ANOTHER VOICE
The end of an era at Private Eye
AUBERON WAUGH
On Friday I went to the Escargot Restaurant, in Greek Street, to collect a handsome silver-plated wine funnel from an old friend: 'Presented to AUBERON WAUGH by LORD GNOME in recognition of sixteen years' devoted service to his organ.' Nearly all the Private Eye staff were there, although there were one or two regrettable absences. Torn Driberg (one-time Chair- man of the Labour Party, finally Lord Bradwell) who composed an indecent crossword in the magazine for many years under the pseudonym Tiresias was, of course, dead, as was my cousin Claud Cockburn. Not even such an occasion as this could back to its mansions call the fleeting breath. The managing director, Chief boxwallah and man in control of the Purse strings, Mr David Cash, was suffer- ing from shingles; Mr John (lawn') Wells, the humorist and mimic, had other, more pressing engagements; Christopher Book- er (The Deacon') was elsewhere, trying to convince his editors at the Sunday Shah that the assault on a West London vicar and rape of his daughter should be seen as an Act of God, like the lightning which struck York Minster, in punishment for the New English Bible and other modern Perversions apparently favoured by the vicar in question. There were also empty chairs for Mr Nigel Dempster, the greatest living 6. Englishman, and Mr Patrick Marn- "m, whose brilliant history of Private Eye: The Private Eye Story (Deutsch, 1982) provides an effortlessly accurate account of the magazine's first 21 years. But by and large it was a happy family gathering with the towering troubled genius of William Rushton dominating one end of the table, Richard Ingrams in the centre and Mr Peter McKay, the former Socialist Worker columnist who came to fame as Ingrams's original Dobermann Pinscher, making much of the running with What Tina Brown described as his Buchen- Wald giggle. I was a little nervous of the occasion, since Ingrams has always tended to regard defections from Private Eye as a Personal betrayal. Sure enough, there were mutterings, as he surveyed the groaning board: 'So this is the sort of reward you can expect for a stab in the back nowadays.' But he cheered up when he spotted his deputy PurY editor slip in, rather late, greeting .irn with a great cry of 'Driscoll!' In fact, Luriscoll's real name is Hinton, but every- "°cIY on the Eye goes under various aliases. Anthony Hinton has been around the Eye for three years, although I noticed his presence only in the last year when, in Ingrams's absence, he set himself the task of removing any reference to Mr Barry Fantoni, the gifted Australian singer, from my copy. I remarked that it was clever of Ingrams to have spotted him; nobody else had noticed his arrival in dark glasses, possibly because the chief characteristic of Hinton, a merry, good-natured and dis- tinctly witty 25-year-old, is that he is very, very small.
But Ingrams seemed to cheer up with Hinton snuggling up on his other side, and the reason became clear when, after a witty and graceful valedictory oration to mark my departure, Lord Gnome announced he was going to retire as editor on 1 Septem- ber appointing Driscoll in his place. At that late stage in the proceedings the company was in somewhat elated state. Everybody assumed he was joking and several people fell off their chairs laughing at the absurd- ity of the idea, all of which may have been annoying for the young man who might have been expecting to be congratulated.
It fell to me to plead with Ingrams to change his mind — a hopeless task — in what the Guardian's Seumas Milne de- scribed next day as a 'bitter personal attack' on the new editor-elect. We were fairly drunk, but I am pretty well sure it was no such thing. In any case Mr (or Miss or Mrs or Ms) Milne was not present, unless under a pseudonym, in which case she/he was probably as drunk as the rest of us. Then Hinton stood up to announce that his real name was Hislop — perhaps he is some relation of that great figure, John Hislop, who bred Brigadier Gerard by computer techniques — and that he hoped to make Private Eye more relevant to young people in this day and age, or possibly in the community as a whole.
One must look on the bright side, I suppose. Hislop, although young, is excep- tionally witty, a good writer and not afraid of bad taste jokes, without which Private Eye would be nothing. I am not sure how often he has been confronted by the results of a bad taste joke, in terms of the outrage it can excite. But then very few people have the inner resources to take the sort of flak which Ingrams has survived over the years. The great thing is to hope for the best, wish him luck and at any rate give him a chance. It is too early to write Richard Ingrams's obituary (although I believe he has written mine for the Times) since he will go on contributing to the middle pages of parody and burlesque which have always been the Eye's strongest point. But I remember now, when my father died, practically no obituarist pointed out what I should have thought the main point about his life's work, that he was an extraordinarily funny writer with an exquisite sense of comedy. The great point about Richard Ingrams is that he is extremely funny and has used his sense of the ridiculous as well as his powers of parody to create an alternative percep- tion of life an Britain which has had a profound effect on the nation's awareness of itself throughout the last quarter of a century. Personally, I would judge his effect on Britain to have been not only more profound but also more beneficial than that of the Earl of Stockton, Viscount Whitelaw or Viscount Tonypandy, but this is not the moment to embark on another futile campaign for public recognition.
The battering which Richard Ingrams received over the years has left only one scar on his otherwise beautiful and blame- less countenance. From its earliest years, Private Eye made a habit of describing people's sexual indiscretions on the grounds that they are always interesting and nearly always funny. That seems to me sufficient reason. Under unremitting attack from the nation's Guilty Men, he allowed himself to be pushed into the Buchmanite News of the World posture of claiming a high moral purpose to these exposures.
One day the wind changed and the grimace stuck. But that is the only trace of pomposity to be found in a man whose high intelligence has illuminated the contem- porary scene for a quarter of a century. It may just be a healthy middle-aged man's hatred of the young which makes me suppose that Private Eye will now either degenerate into a teenage comic or disinte- grate under the pressure of innumerable libel suits. It is certainly not jealousy of the young's greater beauty or sexual prowess, of which I have seen little evidence. But my generation must feel sad that Ingrams has decided to throw in the sponge after so many years, even as we marvel that he held it so long. Of all my contemporaries, he is undoubtedly the one who has made the greatest mark on his times.
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