Looking Sharp I don't share Mr. Anthony West's view of
Private Eye. Even its well-known 'bad taste' is often merely the breach of conventions which have sprung up quite irrationally—such as the notion that one must not criticise Royalty. What one does seem to find is that the satire lacks a cutting edge, a connection with reality, and this cannot be compensated for by cracks, however dirty. The Action Francaisc attacked the Sarraut brothers, I think, as `ces gorilles morphitto- tnaneN,' and alleged that the then President of the Republic visited a brothel on the Ile St. Louis to be flogged by girls not yet in their teens. But Maurras and Leon Daudet were men of vindictive genius and such things were just notches in a terrific scimitar. The trouble is, in a satirical paper it is not enough for half the material to be good if the rest is silly. Editor Richard Ingrams's letter about the Ward case in last week's Spectator seemed to me to be abso- lutely just, on all points. But the magazine itself, without ever falling into the moronic smugness of TWTWTW or Lenny Brucery, never quite seems to rid itself of the whiff of that much- publicised wreath by which the unfortunate Ward, who'd surely already suffered enough, was brought into play as a property in the tedious, self-dramatising feud conducted by the Profes- sional Signatories' Guild against rival canters.
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