Maisie: Page 94, the Private Eye Podcast.
Andy: Hello, and welcome to another episode of Page 94.
My name's Andrew Hunter Murray, and I'm here with Helen Lewis.
Adam McQueen and Ian Hislop.
We are in the private eye office, and this is a special edition of
page 94 because if you listen to the last episode, you will have heard us
put out a call for correspondence.
We have had an email address all this time, we just hadn't told any of you.
It's podcast@private.co uk.
Last time we asked if you had any questions, and this time we are
going to do a Postbag special.
So, uh, I thought we'd start off with one from Nick Barber.
Nick writes, welcome to the 21st Century with your email address.
Sarcasm to start still
Adam: putting a post bag special though.
When was the last time you saw a post
Ian: bag?
Yeah, we'll answer the questions in about three weeks.
Andy: It's a great point.
Um, I've always wondered why private eye doesn't have bylines.
Obviously some contributors do so for safety, but investigative
journalists at other institutions do, do include their names.
Uh, so why not the Eye, not that I necessarily want them.
Just wondering.
Ian: Well, it's very simple.
Um, if you give reporters bylines, they get a certain
amount of credit for the stories.
Whereas if you don't give them a byline, then it's just you as editor
and you say, it's all down to me.
I.
and that's been the guiding principle.
Andy: There you go.
Hope that answers your question, Nick.
I
Helen: quite like writing without a byline in Private Eye, 'cause I obviously
do write under my own byline elsewhere, but I dunno if you've ever spotted this,
Andy, but you do get an awful lot of grief sometimes with things that you write and
sometimes like just submerging yourself into the kind of gestalt consciousness
of Private Eye's quite relaxing.
Adam: What she means is being able to say.
Oh no, I think that must be one of Andy's.
Yeah.
Sorry mate.
Helen: I mean, definitely there is a level of plausible
deniability in the book reviews.
We are like, that was a very mean book review, wasn't it?
Oh, we could have written that.
Adam: I like, I, I, I, I like it.
I mean, I know apart from the fact that I'm completely invisible after 27
years in journalism, um, but it, it.
He takes out.
A lot of you are, again, I'm Andy Murray, right?
Yes.
I like him.
It's very good, isn't it?
Indeed.
it takes away a lot of ego and infighting, which is a lot of the stuff I find
myself writing about in Street of Shame and all that byline, atory and stuff
that you can just, um, you go in and, and, and there is a sort of Private
Eye voice that you take on as well.
Mm-Hmm.
Yes.
Um, which is different for different sections as well.
I mean, the, the, the tone of the book reviews is.
Is different to, you know, the Street Of Shame stuff is different again to
the, in the back stuff, but it does allow you that sort of sarcasm and
all the catchphrases and the uhs and continued page 90 fours and all those
things you can kind of throw in.
Ian: One of the things you learn over the years is people who say,
look, I don't want anyone to know that I write for Private Eye.
And then everyone you know says, oh, I was at a dinner party, he was telling
me how brilliant his latest piece was.
So there, there's a certain outing of yourself that goes on, but if
you don't want to and you literally want to work from inside your field
without anyone knowing it, that is possible , through not using a byline.
And, and people say, well, it means that you are not accountable
or transparent or responsible.
You are.
It's just all the shit comes one way and it's not to the writer.
Andy: there was someone who just on the outing oneself, subject,
it was a very long piece as well.
It was kind of a sort of special section.
It was someone teaching, it was someone at a school who
was writing about the teacher.
Yeah.
Teacher.
And it was great.
And I think he, I think it was a, he was quite secret.
He was.
Adam: I handled that.
I kind of edited that supplement.
It was a, it was a four page pullout thing.
It was a diary of a teacher at a comprehensive of school.
It was really, really real well written.
But he was so paranoid about his identity coming out.
We had to do everything through sort of, um...
burner phones and, and kind of anonymous emails and all sorts of things.
And the second it was published after we'd taken all of this care
over it, he just couldn't resist.
"It was me.
It was me.
It was me."
And immediately got sacked from his job.
Helen: I was gonna say, the other thing about Private Eye being
largely anonymous is the fact it adds a certain glamor to it.
Right?
I always used to think of it like being Willy Wonka's chocolate factory.
Like no one ever goes in, no one ever comes out and we are just a little,
Umpa Loompas toiling away in obscurity.
But I should say, it also means sometimes people could
pretend to work for Private Eye.
Quite famously, Heather Mills McCartney, as she was then, tried to confuse
herself with our Heather Mills and pass herself off as investigative journalist.
So yeah,
Ian: And particularly at local level, you often get people writing and
saying, I had a call from one of your journalists, and I, I say any indication
who, because I've never heard of them.
so there's a certain amount of that goes on, but I think on the whole,
the system works and then the pay is sort of Oompa Loompa level.
All the
Adam: chocolate you can eat, drink from the river.
on a historical note, um, with the, there were originally, I'm not quite bylines,
but the, the, there was a staff list at the front of every edition, and the
real reason that that disappeared was because in 1967, off the top of my head,
Randolph Churchill, son of Winston, uh, sued the Eye and sued personally everyone
who was listed on that staff list.
We got the writ in a frame downstairs.
The weird thing is a lot of them, they, they were listed by like, their sort
of in-office nicknames and things.
So this, this very, very formal legal document arrived, addressed
to people who didn't really exist.
But that was the reason at that point was I think legal advice was taken
that it was a very bad idea that people could be sued personally.
And so from that point on, everything has been anonymous.
Andy: Okay, next up.
Rory McClellan writes, I've been a subscriber for almost two decades now.
Thank you, Rory.
Magazines available private-eye.co.Uk.
Just putting it in there, um, and have lost count of the times the Eye has
reported a big story that takes years to filter through into the newspapers.
Why are stories the Eye reports on often ignored by the rest
of the media for so long?
Do none of them read the mag?
Best wishes, Rory.
That's nice, isn't it?
Adam: They definitely do read the mag 'cause they're quite quick
to complain when we write about them in the Street Of Shame pages.
They can say that.
Ian: what?
I think it's just because the eye has an ability to repeat.
that's when, , people notice that we've gone on and on and on
about this and, and finally it breaks or it turns up elsewhere.
I mean, the truth is everybody picks which stories they run and
a lot of other institutions don't want to run this type of story so
they don't, and it's that simple.
Why don't they pick up on it?
'cause they don't want to.
that's it.
Helen: also it's a downside of doing original reporting, isn't it?
Rather than commentary, which is if you've done original reporting that's
based on a key source that only you know who they are or documents only you've
got access to, it's quite a big punt as another news organization to follow that
up without having the same level of legal security of that source or that document.
So I think sometimes the Eye's hampered by the fact its own brand
of actually doing the, the legwork.
You know, if something is, is absolutely public and everybody can
have an opinion on it, then one...
people write that up and you know, and that stuff gets
just followed up everywhere.
But actually when you're doing legally risky stuff, it's harder
to get it followed up for that
Adam: reason.
And it's a naturally journalistic thing as well, which applies here as
well, that we won't follow up a story.
that's been run elsewhere unless there is something
significant that we can add to it.
So, I mean, news Desk, you're gonna face that problem.
If someone says, I've read this brilliant story in Private Eye, it's like, well,
okay, it's been done in Private Eye.
How do we move it on?
As you say, if, if, if we've got the whistleblowers, we've got
the context, it's, it's there.
I mean, I have a few times over, um, the years I've been working here,
people from national papers phone me up and say, look, I'd really
like to do something on this story.
Is there anything, anyone you can pass on to me?
And.
The best I can say in that situation is I will tell the person that I've been
talking to that you are interested.
I can pass on your contact details, but obviously, you know, people come to us.
Anonymity is the, the most important part of it in protecting our contacts.
So it, there is a sort of logistical difficulty as, as well to following
these things up, as you say,
Ian: But also the people who write commentary and opinion in other papers
often don't want that particular story.
I mean, the reason the Post Office story, did not get taken up for a very long time
is because of the Government and the Post Office and the Horizon span really hard.
Um, and they wrote aggressive letters the second you followed up
anything that originally competed weekly or then that we had written.
People then shied away from it.
and so nobody wanted to say, isn't this a scandal?
when they had, you know, a barrage of, abusive and threatening letters coming
their way from particularly, you know, with establishment papers, um, government
sources attached to them, you know, and were in the middle of a row about, um.
What, uh, Kemi Badenoch did and or didn't say.
and all I can say at this point is, they haven't got a very good record
on telling the truth, have they?
And we get a very, very, you know, sort of sniffy letter from, um, Kevin Hore
mp, who's supposedly in charge of the post office, um, at the moment saying,
well, that picture you, you ran of me.
A long time ago at a Fujitsu fundraising table.
Look, there's not a conspiracy.
And then today he says, yeah, when the bloke was fired, I wasn't actually on
the call, so I don't know what happened.
You are the, what is it, Minister for the Post Office.
It says here on your letter.
so it, there is a problem in, following these stories when the pushback is
so hard from government and those
Helen: involved, but also I think there's the fact that stories sometimes
only catch fire when they're part of a narrative or being pushed by
a particular campaign group or as part of a partisan political route.
So, the worst mass shooting in American history was the Las Vegas shooting.
But it wasn't, it doesn't mean anything if you see what I mean.
It was just a terrible tragedy.
It wasn't a white nationalist, it wasn't an Islamist, it was
just a man who was mentally ill, had a grudge and a lot of guns.
And so it doesn't really get remembered in the way that lots
of other terrorist atrocities do.
And there's a similar thing happened with the Panama Papers,
which were the, um, documents about tax evasion and tax avoidance.
And David Cameron's father had had an offshore trust, and this
was reported at the time and then reheated during the Brexit campaign
when suddenly everyone kind of fell about going, this is terrible.
David Cameron's father involved in offshore trust, and it was because at
that point he wasn't Tory leader, he was leader of the Remain campaign, and
it had obviously been briefed against the leader of the Remain campaign.
And so I think the Post Office is a classic example of this.
Everyone came out of it badly.
It wasn't like Labour could go, ah, the terrible Tories, because you're
like, and who set up the contract with Fujitsu in the first place?
It was new times with Smoosh maba and, and I think that's something that as
well, that really stops stories getting followed up is if they don't help anyone's
agenda to advance them, then they can just be a terrible thing that happened.
Ian: Yes or just wrong or an offense to national justice.
All right.
Adam: Any of those, those old fashioned ideas?
Yes.
Andy: Here's a good follow up, which is about the long
running stories that the I does.
It's kind of related.
So this is from Chris Brown.
Um, who decides what stories to pursue doggedly for decades Post Office...
Teesworks, and why?
Is it the experienced journalistic judgment or preconception of the
editor, the enthusiasm or sources of the journalist or something else?
Ian: Good question.
Uh, but all of those, yeah.
Um, and I mean, as editor, I, I freely take any amount of credit, but also I
will admit there are times in any long running campaign where the piece comes
in and I say, oh God, is it this again?
Um, uh, do we have, we've
Andy: never had this acknowledged before.
This is
Ian: good to know.
Uh, and then the, uh, journalist correctly then says, yes, you
do have to run this again.
A, because I've written it.
and B, because it's important.
and then I say I'm only trying to reflect the limited, um, attention
span of our readers, and try and protect that, which again, is a very
unconvincing argument if you are the journalist who's just written it.
So on the whole, yes, it's a mixture of those things and we have the amazing
luxury, of, being able to repeat because there's so much else, , in the
news pages and there are the jokes.
As I explained to a, an American PhD student, um, the Eye operates on the
principle of, um, Mary Poppins, , uh, the leading philosopher, the spoonful
of sugar, helping the medicine go down.
And I hope that is now in the vaults of, of, of a very big American university.
Andy: I think of it as a bit like a loaf of bread, you know, the outer edge.
You've got the crust, which is.
Sometimes a little harder to get through, but I think is better for you.
And on the absolute inside, you've got the very softest bit of the loaf, which
is the most fun to eat , but it doesn't contain as much of the, you know, the
really difficult, nutritious stuff.
Everyone.
I'm getting three blank faces for everyone.
No.
Adam: Spoonful of sugar, loaf of bread listeners.
What food stuff do you think?
Private eye mustard.
Helen: I think it's, I think it's salt.
It's salted caramel.
Okay.
It's like, but everything is better with it.
You can't have too much of one.
Things that are one note are bad, right?
Mm-Hmm.
So actually everything has to have some balance to it.
So come on.
Adam, you're the only one who hasn't thought of a food that we are
Adam: a potato, reliable, starchy, and the mainstay of, uh, nutrition and
Ian: about to get mashed.
Andy: so podcast@privatehyphen.co uk.
Tell us which food you think the Eye is most like, and we'll maybe cover
some of them in the next few episodes.
here is, here is a really difficult one.
Now I don't, I don't think you've seen all these questions, uh, or I hope
you haven't, but William Nash writes.
Hello.
Love the podcast.
Thank you, William.
Uh, I love private eye, but sometimes it's also bleak.
I have to tune out to save myself.
Can you tell me one thing you like about the British political establishment
and one thing the bloody Torries have done well in the last 14 years?
Yours positively, William.
Adam: Go with one thing, the Tory government, or it was the coalition
government at the time have done, uh, which I personally benefited
from, which was equal marriage.
There we go.
And that's why my list stops.
Helen: I think that's quite a good one because Cameron
said, um, of, of gay marriage.
I support it not in spite of being a Conservative, but
because of being a Conservative.
So he found a way to work equal rights into an absolutely, you know, into a right
wing story that was about family and being grounded in a community and all of those
kind of traditionally Conservative values.
I think that was genuinely groundbreaking.
If you look across at America, you know, I think where the LGBT picture
is much more polarized at and what has happened in Britain over that, it's
just has been genuinely very good.
I'm, I'm gonna row behind you on that one.
It's absolute
Adam: sea change in attitudes that just.
Extraordinarily quick and then afterwards, you know, you've got a gener,
not even just a younger generation, but a generation above it as well.
We're just going, well, what was all that about?
We just, you know, in terms of social attitudes, we just moved on.
Yeah.
And that was something you have to give Cameron credit for that.
He spotted that and, and uh, and I
Helen: go to those cranky conservative conferences where,
you know, still abortion is still a huge culture war issue, but
just, yeah, gay rights is just not.
It's just not somewhere that they even go actually at all.
There's just no, there are no votes in being homophobic.
I'm gonna say the, um, passport office, which is slightly less important
than equal rights for for gay people.
But nonetheless, it has been a quiet success story.
It was an absolute shambles during the pandemic.
And now actually you can get a passport quite quickly.
That's great.
And they should tell everyone else in Whitehall what the
magic was that they did.
I didn't know that.
That's fantastic.
Interesting.
Well, again, as the correspondent notes, those things don't get reported on
"Passport Office in Shamble; no one can go on half term holiday," is a story.
"Passport office working as intended...."
Adam: it is oddly harder to see.
I think there have been actually, I mean I know we've reported a
lot on waste in government IT projects and things, but there are
a few things that actually quietly digitally work really, really well.
Now.
Things like renewing your car tax and that sort of thing that you can just do online.
Uh, like astonishingly efficient and I dunno where though those
may be long term projects.
I couldn't date you when that sort of stuff.
But little, little tweaks like that have have gone on in the background
that I think have made things better.
Gov.uk
Helen: uK is actually
a very useful website.
Like doing your tax return here compared to doing an American
tax return is like almost kind of getting a present from God itself.
Um, so there are,
there are things, I mean, it kind of has to be better digitally
'cause you cannot get through to anyone at HMRC online on the phone.
That's the problem.
Any advice from anyone but,
Ian: People are very, very keen that I should at some point say, , well, apart
from these rude stories we've, we've written about the government, they're
marvelous in, in the following ways.
And I try not to do that because when, when the government changes,
I'll have the next slot in.
Um, but I'll say, well, you never said that at the time.
So.
I mean, once or twice I'm persuaded by people to put in a good news
corner where something happens that isn't absolutely terrible or isn't
quite as bad as it could have been.
But on the whole, we are a satirical magazine and an investigative
and campaigning journal, and I.
We are not running upbeat stories.
Um, and that is the nature of the beast and the reason that, um, a lot of, uh,
readers have, have pointed this out.
They read those bits and there are 50 cartoons.
Um, and those are all good news in their way.
Yeah.
No one ever wrote
Andy: to Jonathan Swift saying, I really like book two of Guive travels, but I
just wonder the next one, can it be a bit,
Ian: a bit more cheerful and that it's a bit bleak, isn't it?
Yeah.
Isn't it John?
Yeah.
Andy: well, my thing, the victories have done well.
Austerity, I just thought it was a really well thought out work really well.
okay, here is a, here's an interesting one and, uh, it's, it's from Ben.
Ben writes high team, can you help me understand something?
Please?
Some of the polling.
Commentators and podcasts have been predicting the collapse of the Tory party,
uh, massive drop in mps donors leave potentially not the official opposition.
It could be that the party drifts into insignificance by 2030.
My question is, what happens when there is less than 10% of the
commons as Conservative, but a ton of Tory peers in the Lords?
This question has come up after the recent rushed period of Baron David.
How should I presume is David Cameron?
I don't know the answer to that one.
Adam: I think that's some, I I don't think it'll, I don't think, for two reasons.
I don't think the Tory vote will go, seat number will go that low.
I can't see anyone else coming in to be an official opposition
getting more seats than the Tories.
However bad thing I do think things are gonna be very, very bad for them.
But the other thing is that Labour have already pledged that they're gonna do
some form of Lords reform, which everyone always says, and then they sort of bottle
out actually doing it in the end, right?
Mm-Hmm.
But I mean.
In that situation, the pressure to do something about the Lords for precisely
those reasons that the listener said would be, you know, pretty, uh, you
know, un, un challengable, wouldn't it?
There are lots
Helen: of complaints about the fact that the, the conservatives under this
government this term have had, that the Lords have been stroppy and have
delayed things that they wanted done.
And one of the reasons I think, I can't remember who was the interview,
said this to me in previous story, governments like pre Blair, there were
so many more hereditary who were...
you will not be surprised to discover largely quite Conservative,
rather than being avid socialists.
So the, you know, the Government had a lot easier time than laws.
It was used to having even, you know, an even weightier stack.
So I think there would be a huge feeling, this was anti-democratic to
have a, a Lords that was opposed to the Commons and was blocking things.
However, I will say about the total collapse of the Tory party,
actually what's kind of historically unusual is that the parties
have been static for so long.
You don't hear a lot about the Whigs these days, do you?
I do.
And more's the pity and indeed the, the liberal.
Liberal party was one, one of the dominant parties at the turn of the 19th century
and collapsed, declined, and folded into the Liberal Democrats eventually.
What's quite interesting about the Tory party is that it has
survived for so long in so many different ideological guises, right,
Adam: Most in the last three years.
Helen: So, although I agree with, uh, Adam, even the worst rates
of what the polling look like don't look like essentially a
disappearance of the Tory party.
It's quite unusual that they have that, you know, you've ended up
with that duopoly as it has been since the sixties now at least.
Andy: Alright.
There you go Ben.
Don't worry about it.
It won't happen.
Ian: It's fine.
No, I would worry about it.
What happens if there's a very large reform presence?
and they say, well, it's, it's time.
We had, 30% of the Upper Chamber reflecting our views.
and then presumably the next stage of Lord's reform, you would have, I
dunno, Lord Lawrence Fox and Lord.
Um, who else do I Lord Dan Wooten.
These, these are the, these are the Lords that I'm looking forward to.
Uh, Lord te obviously, um, and presumably Speaker of the Lord's
Lord Farage, I mean, again, I'm, I'm putting this largely to give people
nightmares, but also as, You say, well, they'll reform it when that happens.
It sort of depends what the vote is,
Helen: doesn't it?
I'm gonna air my own popular opinion here, which is that if Reform are
polling that high, they deserve some representation in the Commons.
I mean, this has always been the argument against proportional representation.
Is that in the thought you saying?
Well, I mean anywhere and whether that be, you know, but the fact is that the
first pass the post is very hostile to new entrants and there clearly are a lot of
people who support something to the right of the Tory party in a number of ways.
It's kind of unpleasant to think that you might get BMP style parties,
English national parties, those kind of parties represented in the Commons.
But it's kind of unpleasant to think that some people wanna vote for them.
Um, and we have got a, a system that locks out new entrants.
Mm.
And the question is, when it comes to a more rightwing party than I personally
would vote for, but not an illegitimately Right wing one, you know, not a
violently right wing one should Reform...
I'm just saying...
I like the idea of Lord Dan Wootton and here is my campaign
to make it happen in it's
Ian: starting year.
Good.
Well, the next question oddly is do journalists ever get fired?
And yes, indeed, anonymous.
They do.
Andy: Um, here's quite a nice one about process.
This is from Simon Lundy.
a question about courts and disclosures.
Uh, and this is actually related to what we spoke about last time.
We were speaking about, um, the various rules about what you can
and can't say in open court and what you can and can't report.
Uh, I understand the points made, read criminal cases, reporting, et
cetera, but there was a mention of super injunctions and D Notices.
But no further comment or explanation.
And a D Notice is is a national security restriction on what
you can report, isn't it?
Effectively, it's, it's a sort of very like top Government level.
You can't say this.
Uh, my question is how does a journalist know...
that there is a super injunction or a D Notice.
If someone gives the journalist a tip to follow up, how can the
journalist ensure that they do not breach either of those things?
Which is a, a really good question that you might wanna know how, how on earth do
you know you get a story, you write it up
Adam: with some difficulty, uh, from our point of view.
Certainly.
Um, so we have, we have mentioned, uh, we, we did go into a bit more detail on
this in, in in, in a previous podcast, but super injunctions essentially are.
As far as we know, and, and I'm pretty, I'm pretty certain on this, a thing of
the past now since that review by the Master Of The Rolls in 2011, after there
were a whole, there were loads and loads of them and the, and the whole, it was
decided that by Master Of The Rolls, top of the legal, legal system reviewed
it said this is an untenable situation.
I mean, Super Injunctions are different to normal injunctions, which are a,
a, a fairly standard part of law.
Uh, injunctions saying there are elements of this that has been
decided in court, cannot be reported.
Super injunctions, you're not allowed to say that the injunction exists,
which was just extraordinary and, and, and, and leads into exactly.
Um, what, what, what the listener's asking about that.
If you dunno that something exists, how do you know not to breach it?
Um, and I had to do at that time to 20 10, 20 11, an awful lot of
research and phoning round contacts on newspapers and, uh, lawyers and saying,
right, what ones do you know about?
Can we, can we compare notes on this?
And we, we've got a file.
I think we've still got it next door of all, all of them.
And, and as many as we could identify at that point.
Partly just for research purposes and wanting to know how many of them
there were, because we wanted to write 'em about 'em as a, as a kind
of a concept, but also for those very reasons that you don't wanna end up
breaching them, uh, without realizing it.
Okay.
What about D notices?
So, D notices don't exist anymore.
I thought they'd been replaced by DA notices.
I now find out this morning, they now something called DSMA notices, uh,
which are, they're issued by the Defense and Security Media Advisory Committee.
Uh, now these are not desperately secretive because you can find out all
about them by going to DS ma.uk, uh, where you will discover that there are
essentially, um, a load of standing, uh, DSMA notices, which are just aimed.
Uh, they're, they're, they're aimed at, um, essentially not giving away
anything that will be useful to terrorists or enemies of the state.
So it's basically, if you have found, um, that there is, um, some terrible
vulnerability in our nuclear power stations, uh, not publishing exactly
how to blow them up, that sort of thing.
And, and, and that there are five standing, uh, DSMA notices, which
cover all this amount for your military operations plans and capabilities.
So that's basically saying.
Not printing a piece saying, we're gonna attack the Houthis
tomorrow from this place.
And that's where, that's where they'll be launching the drones.
Uh, nuclear and non-Nuclear weapons systems and equipment, military
counterterrorist forces, special forces and Intelligence agency operations,
physical property and assets.
So that's, you know, the nuclear conversations and things I was talking
about and personnel and their families who work in sensitive positions.
So that's basically not going.
Hey, see that guy in Tehran?
He's actually a spy, and his kids go to this school.
So, I mean, there, there, there's stuff that, that, that you, pretty obvious
there is a fairly obvious reason for, for, you know, it's actually
putting people in danger, including potentially yourself in this situation.
Helen: that did come up this week when the KI biography came out because, um,
his chief of staff, Sue Gray, spent some of the Eighties running a pub, uh, on
along the Irish border, which people said that's a very strange thing to do.
Some might say the kind of thing that a spy would do.
And Sue Gray gave an on the record denial for the first
time saying, no, I wasn't a spy.
And then someone pointed out that under British law, if you are a spy, you are
obliged to go 'no, I wasn't a spy.' So it doesn't really get us any further along
knowing whether or not that was true.
But that's not exactly a D Notice is it, Adam, that's just a sort of standing
MI6 rule that you don't outs spies
Adam: or that would be the Official Secrets Act, wouldn't it?
Ah, okay.
I would
Ian: guess.
Um, I mean, I'm glad to hear that, um, it's been automated now.
'cause in the old days.
The D Notice committee was rather more informal.
It was more, more gentlemanly.
And I, I had personal experience with this 'cause.
I dunno if you remember, during one of the Iraq wars, there were some
plans for an operation called Desert Storm, which were in the back...
I think it was a Volvo, which was nicked.
and, uh, nobody knew where these plans were.
I had a very irate call, uh, from the Head of the D Notice committee
who was an admiral at the time, saying, is that Ian Hislop?
And I said, 'uh, yes it is.' And he said, 'uh, you know, these plans for Desert
Storm?' And I said, 'yeah.' He said, 'you don't know where they are, old boy?'
You know, which is, uh, Britain working in a slightly different way.
Yeah.
Just the
Helen: chaps phoning up to say, yeah.
Got any military pla secret military
Ian: plans?
Yes, I'd say, yeah, I've got them in the back of the office.
Adam,
Andy: they're stored in the company Volvo.
Yeah.
Adam: Um, it has been slightly more formalized now.
I should just, just to finish off the details of it, um, what happens
if there's an additional DSMA notice on a specific story, which
does happen very occasionally?
Uh, is that, um, it will be.
Issued by email to all editors.
I guess this includes you Ian, and through the Press Association and
the Society of Editors' networks.
That sounds slightly sinister, doesn't it?
Andy: Can I check how far does it go?
As in if I'm working on.
Railways Today or whatever, you know, is it just national papers?
Is it local papers?
Or, or, or
Adam: hobbyists?
It says here, all editors.
How many of you ever do you remember receiving
Ian: Ian?
very few, largely 'cause people don't consider Private Eye proper publication
or indeed myself as a proper editor.
And, and once I was very, very grateful during a, a, a lengthy case against
the Maxwell Brothers, which, uh, uh, it was very useful, um, for us
that this system isn't infallible.
The late Robert Maxwell, he died at the time, his sons were being tried
for a possible corruption and various other offenses and Private Eye ran an
interview with the late Robert Maxwell -from Hell- uh, uh, which the judge deemed
to be prejudicial to the current case.
But fortunately he went through the records and I didn't get the email.
Andy: So the next question is it, it is, it's sort, it's sort of semi-related.
It's, it is.
Why aren't you writing about this?
And I promise we, there aren't many of these, you know, but
it's, no, no, it was quite right.
And, uh, I'll pick the one from Edward who writes.
My question is about Charlotte Owen, who we did write about in
the last issue of the magazine and maybe the one before that.
Yeah.
Who is she and how come she's in the House of Lords?
And if you're not allowed to answer that, why?
And if you're not even allowed to talk about her, why?
Uh, I, I'd love more answers because her appointment is
infuriating on the face of it.
May have logical reasons.
It'd be quite
Helen: funny if we just had like a single shot run out and then this podcast ended.
That would start a few conspiracy theories, wouldn't it?
Andy: So this is Sean Boulogne, who was an aide in Downing Street.
Uh, seemed to be relatively junior, was then elevated as part of Boris's.
I think this his leaving honours, wasn't it?
To the
Adam: house along with Ross Kempsel, who's a similar age to her and
no one is quite as cross about.
No.
Andy: Ross Kempsel who...
Ian: Is he blonde?
Adam: Uh, he's not, no, he's got
Ian: no,
you've got no news judgment at all, have you?
Adam: I'm so sorry.
I'm coming at it from another angle from you.
Andy: I mean, my, my main thing is that his name begins with Ross Kemp.
Yes.
And no one seems to talk about that nearly enough for me.
Helen: I always think Adam's gonna talk about Ross Kemp.
I, Kemps made,
Adam: appear.
I can talk about Ross Kemp if you want me to.
Andy: The Hard Man of the Lords.
No.
Um, so lots of people, and again, this is a very big thing online as well.
Lots of people have lots of sinister theories about Charlotte Ho and being in
the House of Lords and why she's there.
, Helen: basically people wanted to say that she's either Boris Johnson's daughter or
his lover, and there's no evidence that anybody can find for either of them.
Adam: No.
I can tell you there are a lot of journalists on a lot of publications
who've been looking for nefarious reasons behind it, and I think my
conclusion on it is that essentially Boris did his, uh, resignations list
by looking around the office and going, oh, you, you could be on it.
And if you happen to wander through the room at that.
That's sort of quite within character for, yeah, for Boris, you know, as,
as much as elevating lovers and, and, and love children to the Lord, I
Ian: believe that entirely.
But didn't this, this, um, girl's mother actually issue a statement
saying, no, look, and she's my child.
Thank you very much, everybody online.
Uh, can you not put this on anymore?
Well, it was one of
Adam: those classic online conspiracy theories that relied on them leaving
a be really big clue in that, which is called Charlotte Owen.
And Boris's first wife is called Allegra Mosin Owen.
That, if you think about that
Ian: for a
Adam: second.
Yeah.
It just, it, it, it doesn't stand up what it, but if you're trying
to hide your love child, you
Helen: give her a different Well, it was, well, it was definitely
her mother was someone else.
And it's not like if you have a secret love child, you go, are you
gonna name this love child after be.
First wife of the guy I had it with.
That's very odd.
Love child behavior.
But yeah, I
Ian: mean the, the answer to this question, why haven't you run this story
is, is quite likely to be because it isn't true that that's always a slight problem.
And the other one, my other answer is, uh, 'cause we don't
know about it, can you tell me?
Mm-Hmm.
Yeah.
And if the answer can you tell me is I read it.
On some blog somewhere, , that I can't remember where, and the
detail's gone, that isn't very useful.
So to be honest, the answer to the Charlotte Owen story is nobody knows why.
Boris a point.
So maybe he doesn't know.
Um, we literally, we were at that point of the cycle, um, It's not
because there's a super injunction.
Again, the other thing a lot of people write in and say is, Hmm, you see I've got
this story about my accountant, and I'm guessing he's got a super injunction out.
And you say, you've guessed wrongly he hasn't.
and, give us the detail.
Don't assume that it's cowardice or a legal problem.
You know, the, the rare occasions when you know there is an order
or we can't say anything like.
we've twice had to put in, there was going to be a piece about, uh, Lucy let be.
There isn't.
There is a very, very, um, authoritarian order restraining what we can say.
We've challenged it once, it's been slightly ameliorated, but it
still makes it very to report about it, you know, and this is because
there's another trial coming up and there's nothing we can do about that.
That's not cowardice.
That's not, Ooh, I'm terribly scared.
It's, we don't want to mess the trial up.
Adam: And that piece will appear at the conclusion of the trial, I would
imagine if form of it, won't it?
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
It's funny, it's probably
Andy: part of, partly, you know, it sort of relates to Private Eye writers
not having bylines, this kind of thing.
There is a, there is a slightly different feel of pieces in Private
Eye, which I think does encourage people to think, ah, well, that we're
probably sitting on a big cache of stories that we haven't published yet.
But, uh, we were, and the truth is.
That's not true at all.
Adam: No.
If you stand the story up, it, it goes in, can the story up and get it past Ian?
Yes.
Helen: But it is kind of a wonderful reflection about the fact we do
expect everything to be explicable.
Now I often think not, this is my, one of my weird delusions, but I often
think about what life must have been like as a medieval peasant, right?
When you had no idea what was coming around the corner
and your crops might fail.
We do assume that everything is totally
Ian: explicable answer.
As a matter of a per.
It was God.
It was, yeah.
Mm-Hmm.
Or you failing God.
Yeah.
Right.
Helen: And that was probably, you just live with that level of simple time,
Adam: Helen.
So now you need to return.
So now it's just Boris moving in mysterious ways, isn't it?
Andy: Helen?
You have spent too much time at these Conservative conferences that you are they
Helen: I long for the simple agrarian society where men were men and
wheat fields were wheat fields!
Andy: Don't worry if the Popcons get the way.
We will all be tilling the crops before long.
Um, okay, here's a, here's a really nice one.
This is from Stephen d Quirk.
Thank you Steven.
this, well, there are two questions.
The first one is, as a bit of a procedure nerd, I'd love to hear a bit about the,
how it's put together, which items go in first, which are left to last, and
then just how close to the Wednesday.
Do we actually send it off?
Uh, and then secondly, in the 12 years or so of reading the mag, I
can't help notice just how many big governmental announcements occur on
the Monday just before the new issue.
Mm-Hmm.
Is this a healthy sign that I'm paying attention to the
world or are tinfoil hats?
I'm thinking Lawrence Fox has some good points in my future.
Ian: Good letter.
Um, I agree about the Monday deadline though.
it's not a Wednesday.
We get a press Monday night, and, uh, the bulk of people get it the Wednesday,
but some people get it on the Tuesday.
Um, depending where you are and, and, and how the Royal Mail's
doing, um, at this particular time.
But, uh, no, I mean, I, I, I think you could assume that people do know when
we go to press and certain people don't answer questions that we need very badly
until we've just gone to press and, uh, people play games with us on that.
So I think, I think it's fair to assume that happens.
the other thing is, uh, what order do things go in?
I can't really reveal that 'cause it might give away, editorial
incompetence and lack of time tabling.
So I'm afraid that that is under a D Notice.
Hey,
Adam: nice try Steven.
The,
Helen: um, the one thing that I, uh, did, I read Adam's very good history of
Private Eye before coming to work here.
'cause I good remainder bookshops folks.
Yeah.
Like the big swot I am.
And I was surprised that until the pandemic happened, you were
essentially sticking things together with bits of Pritt stick.
I'm
Andy: still a bit unhappy that that's changed.
I mean, I, I used to love the pritt stick.
You,
Adam: Ian wasn't using the pritt stick.
We had, he had a man who used the pritt stick for him.
He just pointed at where the pritt stick should
Helen: go.
Like Richard Desmond and his banana of some butler would carry in a pritt.
Stick on a silver tray on the Monday
Adam: morning.
Well, you see, you think you're joking, but I can remember, you know, arranging
little bits of paper like confetti, the individual stories and cartoons
on sheets of cardboard, which then had to be carried across the room.
'cause the pages, even at that point were actually done on these things called
computers, which we had by that point, but just been carried so carefully.
And if anyone opened a door or there was a draft or anything that that could be it.
That was an entire page just gone and had to be done again, wasn't it?
Yes.
The
Helen: Chiefs have said to me this morning that you were in terror
of sneezing on a Monday morning.
Yeah.
It was a whole
Adam: page.
Completely ring true.
Sometimes there would be a moment on press day where you would
say, where's that story gone?
And everyone would sort of get down on their hands and knees
like a contact lens you've got,
Helen: yeah.
On which year was this, please?
This was up to, it
Adam: began with 2
Ian: 0 1.
This was in 19, I tell you, a lot of people, did it get fired?
Adam: See it worked as a system.
Yeah.
You could see the whole magazine laid out literally on, on, on, on, on a big
table downstairs and, and, and get a real idea of what the pages were gonna like.
It was essentially an
Andy: agr, a medieval
Adam: Peas essentially that understood how Yeah.
And, and then we paid a 10th to the profits to the Pope and we knew we
were gonna looked after afterwards.
It was fine.
Andy: Okay.
I think we've cleared that one up.
Thank you, Stephen.
Um, Jenny Lanter writes, uh, she's written them with loads of questions,
actually, so I'm just gonna pick, uh, one or two of the most fun.
Uh, if times New Roman was removed from your font library tomorrow,
what would you choose to see the magazine published in Georgia?
I.
I think comic
Adam: sounds, comic sounds all the way.
Yeah.
Helen: You know, the Guardian commissioned its own font called Guardian
Egyptian when it did the redesign.
It's quite a thing to have a bespoke font of your own.
Andy: Yeah.
Yeah.
And do you have to get that into.
Your computers, as in, do you have to, how do you, he
Helen: said in 90 years old, how do you get the font into the machine?
Do you,
Andy: do you send it to Microsoft?
Do you send the drawings of the letters
Adam: really small in those holes?
I'm sorry, I trying to understand
Andy: this, but I, I think I'm speaking for all our listeners
when I say I do not understand, I'm
Helen: sure it's fine.
There are things called font sets that you load and to that are programs
that you run on your, whatever your desktop processing software is, and
you can, uh, yeah, you can update it.
Adam: We do have a proprietary type set.
Uh, the, the Private Eye logo.
Is a specially designed, um, font that was done just for us
by, and again, I'm consult the excellent history of Private Eye.
I wrote quite a while ago, I cannot remember his name, but a
very famous graphic designer in the 1960s, who did that for us?
There's, there is a full alphabet of it.
So we could, we could rename ourselves at any point and still have that...
well, we do occasionally do different logos and things.
We've been Private Spy
Ian: and I'm very keen on this idea of, uh, uh, of the, why
is it called Guardian Egyptian?
Was there a big head office that lost a lot of money in Egypt?
I mean, at what point in the Guardian's?
Yeah, it was a cycle.
Was this,
it was a pyramid scheme, unfortunately.
We're there.
There we
Helen: go.
I mean, yeah, I mean I did genuinely, I don't know.
I did wonder if it was a, 'cause Langen notoriously didn't
say anything in conference.
He was literally at the spinx.
So maybe someone was making it a kind of a sign to him was a pirate lift joke.
Andy: No, I think there is a font called Egyptian, so it might have
been an an iteration of that.
Ah,
Ian: right.
Tweet spec.
I would want something actually specific to us.
Andy: Well, let's, let's do that.
I've got some potato printing kits at home and we can,
Ian: um, yeah.
Make it happen.
Yeah.
Times New nomen.
There we go.
Adam: There it is.
Andy: She also asks, um, do you see space in the British media environment
for a spiritual rival to the Eye?
No.
I, spiritual, I gotta say I don't see any space for any rivals of any kind.
I think it's dangerous
Helen: to even ask.
I think that's actually a Evgeny Lebvedev's podcast is a
spiritual rival to all news media.
I think
Adam: actually, you know, our old rival Punch that's got that, that
title is still going begging, isn't it?
And it's, it's moved.
It was last owned by Muhammad Al Fad, who ran a very unsuccessful
rival to us for a while,
Ian: and his son.
Who, um, actually offered me the title
Adam: so he could have been Private Eye incorporating Punch.
Ian: Yes.
Quite recently.
Really, really charming.
Um, young man.
and I thought, blimey.
I wasn't very kind to your father when he was alive, so this is very good of you...
to ring me up.
And he said, do you wanna buy it?
And um, I said, no.
Adam: Why?
Ian: price was too high.
I can't go into, it was, I mean, for me to consider buying it, it
would had to have been under a quid.
You're right.
Adam: Okay.
Andy: okay.
One last, procedural one in your last podcast.
Kevin Doyle writes, you were talking about the need for journalists to
report on court cases to make the public aware of the crooks in their midst.
To that end, why doesn't private eye have any online archive of its reporting of the
many rogues it has exposed over the years?
Is it money, time, legal restrictions, or a worry that people won't buy the
magazine that stops this happening?
Ian: I suppose the general principle is we need to charge for journalism,
um, even if it's journalism in the past in order to fund current journalism.
But I think Adam, some of the specials are up, aren't they?
Adam: A lot of the special reports we've done from sort of locker B
to foot and mouth right through to.
My one about the phone hacking trial and a lot of Richard's
more recent stuff on T side.
Those are, those are all available from the website as, as, as
PDFs and gonna be downloaded.
Uh, I mean, it would be enormous thing to put 60 whatever years
we were out of, uh, back issues digitized and, and, and all up there.
And I, I mean, there would be some legal problems with it as
well because not so much recently, but some of those early days we.
Did have to print apologies for stories and, and, and, and retractions and things.
So there would be a, you would actually have to go, because
legally it counts as republishing if you, if you put stuff out online.
So that would be some issues with that.
Ian: I think it's a very good question is, is we were slightly beaning
the fact that you don't get local newspapers doing court reporting.
I mean, the Telegraph used to do it.
I mean, sort of exhaustively that sort of page three four is just, you would
get the case and not just the first day where you got the prosecution's
case, you'd, you'd get all of it.
And that was a huge bo to everyone in terms of, oh look, someone is being tried.
Look, that is going on.
And now as I think that he's trying to say, that doesn't
happen and I, we can't do that.
We can't do local court reporting.
Helen: You know, the fact that the eye doesn't put things on the internet is the
origin story of me coming to work here.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
In some ways.
I think the first time in I ever spoke to you was you.
I had done a, a New Statesman story about.
Uh, hot women being employed at sort of as booth babes at video game
conventions in which I had chosen to illustrate with some of these women.
And, uh, the eye probably, Adam actually wrote a story about how
intensely hypocritical this was.
I think that was one of Andy's,
Adam: sorry.
And
Helen: anyway, I get this
Adam: call.
I was
Ian: on holiday.
Helen: I get this call put through, and it's someone, and then the
woman's voice says that Ian, his lap is on the phone for you.
And obviously I think, oh, what the.
Fuck have I done?
It's all over.
I see my journalistic career come crashing down and it was Ian phoning
me to say, would you mind, I know we've been very rude about you, but
would you mind taking the story down?
Because I tweeted about it being like, I'm in Private Eye.
And he was like, we'd like to sell some copies of the magazine.
Uh, and I found this very funny.
He had to phone me saying, I've been very rude about you.
Would you mind in not publicizing this?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
To people so I can monetize
Adam: it as in you put up,
Ian: because you put up the whole story.
It's a button hell of a job I got here.
People, people just don't realize.
Andy: 90% of your day is ringing people on Twitter who've, who've put up a cartoon.
Yeah.
Here's just a little bonus ball one from Ian Kippen.
dear, sir, or Madam.
I like that.
Ian: That's me.
Thank you.
Andy: Well, whilst I follow your regular depths into the lives of
the Sussex, I would like to hear your take on why a particular genre
of journalists such as Moron and Toni, can't leave the Dutches alone.
I think the answer to that's pretty simple is that it just gets clicks.
Yeah, clicks.
It's as simple as that.
I, I met someone recently from a paper, which has been very, very over egging.
Its, its Sussex coverage and, and he said, yeah, it's just
staggering how many clicks it gets.
I did
Helen: like the, um, the thing that was in our magazine, print magazine, the last
issue this pointing out that Harry didn't believe the briefings from the, the press.
You know, he feels that the, uh, obviously part, a big part of Spare is the fact
he feels that the rest of the palace briefs very aggressively and against him.
But he didn't believe the briefings about how ill Charles was and
came over to see from himself.
I thought it was a really good, weird little insight that, uh,
that came across in the last print magazine, but you are right.
One of the questions is that they do clicks and also everybody involved
does also can't stop themselves.
Briefing to the press, even the Sussex get people who know them.
We know from the court case to brief the press.
So it is, you know, some of the messiness of the drama is because
everyone involved wants to get their version of the, the story on it.
So it's
Ian: easy, I mean, because you don't have to try very hard to, to get sources or
information, and B, the general public is very keen on this and the number of.
Conversations you have with people who you really thought didn't care massively about
the rebranding of the Sussex website.
People who've, who've really got lives and friends and hinterlands who are saying,
well, it's pretty shocking, isn't it?
And I know I'm meant to be shocked and I'm thinking, oh yeah.
Is it?
Yes, yes it is.
I'm very taken at the moment.
This is my current obsession.
And Res can tell me which bit.
It seems to be an exact parallel for the prodigal son.
And we're in, we're in act one.
he's off, um, being the swine herd.
Yes.
And he's off, which is, you know,
Andy: They keep livestock in California.
That's it.
They do, he's doing the, he's doing the, the
Ian: work to, they're chicken, they're not pigs, but he is,
he is literally out there.
If he returns act two.
The other brother, if you remember, very upset.
Oh yeah.
I've been toiling in the fields all day while he's just, just turned up day.
I'd be perfectly good as number one son, right?
Father welcomes him with open arms.
Now as I remember it, the Bible's fairly quiet on the mother who
doesn't get to look in, but if anyone wants to help me out on the
rest of this story, uh, please do.
Who's the
Andy: fatted calf who gets killed?
Andrew,
Adam: that's it.
We are
Andy: there.
That's it for this episode of page 94.
Thank you so much for listening.
If you'd like to get a copy of the magazine, we recommend you do.
It's really good.
As you've heard, all of these people who've written in are
keen readers of the magazine and they're having wonderful lives.
So go to private-eye.co.Uk, click on subscribe.
It's very easy.
It's very cheap.
It's honestly the price of everything else.
Very expensive, Private Eye, very cheap.
Go and get one now.
Ian: Good value.
Andy: Good value.
, and we'll be back again in a fortnight with another one of these.
If you would like to write in with a question, we're not gonna
be doing a postbag special every time, but do send your comment,
question, concern, unqualified praise to podcast@privatehyeneye.co uk.
We love hearing from you.
They all get read.
Alright, that's it.
See you next time.