139: Page 94 LIVE

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Page 94, the Private Eye Podcast.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of Page 94.

My name is Andrew Hunter Murray, and this is a very exciting, rather special episode of Page 94 for us because, for the first time in the many years that this podcast has been in production, we have gone live, we've gone electric, we've gone to the Cambridge Literary Festival.

This is a recording of a show that we put on at the Cambridge Literary Festival about a week ago, and it's a format that we call Many Questions, which is definitely legally safe and won't provoke any copyright claims against us.

So these are questions that the audience sent in.

These are questions that came in in the room on the night.

These are questions that, frankly, we've always wanted to be asked, and we were disappointed nobody else had.

So it's me, it's Adam McQueen, it's Helen Lewis, it's Ian Hislop.

We started off by asking Ian, the editor, how he thinks the first year of the Labour government is going.

Take it away, Ian.

There was a very brief honeymoon period, and we thought, to start with, because the comic device for the late Tory governments was the WhatsApp group, in which they were incredibly rude about each other.

And we thought this was a brilliant bit of fiction.

And then the Covid inquiry revealed that this was just documentary, really.

And this is how government's now done.

So we thought, we'll keep the same device and see if it works.

And then immediately, you find out that this Labour cabinet works by WhatsApp group.

And the actual meetings are equally,

equally toxic.

Everybody's on WhatsApp.

So Robert Jenrick added everyone in his entire phone book, basically, to a WhatsApp group this week.

Did you read the story?

What was this?

Pure supposition.

Because he wanted to do some leadership plotting and hit the wrong button, I presume.

Right.

And was like, delete, delete, delete.

But then Sarah Vine, equally, male on Sunday columnist, male columnist, started a huge WhatsApp group with all of her media chums for her book launch.

And then about five of them have already got columns out of it.

If you see this, it's extraordinary.

It's like, what would happen if you added everybody who has a newspaper column to the same WhatsApp group and they'd all get a column out of it.

We've just found this sort of perpetual motion

machine for British journalism.

I don't think there's anything more humiliating than being publicly revealed as one of Robert Jenrick's mates.

Awful.

See for libel.

Great libel case.

He claimed it was a map.

He's running the London Marathon, he claimed it.

He is.

And he said he had to contact all these people because he was trying to raise money for charity, which the Conservative Party is now technically a charity.

But

I think he's doing it for the greater good.

No, I don't.

Okay, so sort of mixed report card, it sounds like.

I mean, it's very early.

I just want to

do a little devil's advocate thing there.

It's extremely early and it feels like a long time.

It does.

Trump's been in three months.

I mean, that feels like a lifetime now, doesn't it?

Yes, it is a sentence for many.

Yes, I think the balance argument is that whoever got in would have faced a really tough puzzle of the fact that there are intractable problems with the economy.

We just had a very high wave of immigration, the so-called Boris wave, which is traditionally what politicians have done when they want to juice the economy a bit.

But it doesn't seem to have done everything that there was kind of hoped to be.

So you've got this situation in which people are both grumpy about the high immigration, but also grumpy about the lack of economic growth.

And that would have been a problem whoever won that last election.

But whoever won might have been slightly better at politics than Sakir.

A harsh but fair judgment on Sakir.

No, I'm not trying to be harsh.

It just seems to be be that some of the things that he did, many people could have said, why don't you not do that?

Well, I mean, I think that the winter fuel allowance, I'm just guessing, I'm not an expert, but...

Maybe you don't start with punching catcheners in the face.

Save that one for build up to it.

Yeah.

Okay, I think, I mean, unless anyone has any more on that, I'd love to move on to our next question, because we've got

so many questions to get through.

Format is many questions.

This one's a bit more of an I-ish one, actually.

It's, are you still being sued?

And if not, why not?

Because, Ian, you have a a reputation as the most sued man in British legal history.

Yes.

But there seem to have been fewer huge court cases recently.

Are you doing something wrong here?

Have you mellowed?

Yes, no.

They did change the libel laws.

I mean, largely as a result of a number of spectacular cases, all of which I lost.

The guidance over libel changed completely.

In the old days, public bodies and councils, you could sue and get your employer to pay.

So, you know, fire chiefs did it, policemen did it, local councils did it, politics, everybody did it because there was no risk to you.

That changed.

Suddenly, people's reputations weren't quite so valuable to them after all.

So the numbers went down there.

Then they changed the sentencing guidance.

After a brilliant case involving Private Eye losing against the wife of a serial killer, other people tended to lose against, you know, celebrities, people like.

We lost to Sonia Sutcliffe.

But the rules were changed after that because the juries were just coming up with absolute bonkers figures.

Then the internet happened, which again was news to me.

He's talking about two weeks ago as well.

But essentially, it means everybody is libeling each other all the time online, and the whole climate changed.

So publications, having been given more license by the changes in the law, were just way behind the plot.

Everybody else online was essentially being unpleasant to each other all the time.

So our main problems nowadays are confidentiality, any deal involving a public body and the government, it's confidential, they can't possibly tell you anything about it, so you can't get through there.

Privacy, anything about an individual, it's private, so you're not allowed to know that.

And anything otherwise interesting, there's usually a court order on.

I mean, last year we spent a vast amount of money challenging draconian orders about Lucy Lettby, and about nine months later, finally, we were allowed to actually print something about what the experts had had said, or rather hadn't said in court.

So, we're still wasting a huge amount of your money.

I want to make that absolutely clear

if you're a subscriber or you're a buyer, but it's less fighting it in the court.

I mean, those days, sadly, have gone.

How much of your time is spent sort of negotiating?

Because a lot of it's moved to ahead of publication, hasn't it?

And how much, what conversations do you have with the lawyer are kind of ahead of time?

How much notice do you take of what the lawyer says?

Oh, a huge amount, Adam.

A lot of it

is basically they're saying, you can't possibly say that.

And we're saying, well, how can we say that

in a better way?

So if the original copy, probably delivered by the three of you, said, he's a tremendous crook,

can we say he's a well-known northern businessman?

Who could we have in mind?

And that tends to work, I think.

I mean, one of the biggest payouts that the biggest legal troubles that Private I ever got into was long before all of our time, back in the 70s.

And it was the James Goldsmith case.

Yeah.

Where we were, I mean, a blizzard of writs, over 100 writs, and he sued the distributors and he sued the news agents and he sued the printers and he sued absolutely everyone.

Tied us up in court cases for years and years and years.

And a lot of that centered over the use of the word obstructing, because he said it was all like Lord Lucan, unbelievably, and the role that Goldsmith and John Aspinall and all that kind of Claremont crowd had in helping Lord Lord Lucan to escape after he murdered his children's nanny.

And that's not libelous.

No, no, no, that's and he's he's dead anyway.

We can't libel Lucan.

Lucan, he's he's officially dead.

He's been, yeah.

But the phrase that he used was police have met with obstruction and silence from this group of people.

At which point the lawyers pounced.

I think it was Carter Ruck.

It usually is Carter Ruck, isn't it?

It's Carter Ruck.

And said, well, hang on, obstructing the police in the course of their duties.

That's a criminal offence.

You've clearly heinously accused our client of a criminal offence, which was not the intention at all.

So it can be as much as just one word that's going to make a hell of a difference, can't it?

I should say our case in those days, and certainly when I was editing, we were frequently sued by Carter Ruck, Peter Carter Ruck and Company, the well-known solicitors.

And Private Eye didn't help its case by intentionally misprinting their name every week.

So it appeared as Carter Fuck.

And Peter Carteruck, who's a very senior and serious figure, rang up and said, you are pathetic.

I do not want to appear in in your magazine as Peter Carterfuck.

I said, absolutely, Peter, it won't happen again.

So next week it was Peter Farta Cuck.

It's very grown-up stuff on Plimming Eye.

Here's an interesting one.

Have any of you ever regretted working for Private Eye?

Adam,

can you ask me again at the end of the scene?

I did have a moment when I, my first day, and everybody took enormous pleasure in telling me about the briefing you'd had about if anybody tries to break into the office, you should try and stab them with a pen.

And the first time someone told me this, I thought they were trying to be helpful.

And about after the fifth person had told me this, I began to realise it was a sort of hazing that I was going through.

And everybody in the office was sort of trying to put this sort of terrible fear into me.

But apart from that, I have to say, one of the things that I always thought before I joined Private Eye was it was a little bit like Willy Wonka's chocolate factory.

And not

Children disappear all the time.

But because it's got such a kind of lore about it, but actually because it doesn't have bylines in it, it kind of emerges in this way that you don't, like, I wanted to see behind the curtain.

I just thought that was all really exciting to me.

And so, when I did the swatty thing, of I read both of Adam's books, his fifth books.

On sale at all,

thank you.

But I think that's one of the things that's nicest about Private Eye is that, and actually, the office looks like it's grown organically from the ground, but

it has got this kind of like a rainforest, got this kind of ecosystem that you would never have planned from the start.

Does this make am I being wildly offensive here?

Just

yeah, but I think that's one of the things.

It's got such a distinctive taste to it that actually I just don't think I've ever found it, which is what makes me not ever regret having started there because it is a unique thing in British public life, and I just think that's what people like about it.

When we had our 50th anniversary back in 2011, the VNA amazingly did an exhibition all about private eye, and this kind of senior creator came in and he said, What I really, really want here is to establish the whole atmosphere of the office, the kind of feel of the office, and lots of other sort of VNA people who are used to dealing with sort of ancient parchments and sculptures and things.

We don't really get what you mean here.

And after a while, he just grabbed a load of paperwork and just threw it on the floor and said, Like that.

And that's basically our office.

The question: Did do you ever regret when the wind screen shattered behind me in a taxi on Oxford Street and armed police appeared, I thought, this isn't great

because the taxi driver thought that we'd been shot.

But then I had a

marvellous moment when the policeman said, Is there anyone who might bear a grudge against you?

And I thought, yeah, all right.

But it wasn't, it was a demister.

And as the other thing about working at Private Eye is your colleagues are always very, very supportive.

And

my friend Nick Newman, the cartoonist, said, oh, very exciting.

You were attacked by a D mister.

Here's one for you, Ian.

Which of your fallen enemies do you secretly miss?

Robert Maxwell was

amazingly good copy.

I mean, he was not a good man.

I think that's not libelous now.

He was obsessed by private eye.

There's always someone who's obsessed by the magazine.

I'm usually some very, very rich businessman.

It was Robert Maxwell, it was Jimmy Goldsmith, Azil Nadir,

Mohammed Fayed.

Actually,

Fayed.

I was once at an event like this, and a boy who was about 18, he got up and said, Would it embarrass you to know that there's a relative of Mohammed Fayed in this room?

I said, Doesn't embarrass me.

Yeah, quite.

So, if there is anyone in,

fair enough.

There's something about that era of like magnificent monsters that I always feel has happened more widely through public life in the sense that I think social media has made everybody more self-aware.

So, as a journalist, when I go out my other job for the Atlantic going and interviewing people, it's such a delight when you meet somebody who is just like living their life unself-consciously and telling you things, rather than what I think that lots of us end up doing now, which is feeling that we're acting constantly as our own PR firm.

Yeah, and so I think that there are, let's be honest, no shortage of massive bastards still around.

But unfortunately, they tend to be more protected by walls or sort of boringly bastardly.

Do you know what I mean?

I feel quite nostalgic for the era of the, you know.

Extreme wealth and eccentricity obviously go together very neatly.

And maybe the era is slightly coming to a close where

it's an aspirational thing to own a newspaper, for example.

I mean, that's where we've lost.

The press proprietors.

I mean, the other one that I really missed doing the Street for Shame Pages is Richard Desmond, when he was in charge of the Daily Express.

And there was this glorious thing, Francis Ween, who I worked with, and I, we would do this.

It was a very standard kind of format to stories where The Express would do some sort of, or Anne Whitticomb, who had a column in The Express, would do some fulminating thing about the morals of society and disgusting BBC allowing swearing and smut on.

And we'd just go straight to the Television X listings, which was the pornographic channel that Richard Desmond owned at the time, the proprietor of the Daily Express.

And there was some Francis and I would carry, I'm looking at porn,

and And this website would come.

But he was sort of one of those really enormous characters.

And I do feel we've kind of lost a lot of it.

We have, it has to be said, we have still got Yevgeny Lebedev.

That's true.

And his magnificent copy.

The last of the new entry of that field.

And I think

if you're so wealthy, I mean, it's a similar thing to Elon Musk, maybe, where you're so wealthy,

you sort of pass through being protected by walls because you're just putting out there the maddest possible stuff you can.

There's also a trend, which is that the most free free you can possibly be is somebody who can say anything without any consequences, and no one can ask you to take any responsibility.

And that, I think, is the Trumpist appeal in the U.S.

There is like a zone on the other side of cancellation where it's just no one can stop you.

This is what power looks like.

Power looks like sitting all day scrolling on your phone on the loo, going, ball, wow, the Mao, and like that, you know, as if that's what Alexander the Great aspired to.

But

yeah, I just think that a magazine like Private Eye, I think it helps when you've got a vivid enemy that is an encapsulation of bullying power and Private Eye stands up to it.

And that's how I think people want somebody to stand up to the bullies.

And that's what when journalism is, if campaigning journalism is good, it does.

And sometimes it stands up to them by blowing a raspberry in their face, right?

Just making them look ridiculous.

The problem is, the great thing is when they get obsessive about it, I mean, Fired nicked our rubbish, didn't he?

He literally had someone stealing the rubbish from the office so that he could print it in his rival to us, which was called Punch at the time.

Yes, I remember you saying to me that nothing was more annoying to you than the fact that Rupert Murdoch doesn't really care.

No,

it's incredibly offensive of you

to sit there week after week just ignoring these jokes,

which I find rude.

Many of which he's seen many times now, nothing really annoyed.

Yes, because they've had a good run.

But I mean, again,

he is still terribly good copy, partly because he's discovered the secret of eternal life, which is good

as a press baron.

You want your master's degree.

You know you can earn it, but life gets busy.

The packed schedule, the late nights, and then there's the unexpected.

American Public University was built for all of it.

With monthly starts and no set login times, APU's 40-plus flexible online master's programs are designed to move at the speed of life.

Start your master's journey today at apu.apus.edu.

You want it?

Come get it at APU.

You want your master's degree.

You know you can earn it, but life gets busy.

The packed schedule, the late nights, and then there's the unexpected.

American Public University was built for all of it.

With monthly starts and no set login times, APU's 40-plus flexible online master's programs are designed to move at the speed of life.

You bring the fire, we'll fuel the journey.

Get started today at apu.apus.edu.

Is there a future for a print magazine in a digital world?

Sorry to make things somber.

If he says no now, we're really going to know that.

Going TikTok only.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, I think there is.

Yes, obviously.

I mean, I believe in print.

Private Eye now sells more copies than we did 20 years ago.

I was editor then then as well, so

I can't blame the useless editor.

There is something magic about print, which I believe in.

I believe in broadsheets, broadcasting.

Again, we have 50 cartoons now about in every issue, which I ramped up during the pandemic, just on the grounds that, A,

people need something to laugh at, but B, they are so brilliant and they don't work anywhere else.

You need to see them.

You need to see them on the page, and they're fabulous.

So people say, Oh, you're very niche, and you failed to go digital, and you know, all those other accusations.

But we're still there.

You know, our circulation now is sort of bigger than most sort of newspapers.

I think that's the thing.

I don't think there is necessarily a future for the daily newspaper that's printed on newsprint and is at the petrol station forecourt.

That doesn't necessarily fit into people's lives.

The thing I most appreciate about a magazine is that it's it you can finish it.

Yeah.

And I think that is the experience that maybe people want.

I don't know about you, but I feel very burned out by sort of doom scrolling.

And there is, again, like you say, the other thing about a magazine is it has it has a grammar and a rhythm to it that is familiar.

You know, when you read Private Eye, Street of Shame is always going to be here, and then you get the jokes, and then there's in the back.

And you know, maybe you don't read all of it, but you know that there's a kind of somebody has sat down with all the information in the world that week and said, here's the bit of it that we think you should look at.

People now talk about curated news, and I just think, doesn't that mean edited?

And the whole idea of, oh, we've got all this thing and

we curate it.

I mean, that's just choosing stuff.

I have a lot of conversations with, obviously, journalists on other papers.

And the big thing at the moment with digital stuff is they say, you know, what's really, really taking off is we're getting people to subscribe to newsletters.

And it's kind of the best of the day's headlines and the stories.

And we put them together and we send them out in a newsletter every morning.

And it's, you've invented the newspaper.

That's what you've done.

But that is a thing.

I mean, there's a, you know, the website Substack where people write their own newsletters.

I mean, you do a Substack.

I don't know.

It's a bit like sort of 17th-century pamphleteering.

You're getting a strong sense of the person who's behind it, what they're choosing to prioritise.

People seem to like that a lot.

That is, and the podcast sphere, which again is about very strong personalities, it will remind you nothing so much of a sort of like Alexander Pope writing some anonymous pamphlet about how his great rivals got syphilis.

Like, that's very much the tone of lots of those podcasts.

So, I think human nature doesn't change.

My substack is entirely about which of my enemies secretly have syphilis, yes.

But I do have an ongoing account.

I think one of the secrets is that Private Eye has hit on this formula of sometimes quite hardcore and depressing kind of news stuff.

But if you look just slightly to the right, there's going to be a cartoon that's going to make you laugh.

And the relationship between the hacks and the cartoonists is always good because we appreciate the cartoons.

The cartoonists appreciate that we give them a nice sort of grey frame around them, but we sense it after.

Cartoonists depend on journalists, particularly the topical cartoonists, to give them an angle to find things out.

I mean, it's very interdependent.

Yes, the news is depressing, but it isn't depressing if you look at it this way.

And that is the idea.

Just to keep with other publications and other organisations...

So Reach's newspapers table is having a very hard time.

The Telegraph is completely in limbo and can't be sold to anyone.

Is the British media in general in a healthy state right now?

No.

No, certainly not newspaper media.

Well, bits of it.

I mean, the weird thing about the Telegraph is the Telegraph was making enormous amounts of money, which is why

that fund backed by the UAE were willing to pay, well, they overpaid massively $600 million for it.

But there is still money to be made.

No, but not the question.

Is it making lots of money?

Is it in a healthy state?

Nobody needs to be.

Speaking as a working journalist, in terms of journalists getting paid,

that is quite important.

I mean, you could go back over...

We literally declared the death of journalism a few issues ago in Street of Shame, didn't we?

And put a black board.

Yeah, I was way particularly depressed that week, I think, and put a blackboard border around the pages.

But actually, I think you could probably go back through most of the 63 years or whatever we're at now of the eye and conclude that everything was pretty awful at any of those times.

There's a lot of slop around now.

If you look about 50 years ago, information was much more tightly controlled, and that meant that there was a sense of a shared culture and a shared kind of set of conversations.

That had its own problems, not least that the kind of people who were in charge of what those conversations were all pretty much looked the same.

Things are now much more rancorous.

Again, I do think it's a bit more like the 18th century now.

Like it is just more people shouting at each other, often in vile ways, riddled with misinformation.

But that does mean that there's a certain kind of liveliness to the conversation.

And actually, for all that, yeah, I think we've talked a lot in the magazine about the kind of decline in some of those traditional newspapers.

There are some real success stories of things that have started up in the last five or ten years that are commissioning stuff, paying journalists, like Unheard, The Critic, Politics Joe, you know, as you say, all the things on Substack, you know, and a huge number of like, you know, the news agents podcast has managed to make its case as an independent format.

There are still lots lots of people doing journalism, but just the model has really changed.

The idea of having a big warehouse where you have you keep, I worked at the Daily Mail for a long time, so you keep 500 people captive and miserable and make them produce news.

That was the Daily Mail's model.

I think that has ended.

And things now tend to be smaller and more nimble.

There are more kind of skiffs and fewer, you know, tankers, basically.

But what I would say

that's happening sort of on a smaller scale.

On a bigger scale, the really odd thing that newspapers have done as they've gone more and more digital is that they all seem to be going after that same clickbait market.

Most

I'm not going to bang on about reach because I write about them every single fortnight, but the Mail at the moment had two very distinctive, very, very successful things.

It had the Daily Mail newspaper, which was kind of Paul Dacre's vision of the world, which a lot of people went along with, and it had the Mail Online, which was kind of sidebar of shame and bikini photos and all that kind of thing.

And actually, they've put them together now, and

both of those, I think, have suffered in that process and just become slightly worse versions of themselves.

And it seems very odd to me that, you know, if you go back 20 years, you know, the Telegraph was absolutely the paper of kind of people who wore gleets and barber jackets and green wellies, and that was their audience.

The mail was had its very kind of, you know, a more suburban, not quite as well-off kind of thing, but very, very well-defined kind of market.

And in the way they've all gone, oh, we've got to go online, we've got to appeal to everyone.

They've ended up, none of them really appealing to anyone.

And you end up with them just pumping out this sort of,

it's not even, it's not even clickbait that's attempting to be news anymore.

I mean, the big success story at the moment on the

Daily Mirror, as far as their bosses are concerned, is cleaning hacks.

And you think, you know, it's literally like, this amazing product will clean your sink.

And this is what's getting big, big hits on their websites.

And, you know, this is the paper that 40 years ago was Paul Foote's paper.

You know, John Pilger was on there reporting from the killing fields in Cambodia.

You just sort of think, really?

Yeah.

Really?

That's where we're going with this?

You can't go back to the 50s where eight in ten people bought a daily newspaper.

Those days are not coming back.

And I think in terms of informing an entire population, which is my benchmark, it's not in a healthy state.

It's all very well having substack writers who might have some thousands of subscribers, but in terms of telling like 70 million people what's going on so they're informed to make decisions and exposing scandals for those 70 million people.

And then this is the impetus from social media, isn't it, to say don't trust the mainstream media, trust me in my bedroom.

The problem about British papers trying to cater for an American audience, partly because there's more money there, so they go online, and the advertising and the clicks come from men in Nebraska whose interests aren't the same as people in Guildford.

You know, which is why you get into the culture wars and they're saying, do you know what's happening in Canadian mixed women's hockey team?

No, I don't.

I really don't.

And that sort of thing seems to me, we just, it just moves over.

So you get what are essentially American debates and you look at it in your paper and you think, what, why is this in here?

You know, Elon Musk says, most of Britain is a no-go zone.

If you go out of your house, you'll be attacked by women in hijabs with machine guns.

Retweeted in Britain.

Yes, that's what's happening here.

Just go outside.

On the like the New York Times as well, they seem to love the idea of Britain as this

drizzly, plague-riddled,

sort of broth island.

Well, if you're right for the Atlantic as well, it's just sort of this miserable, like they seem to get a real kick out of it.

Why?

Why do they like that?

Well, I think it's a bit like the way that you now there are only certain ethnicities you're allowed to have as villains.

And for them, they're still allowed to be mean about Britain because in their minds, Britain is the kind of origin country that's very rich and riddled with aristocrats.

So

there's a sort of weird twin effect about the fact that they basically the the British shows that like Middle America consumes are the great British Bake Off, Downton Abbey and The Crown.

So

and then the social media view of Britain is, as you say, creeping Sharia and like And so they believe that basically that Britain is sort of high-click arsle, but surrounded entirely by people in hijab stabbing each other.

It's really, it is kind of really fascinating.

But it is this idea that this is one of the few places that you're allowed to sort of look down your nose at if you're an American.

And I think that

the obverse happens here.

You have people who are very snooty about Americans as if they're all used car dealsmen in Pensacola, right?

As if that is

kind of a byword for being uncultured.

And I think that there's a feeling that we're both on the same playing field and therefore we're allowed to be mean about each other.

And the really tragic thing is that they're so much richer than us.

Just so much richer than us.

I can't even begin to tell you.

You walk through an American car park and the cars are three times the value of cars here.

The houses are three times bigger.

But nonetheless, there is this belief that in some way having a go at Britons and saying that they've got bad teeth and live in a swamp.

New York Times actually referred to the concept of being swamps in Britain.

That this is kind of punching up.

It's completely fascinating.

But you're exactly right, Ian, about America brain.

Carla Denny of the Greens was actually saying, Why is out here people talking about gender when the price of eggs has gone up?

The price of eggs has not gone up in Britain.

It's gone up massively in the US because of a huge bird flu outbreak.

So, what you are getting is you're getting British politicians who are, you know, and this is clearly, this was the first time I'd really seen it on the left.

I knew it was happening on the right, who are getting their talking points from not just Fox News, but the kind of online sphere around it, and then just sort of trying to drag those and kind of like map them onto Britain.

Just quickly, on the swamps thing, is it possible they're talking about fens?

I'm very well aware that you have drained them, and I am looking forward to going to the.

I really think you should go to Florida and go, this is a charming little fen you've got here.

There are all these little alligators in the fen.

Can I ask you a question, Ian, about subscription cancellations?

Because when you do one of those covers or those cartoons, and we get lots and lots of notes from saying, cancel my subscription immediately.

Do they actually cancel their subscriptions?

The data isn't clear.

There is a certain suggestion that they don't cancel before the next issue in the hope that their letters are in.

And then they frame that one and put it in the downstairs loo.

I mean, the Boris Johnson A Legacy cover, which was just a picture of a huge overflowing toilet,

created quite a lot of trouble.

A lot of news agents wouldn't sell it, and a lot of our readers were really cross.

but again they threatened vast amounts of canceller subscriptions but they didn't materialize the one about gaza recently we put a thing on there saying you know this is a warning there may be some crisis criticism of israel in this magazine and huge number of people said they would cancel but then looking back on it i just think it was a statement of the obvious and an understatement we'll come to audio's questions really shortly but just a very quick one how do i get my letter into private eye i'm speaking as a subscriber here, not as a

hack.

What's the policy on what letters get in and what don't?

Are they interesting?

Are they funny?

Have we got something wrong?

Do I need to correct this?

Is this just a point of view?

I didn't like this.

Sometimes that's funny.

Sometimes it's not.

It's a bit arbitrary, is the truth, because we get an awful lot of letters.

I get quite a lot from Yevgeny Lebedev.

But then then they're not addressed, dear sir, either.

No.

You got into a grandfather off with him, I think.

That's one of the only times that's ever happened.

A grandfather.

What did your grandfather do?

Yes.

I mean, his was in Stalin's cabinet.

Yeah.

Which I suggested meant he was a bit Russian.

Bit Soviet.

How dare you.

Anyway, he got very, very cross with that.

And I think being referred to as Lord Lovereduck.

I think

I mean, it's not respectful,

is it?

Let's have a really quick one.

Just in case you've got one of these that you think is important, what's the biggest story in Britain right now that's not getting the attention it deserves?

The new post office?

Oh, God, I'd have to say T-side.

And I know we've been banging on about it forever, but and there are a few admirable exceptions of people who've got onto that story.

But that, I really feel, is one that's going to run and run.

It's got the smack of those 70s scandals, the T-Down Smith and Poulton and stuff about it, hasn't it?

I'm just surprised by the fact that there are so many sort of sort of lying around on the floor waiting to be picked up.

I was reading in the Times today about the fact that businesses have been offered all these tax credits by the government to do AI research and development.

And it's worth billions and billions.

And let me shock you, sometimes when people do AI research, it's not the highest quality, you know, it's sort of them pissing about with Google, basically.

And I just thought, I bet you could go and find out incredible examples of that programme being defrauded in the way that the COVID bounce back loan programme was defrauded, in the way that you have Michelle Moen and PPE.

I think one of the things I love about Richard Brooks, who did the Teesside, is that he's just got an incredible appetite for stories of financial fraud, which are so hard to bring to life.

And so few journalists have the kind of tenacity to do them and the ability to go and sit.

You know, he went up to Teesside and sort of poured through accounts.

And I just think that so there is such a problem about the fact that so many scandals in Britain are essentially quite boring.

I think Ben Goldacre once said they're protected by a TDM shield three miles thick.

And I think that's really troublesome.

Like when it's, you know, when there's a scandal that involves vivid personalities,

those can involve people suing you, and that's one different type of problem.

But something like offshore tax havens is another different type of problem to tell that story in journalism.

Because it's lots of people you've never heard of stealing large amounts of money through very boring and complicated means they're paying a lot to.

How the hell do you hold that to account?

And those are the stories that I think are probably undercovered.

Those kind of financial frauds where it's not one amazing crook, it's just some low-rent people just creaming money out of our, you know, off that could be used to pay for our roads and schools, essentially.

Yeah.

I mean, I agree with all that.

I think they're all there.

But I think the lobbying thing.

Again, we've got a lot of very good younger journalists who are very,

they're still shocked at the fact that a company invites a said MP to come to to some jolly, to come to some freebie, and they literally ask a question about it.

Two weeks later, in the House of Commons, they stand up and they deliver.

And, you know, I'm a lot older than, but I still find that shocking.

Someone invites a minister or a junior minister to their event, and the younger journalists say, I presume there was a workers' representative there and a member of the trade unions.

And you can't, no, there wasn't.

No, no, there was just the drinks company and the minister and the gambling representative and the MP and no one else.

That's lobbying.

And it's partly why the Labour Party did so badly early on.

You just thought, because

my colleagues and I get dragged in in front of select committees occasionally and say things like, well, why couldn't MPs not have a second job?

And they all go, oh, for God's sake,

and could they not accept the tickets?

Maybe.

Could they buy them

boxes at Wimbledon?

Or not go?

Anyway, this is terribly shocking.

That's a nice note to end on the capacity to remain shocked.

I think it's important.

We should come to some audience questions now.

We've got just over five minutes left, so I'll sort of do a sweep across the room.

So we've got one over here.

Is there a story that you've not been able to publish, but you do know is true?

And if so, what is it?

And I remind you, we're live streaming this at the moment.

No, if I absolutely think a story is true, it's in there.

And it's really flattering that people think we've got a huge bank of stuff.

I mean, we haven't.

We're getting press on Monday.

I think,

yeah, if you've got one, do you?

I think there's a related thing, which is a question that we all face now, which is how much should you report on misinformation?

So there's been, for example, all over the kind of right-wing internet sphere, there is this lurid suggestion that Keir Starmer is having an affair with Lord Ali right that he hasn't actually just taken money from absolutely zero basis to this absolutely and they seem to be based on like faked pictures and the point about it is it is actually in this day and age if you found out that a politician was having a gay affair poor people would be a bit like oh well

good for him yeah

he never looked like a snappy dresser i didn't know he had a ninhim um

but but you know what i mean it's it's the sense that like they're keeping something from us and actually it's very hard to know as a journalist how to deal with that.

The reason we're not reporting that story is not because we're all in a cozy club where we sit together.

It's just because it's bollocks.

But how do you deal with that?

Because all the way through, we've had this assumption that you shouldn't amplify this misinformation, right?

You shouldn't give credence to false things by reporting them and talking about them.

That could be really damaging.

But you get to these stages where this stuff is coming up in focus groups.

This is happening.

Normal voters who aren't that engaged with the news are hearing about this kind of stuff.

Ahead of the riots, this was a huge problem.

And so there's a really difficult decision to make.

We're not sitting on stories that we know to be true.

We're sitting on lots of stories that we know not to be true and trying to think how responsibly to communicate that information to people.

That's actually the really difficult thing now, I think.

And I would just add to that,

there are sometimes details that you would really like to get into stories, but for legal reasons, you can't.

And a story might appear looking a bit opaque, and there is sometimes

even more to it than you've read.

But that's, yeah, it's not being.

And there are basic laws of contempt, which, you know,

tommy robinson hasn't quite got his head round

um which is about ongoing um cases and that may and there was a brief period of superinjunctions and many of which we did try and challenge and again if you're in any doubt whether we're we're wasting your money we are

by spending it on legal fees to try and overturn these things but again Adam had a list of them and they are very very few now aren't they?

Extremely few yeah yeah in terms of superinjunctions none that I know of going on at the moment.

So I would say that about eighty percent of my job as a hack on Private Eye is establishing that stories aren't true.

And the twenty percent always go in.

And I would have to say this, Mark.

Well, I was asking you that question about w how the conversations goes with lawyers, because I've I've been sat in on a few of those and I have to say if Ian thinks something is true, whatever the lawyer is saying, it does tend to go in in the safest form it can.

And properly, you know, moderate things.

Let's go into our last question here.

In terms of the Private Eye lunches, what are some of your most memorable memorable moments over your time as editor and just kind of wider?

Any of you guys have been to them as well?

So, for anybody who doesn't know, the private eye lunch is a tradition of fortnightly gatherings.

Where did you start?

Was Coach and Horses for?

Coach and Horses originally, yeah, which was a horrible pub that we used to hang around in with horrible food.

So it was added to its charm, didn't it?

And then it moved someone that served a yoghurt cherry soup as a no, what was it?

Do you remember that?

That was the worst thing I've ever taken.

Well, what a food.

Okay, the food's not the main issue.

Now it's lovely.

The point is that we invite influential people and journalists and other people who might tell us things and inform us.

And usually this is on a fairly gentle, sort of gossipy, bantering nature, but sometimes it just falls right in your lap.

We invited John Hemming, who was a Liberal MP, to lunch.

And it'd be fair to say he did hit the booze fairly heavily.

And he turned to me in front of a table full of journalists and he says, oh, I'm in terrible trouble, Ian.

My girlfriend's pregnant and I haven't told my wife.

This was before the starters of Ibn Justin.

It was just.

You've never seen a dash for the phone.

Superb.

There's one question from the stream, which I thought I'd just throw in.

What should we all be doing to get more people reading Private Eye?

Buy them a subscription.

Yeah, I mean, that's route one, but it does

work, probably.

Spread the word.

It's still incredibly good value.

You get 50 cartoons, which are incredibly funny, even if you don't want to read the stuff around them.

The other thing I would say that I never realized was a thing that you can do, but you can often contact the cartoonist and ask them to buy the original.

And they love that.

I've got the private eye, I did a first draft of Difficult Women, which is my poor husband who made me a lot of tea and me going, I'll have coffee instead.

But

I've got the original for that, and it's in my house at home.

And it's really, it's like it's just a really lovely moment.

And I know that, as you say, there's a kind of cottage industry of redrawing them in certain cases.

But there are like that bit about valuing the stuff that's in the mag, I think.

And every year there are Christmas cards and things like that.

So the merch, I would also say, is a way of supporting David Ziggy Green's seen and heard thing that he did when he came down to the phone hacking trial, where I spent eight months and he came in for one morning and just sketched away and did something far better than any of my coverage.

That's in a frame on my wall.

Wherely, no one's ever asked me to write out one of my journalistic stories and

send it over that.

I should say that you can't always get the original from the cartoonist.

One of our cartoonists did a rather beautiful drawing of Chris Binodie, who was shorting the pound during Brexit.

And he drew a picture of Chris Binodie, basically shafting Britain.

And Odie rang up and said, I love your work, I'd like to buy the cartoon.

The cast is framed back saying, You can't, I don't admire your work.

Superb.

I think on that note, I'm so sorry, but we're out of time.

We've got to bring it to a close.

The very final question: Will the four of you be signing books after we've gone?

Yes, we will.

Any of you there, each other's, anyone else's, is fine.

We'll sign books.

Absolutely.

Right, that brings to a close the first incident of Page 94 Live.

Thank you so much to all of you for being here.

Thank you to those of you streaming, and thank you for listening at home.

Goodbye.

Thank you.

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