only remaining mystery is why the Liberal Party policy committee decided to murder Scott rather than Jeremy.

When I find myself bereft of courage or inspiration, it is the works of Auberon Waugh I turn to.

In the current number of the London Review of Books Rosemary Hill reviews a celebration of his work. You have to register with its website, but as it free I think it worth the effort.

Hill captures the essence of Waugh's appeal:

The ability to blend truth with invention on a sliding scale from the plausible to the surreal was the key to Auberon Waugh’s Diary, a column that ran in Private Eye from 1972 until 1985, which he regarded as his greatest achievement, and in which he claimed, with justice, to have invented a new form, ‘a work of pure fantasy, except that the characters in it were real’.

I particularly like her description of Waugh's resignation from the Eye:

At his farewell lunch he was upstaged by Ingrams, who announced his own retirement to cries of dismay all round, except from the ‘small young man called Ian Hislop’ who sat ‘tight-lipped’ as Waugh begged Ingrams to stay.

Ian Hislop's tribute to Christopher Booker reveals the problem with Private Eye's view of the world

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The current issue of Private Eye celebrates the life and work of Christopher Booker.

People of may age and younger will know Booker through his campaigning journalism against the European Union and measures to combat climate change. This was wrongheaded and, as far as he had influence, harmful to the national interest.

But, though he made the mistake of going on holiday in the Eye’s early days and returned to find himself ousted as editor by Richard Ingrams, it is clear from his contributions reprinted in the current issue that Booker was central to the organ’s view of the world.

Dave Spart, The Secret Diary of John Major aged 473/4, St Albion Parish News: he had a hand in them all.

He even wrote the greater part of the parody of Mr Justice Cantley’s summing up in the Jeremy Trial that Peter Cook made famous.

So I am happy for Christopher to be celebrated by Private Eye. He deserves it.

I am less happy with Ian Hislop part in this commemoration.

Hislop has spent the past 33 years editing Private Eye. As he is younger than I and has shown limited ambition to change the magazine, that means he has spent pretty much his entire adult life bathed in the view of the world that Booker established.

So you might expect a degree of affection for Booker from Hislop and some sophisticated reflections on satire and its role in our society and how it has changed since Booker's heyday.

Not a bit of it.

Here are two quotations from Hislop’s tribute o Christopher Booker in the current Private Eye:

And that is the reason I think he was really known as the Deacon – because he always wanted to share some insight, to convert you to his view of an event or an issue and to make you see the truth of it. That sounds a bit preachy (nicknames are rarely entirely affectionate) , but at Private Eye it was always done through humour and it was his defining motivation “to tell the truth smilingly”. This Horatian view of satire was… (put this into Pseuds Corner – Ed).

And:

Given how rude he was about the BBC, his approach was positively Reithian – he really did want to educate, inform and entertain. His stint on That Was The Week That Was was a model of this sort of Juvenalian fury (put his in Pseuds Corner as well – Ed).

So you see, whenever Hislop is on the point of saying something admiring of Booker or at all revealing about satire, he abandons the attempt and takes refuge in the Eye’s decades-old tactic of laughing at the heartfelt.

Such an attitude may have seemed radical when Booker and Ingrams and Willie Rushton adopted it at Shrewsbury School in the 1950s, but for Hislop still to be embracing it almost 70 years on suggest there is something deeply conservative about Private Eye - and Hislop himself,

David Steel tells inquiry that Cyril Smith admitted the abuse allegations against him were true

It was an extraordinary day at the Independent Inquiry on Child Sexual Abuse.

As the Guardian tells it:

Lord Steel, the Liberal Democrat peer, has admitted believing in 1979 that child abuse allegations against Sir Cyril Smith were true, but did nothing to assess whether he was a continuing risk to children. 

The former Liberal party leader said the late MP for Rochdale confirmed in a conversation that reports of child sexual abuse in the media were accurate. 

But rather than suspend and investigate the MP, Steel allowed him to continue in office. Smith stepped down as an MP in 1992 and died in 2010.

You can download a pdf of the day's evidence from the inquiry website, and I would recommend anyone interested in the last years of the Liberal Party to do so.

The three people giving evidence were Sal Brinton, Des Wilson and David Steel.

Much of Sal's evidence involves her being questioned about a written submission to the inquiry by Michael Steed, which details the organisation and culture of the party in the 1960s.

Des Wilson came and went from the party during the 1970s and 1980s, but he was the darling of the activists when he was around.

His evidence lays bare the divide between party's the MPs and activists in that era. The activists were more often in the right, but it is MPs' memoirs that are consulted by the historians.

Perhaps I should start reprinting extracts from Liberator from the past 40 years to show what really went on?

Wilson is also very convincing when he talks about Smith's bullying character.

Finally, there is David Steel and his startling admission.

I blogged about the allegations against Cyril Smith in 2012:

I first heard of the allegations against Cyril Smith when I read them in Private Eye in 1979. The Eye had picked them up from the Rochdale Alternative Press (RAP - those were the days when any self-respecting town had an 'alternative' newspaper). Northern Voices reprinted the original RAP story in 2010. 

My instinct has always been to assume that they were true, if only because I could not see why anyone would trouble to invent anything so tawdry - he "'told me to take my trousers down and hit me four or five times on my bare buttocks" - about someone who was then only a local politician.

My memory of 1979 is that the story about Smith was widely known in the party, which has always made me a little sceptical of Liberals of the era who claim not to have heard it.

You can read more about my reasons for this view in a 2015 post on this blog.

Anyway, you can read the Private Eye story from that year above and download a pdf of the full RAP story on which it was based.

Private Eye, snobbery and The Antiques Roadshow

There is a silly little item in the current Private Eye.

It begins:

Hard times at the BBC, where it appears even the treasured Antiques Roadshow must make cutbacks. 

The roster for the forthcoming series has been announced and settings will include the spectacular Crathes Castles (sic) in Aberdeenshire, Buckfast Abbey in Devon, Eltham Palace in Greenwich and, er, Media City in Salford.

It's years since I made a point of watching the show, but what made Antiques Roadshow interesting was precisely that ordinary people could turn up with extraordinary and valuable objects.

And in its early days at least, the programme often came from pretty mundane locations - Market Harborough Leisure Centre, for instance.

In fact it was Roadshow's later obsession with historic houses that put me off it. The inserts in which the presenter fawned over Lord and Lady Muck and their treasures were usually a bore.

Behind this item, I fear, lies Private Eye's original sin of snobbery. How, they ask, could people in somewhere like Salford possibly have anything of interest to show us?