Private Eye 'Claud Cockburn.' Havus of the New S'tatc.1- man
announced last week. 'has swept into Private Eye...like a gust of bracing wind.' The issue of August 9 was, however, much the mixture as before. Its cover was decorated with what can only be called a 'sick' pin-up that went very well with the neo-brutalist layout of the text pages (obviously the work of someone who has given a lot of thought to finding the correct typo- graphical expression of Brechtian nihilism), and also achieved equivalence. with the drawings which successfully duplicated the delicacies of line and the stylisations typical of public urinal folk art. The text 'fearlessly' went after people in official positions who could be relied upon not to hit back or who were safely down in the mire of scandal and unlikely to sue. The tone, at once cowardly and dishonest, provides a nice example of the way in which a packet can identify a product. The peculiar ugliness of Private Eye is the ugliness of what it stands for, and there is a special suitability in its adop- tion of Stephen Ward as its saint and martyr since his only sin lay, so far as I am concerned, in his effort, when he first saw trouble closing in on him, to turn in a friend in an attempt to save his own skin. Private Eye, to judge by the evidence of its own grey pages. is the organ of that section of the middle-class intelligentsia which is backing the left to win, and which is busily proletarianising itself by dabbling in any filth that's going on in order to be in with the new ruling class when the time comes: it is, in fact, selling out.
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