Satire, libel and investigative journalism: 50 years of Private Eye

Satirical magazine ‘Private Eye’ celebrated 50 years in print on Tuesday, having published 1,300 issues of biting commentary on the news, investigative journalism and jokes.

First published in 1961, the title rose to become Britain’s best selling news and current affairs magazine through a mix of serious investigation and irreverent humour.

It came from humble beginnings having been an expansion of Shrewsbury School magazine, ‘The Salopian’- a title fronted by Richard Ingrams, Willie Rushton, Christopher Booker and Paul Foot in the mid-1950s.

[In pictures: Iconic Private Eye front covers]

Joined by Peter Usborne and Andrew Osmond (among others) the group launched the very first issue on 25 October 1961, an effort first funded by Osmond. The result was a rudimentary yellow magazine, unrecognizable from ‘Private Eye today’.

Although Willie Rushton expected the title to last about four months before they would all move on, it was a success and became renowned for its investigative journalism fronted by Paul Foot.

“I always remember Paul Foot saying to me years ago that he was fine with the fact that people bought ‘Private Eye’ for the jokes, they left it by the loo and two weeks later they’d be leafing through the stuff they haven’t read,” Adam Macqueen, ‘Private Eye’ journalist and author of ‘Private Eye: the first 50 years’, told Yahoo! News. “That is when they would get to his [Foot’s] stuff and they would [get] cross about it and take it seriously.”

Foot’s involvement in investigations made ‘Private Eye’ a distinguished story-breaker – though that courted a number of legal proceedings during the 1970s and 1980s. ‘Private Eye’ has attracted a number of libel lawsuits, most notably with tycoon and publisher James Goldsmith who attempted to bankrupt the magazine in a criminal libel suit. Claiming that ‘Private Eye’ had said he sheltered Lord Lucan [who vanished after the death of his family nanny, Sandra Rivett], the tycoon eventually came to a settlement with the title.

‘Private Eye’ was also forced to make a £60,000 payout to the wife of “Yorkshire Ripper” Peter Sutcliffe in 1989, after claiming that she had negotiated with press to profit from the attention she had attracted. The High Court initially awarded Sonia Sutcliffe £600,000 in damages, a British libel record until it was reduced tenfold on appeal. “If that’s justice, then I’m a banana,” editor Ian Hislop famously said.

“It is a surprise that it [Private Eye] made it through early uncertainty and really big court cases in the earlier years,” Macqueen told Yahoo! News. “It is not recklessness, Ian [Hislop] will always print stories as long as he thinks they are true and he has got evidence – he doesn’t require as much evidence as legal teams on newspapers but that is because most are terrified of a writ.” Hislop became the most sued man in English legal history, a feat listed in the Guinness Book of Records.

Central to the magazine’s success over the last 50 years has been the popularity and social impact the title has enjoyed.

“’Private Eye’ and other things have completely changed the way we look at politicians, the royal family and all of our elected leaders,” Macqueen said. “It was the end of the deferent post-war period that ‘Private Eye’ arrived in.“Even if you go back 30 years you have got people getting outraged at ‘Spitting Image’ dolls of the Queen Mother, it is amazing how much social attitudes have changed and what people are willing to accept and find funny. It has made people more questioning and less willing to accept the official version of things.”

Macqueen believes that the magazine’s reputation for investigative journalism is safe even after the death of Paul Foot in 2004. Richard Brooks, a former tax inspector hired by Foot, has broken a number of stories that Macqueen says are “not sexy but are big news…mostly about taxpayers money being wasted on things”. Brooks is one of a “really solid group of investigative people working behind the scenes, continuing to break stories”, Macqueen explained.

‘Private Eye’ hit its best sales figures since 1992 in the second half of last year, with an average 210,218 copies sold per issue. Amid a new age of political scandal and sleaze, the first 50 years are just the beginning.