Ian Hislop on 40 years at Private Eye, Trump and Burnham...

Once upon a time, in 1961 to be precise, Private Eye was a grubby little magazine with very rude jokes sold around London pubs. Today it's Britain's highest selling current affairs news magazine and it has in many ways changed our public culture. Its editor Ian Hislop has been sitting on that same chair for 40 years which says something about the robust nature of his hindquarters. But at one point it looked as though that 40 years would be halted at two. What happened? I was 26 and a number of middle-aged employees did not like the idea that I was going to be editor. And now I'm very old. I sort of see their point of view. But they decided the way to stop this would be to take Peter Cook, the late great comedian who owned about three quarters of the shares in Private Eye. So he was basically the proprietor. They thought they'd take him out for lunch, which is always a mistake with Peter, because lunch never involved any food. And he came back into the office, and he'd totally forgotten what the lunch was about, and he saw me, and he said, oh, welcome aboard. And that was that. And that was that. A great victory for the liquid lunch. Looking back over that huge period, you've had some huge victories. You know, I'm thinking about the Birmingham Six. I'm thinking, obviously, about the post office story. What, for you, was the greatest of those victories? Well, I suppose because it was so long, the post office was just incredibly pleasing. I mean, it required a very, very good television drama, and let's be honest, you know, often investigative journalism requires something else to get traction. But that was immensely pleasing. I mean, Paul Foot's miscarriages of justice, pretty good. Some of the big inquiries, the blood inquiry, and we haven't got, as far as anyone would have hoped on that, but a lot of those long-running campaigns. And one today, a small... I mean, this is the pleasure of it. You occasionally get news. Angela Rayner has sent an inspector into Teesside. Ah, after all this time. Yes, a story that no-one seems in the slightest bit interested in except us, and I think it's about to turn. And that involves the mayor, we should say. It does involve the mayor, Lord Hoochum. Yeah, yeah. and the Teesside Corporation, and we'll see what the inspector finds. What was the greatest defeat? I suppose losing twice in court on cases that turned out to be right. You're talking about Sonia Sutcliffe? Sonia Sutcliffe, who was the wife of the Yorkshire Ripper, who we accused of accepting money from a newspaper, which wasn't allowed. You know, you're the wife of a serial killer. You're not meant to be making a profit. We lost that case in court. I nearly bankrupt the magazine. £600,000 damages, £700,000 costs. You can see I don't remember it at all, clearly. Yeah. And eventually it turned out that, yes, she had taken the money. But by then you'd paid the fine. I nearly bankrupt the mag and the money had gone. So there were, yeah, I lost a lot of cases along the way. And that brings me to the mysterious figure of Lord Gnome, your proprietor. Yes. At what point does Lord Gnome come in and tap you on the shoulder and say, young Hislop or old Hislop, you're losing me too much money? Well, I thought it would be then. And there were a number of cases since. I thought, well, really, this might be all over. But then I realised that when Peter Cook was a proprietor, he thought this was great. and uh the readers consistently bailed us out i mean they paid up um to there was a fund we called the banana balls because yeah i came out of the court and said if that's justice i'm a banana because i couldn't think of anything else to say and uh uh we set up this fund and the readers bailed us out and they they did it quite a lot during those middle years i have to say now We do pay our own bills. Thank you, readers. We finally got there at last. Got there at last. Private Eye first emerges in the 60s. Macmillan is prime minister. It's a little magazine sold around the London pubs. And then when you arrive, it's the heyday of Thatcherism. Yes. Thinking about what has happened to politics generally and to the wider world, you know, we've got France burning. We've got a National Front leader quite likely to become the next president of France. We have Trump, the gift that keeps on giving every single day. Yes. Just your reflections on the extraordinary change that you've seen in your editorial time. Yes, I mean, the longer you do a job, the more you think it is plus ça change and plus ça change, reste la même chose. They were always as bad as that. I think we have a nostalgia about how, A, how great the 80s were. I love seeing young people say, wasn't it great? And I think, what, the poll tax riots? Yeah, yeah. The IRA bombing Harrods. When I first came up to London, it wasn't that great. The generation from the 60s, you asked them, was it really great to be alive in the 60s? They said, no, it was terrible. You know, are we worse corrupt now? What, worse than Poulsen? You know, how badly are British politicians infiltrated by the Russians? Well, Profumo. All of that. Do you know what I mean? And yet we have an American president who appears to be ganging up with the Russians against another small European country. It feels more like Poland and Germany and the Soviet Union in 1940 than it does to anything modern. Yes, and I think that's right. I think you have to choose your parallels. But the idea that Trump either never knew or hasn't remembered that traditionally Russia was the enemy. I looked up an old private eye cover from his first term. and he said he's putting America first and I just thought that's literally the same story for the last 10 years and he does it again now and we're surprised but he's never really made any bones about it. Are you worried that liberal democracy, to call it that, is on the slide, is going? I think there is always a worry that the centre cannot hold and people have always said that. At this precise moment in Britain, the extremes seem to be having a bad time and I find that very cheering and that the two old parties are beginning to remember that they were meant to occupy ground from which you could govern. Let's talk a little bit about Peter Cook again. Yes. I always go back, I always wonder how effective really is satire? It's great to read, it's great fun, but does it really change much? And I think of Peter Cook's thing about, yes, that the cabarets in Berlin in the 1930s were fantastic. They saw off Adolf Hitler. And there is always that question. Yes, absolutely. Is it worth doing this? My answer, and I think it would have been Peter's, I mean, Peter both said that and wept when Paul Foot turned up with a new investigation. Peter funded for, you know, decades a satirical magazine. He did not think it was a waste of time. He did not think his own life was a waste of time. But I think the answer is always, of course it's worth doing, making points, putting the comic boot in, telling the truth smilingly. All of these old English satirical mission statements are still true. But alongside the jokes, Private Eye has become increasingly serious about the investigative side. Now, Sunday Times perhaps apart, the newspapers are no longer prepared to spend the same kind of money, risk money, on big investigations where you might spend half a million pounds and it doesn't work or whatever. So do you feel a kind of moral obligation to fill the gap? Yes, and I think part of the reason we filled the gap is because the gap appeared. And a lot of journalists found there's nowhere to send their stories except to us. Yeah, people don't want to risk the money and they don't accept the situation where a journalist looks into a story for three months and says, look, there isn't anything here. Nobody likes that as an editor. And also, we have a situation where a lot of the media is analysis. There are a lot of podcasts, a lot of people talking about things. There are very few people going out and finding things out. Let me ask one final Peter Cook-related thing. Yes. Here at LBC, we remember Peter Cook particularly because I have a colleague, Clive Boole, who does the overnight shows. And he would get these calls from Sven, from Swiss Cottage, a Norwegian fisherman who was unbelievably anarchic and dangerous and hilarious. And it was Peter Cook, probably after quite a few whiskies or whatever. Did you know that he was doing it at the time? I did, because if Peter hadn't got through as Sven to LBC, there was a strong chance he would ring me up. So I was always very grateful to LBC. Peter managed to make comedy out of nothing. I mean, we've just been celebrating my 40 years as editor, but I remember going to an earlier party where Peter Cook gave a 20-minute speech about sautéed potatoes, and I wept. I'd never heard anything so funny. No, I was very lucky. I got a chance to meet my hero. He was a very, very dangerous hero, but he was a genuine hero nonetheless. You've seen so many prime ministers come and go from your editorial chair. Was it seven in the last few years? Seven in the last week, I think. Seven in the last week. Just give us your view on Andy Burnham so far. Well, so far, Burnham has had, compared to the others, a terrific ride. That's largely clear. Won't last? Will last? He's got to do something now, and that always makes you unpopular. I've been around long enough to spot that. It's all about this budget, as far as I can see. And the steady-as-you-go budget might be a bit disappointing after all that rhetoric. I think dawn of a new era followed by budget saying well tinker here and there I don't think that will be popular let me ask you about jokes because obviously people turn to Private Eye for the jokes the cartoons the front page and the rest of it now everyone stares at their phones and AI generated satire pops up the whole time yeah and some of it dare I say is pretty good is this the new threat in other words is Private Eye going to become a kind of state establishment magazine you're already the biggest selling i think um current affairs news magazine in the country yeah um that that's quite a low bar uh but i'll take the praise no we're still selling 220 000 copies um and when i took it over that's about what we were selling so uh nothing and all this time i've resisted the march change of progress um no i mean i haven't yet seen an AI joke that makes me laugh um we occasionally um uh run private AI features in which we try and come up with lame um jokes half stolen from elsewhere which is really what AI is so that I don't feel is the threat um uh the threat is um just endless amounts of stories that aren't true I mean it's it's the great Putin thing you know it's sort of if if people um don't believe in things in the end they'll end up believing in nothing and you tell them anything absolutely Ian Hislop thank you very much indeed