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Ian Hislop: regime satirist

The once irreverent Private Eye editor can now be relied on to parrot the official, centrist line.

Gareth Roberts

Topics Culture Politics UK

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The cover of the new Private Eye is dark and tasteless, which is as it pretty much always has been and should be. Under the headline ‘GROOMING SCANDAL LATEST’ we see Elon Musk and Nigel Farage, with a speech balloon of Farage saying, ‘He lured me in, promised me money and then abandoned me’, and Musk adding, ‘You’re not the far-right man for the job’.

Which is all fair enough. Like many Private Eye covers down the years, it’s in dubious taste and is rude about an MP. So no change there. But still, these targets are so, so safe. This is regime humour. And it’s the perfect encapsulation of the inability of the old cultural world of the 20th-century ‘anti-establishment’ establishment to acknowledge the new world we now inhabit.

At about the same time, Private Eye editor Ian Hislop was interviewed by ultra-establishment Andrew Marr on LBC, also on the subject of Elon Musk. A clip of it went viral – ironically enough on X, Musk’s own site. In this, Hislop has a splutter about Musk, telling Marr that Musk is ‘riddled with contradictions, and at some point I am hoping that even his followers will begin to notice that from sentence to sentence, he makes no sense’. He goes on to say that Musk’s reach is aided by ‘people who have been persuaded over the past five years or so that the mainstream media hasn’t covered any stories and that the only people who have noticed anything happening in the world are people sitting in their bedrooms and sending messages to each other’.

This is, shall we say, an interesting way for a satirist and commentator to characterise the failings of the media over the past few years. Of course there have been individual journalists and publications striving to expose very uncomfortable hidden truths, from the rape gangs to the rise of genderism to the Post Office scandal (and Private Eye itself was admirably assiduous on the latter). But the old media at large has been caught napping on all these, and much else besides.

Throughout the interview, Hislop parrots the official, approved centrist line on Musk and Farage, accusing them of spreading far-right disinfo, defending poor Jess Phillips and insisting there’s been enough inquiries into Pakistani rape gangs. It’s what you’d expect from The News Agents or The Mash Report or Led by Donkeys. But this is Ian Hislop and Private Eye, who not so very long ago – okay, quite a long time ago – were a force for the scabrous, full-throated derision of everybody and everything, most of all the established press. For the editor of Private Eye, of all people, to be criticising someone else for doing down our supposedly wonderful newspapers and our magnificent mainstream political parties… this is one of many crazy sights I never thought I’d see. But then, we live in a world where the Babylon Bee, a satirical enterprise run by evangelical Christians, is almost always funnier and more pertinent than anyone else in the game.

Hislop is now solidified in a lost world. Today’s Britain must look superficially similar to the old world to such people, if they squint a bit. Certainly if you’d told me in 1990, when Hislop first appeared on Have I Got News For You, that in 35 years I’d be pinning my hopes for the survival of Western civilisation on the second non-consecutive presidency of one Donald Trump, I’d have been amazed, appalled and fretting for my future sanity. But the length of life throws you these curveballs. It is better to roll with them.

A satire show continuing uninterrupted for 35 years is a bad sign in itself. HIGNFY has ossified around Hislop, baking him into it like a little winter apple. It is now an irreverent look at the week’s news only for cheesed off loony centrists, the very people who have led us into our current woes. The show is itself an exemplar of why everything is so mucked up. It studiously avoids big stories and awkward truths. It is reduced to such feats as making Dame Andrea Jenkyns look a fool. Because gosh, that’s difficult. It is bizarre to find it still going 35 years later, like turning on the TV to find that Sylvester McCoy is still Doctor Who, or that Gruey is 53 and still running about with grubby knees forgetting his homework.

Hislop is still operating the mental model of a lost age, with an inability to face new, and very unpleasant, realities. The biggest of these is that the British institutions are no longer merely loveably incompetent. No, they are all utterly dysfunctional, from top to bottom. You’d think there’d be satirical material in that.

Private Eye, HIGNFY and Hislop himself are among these non-functioning institutions. Satire and snark only operate effectively if you are satirically snarky about everybody and everything. Hislop should be at the back of the crowd chucking bottles – at Musk and Farage, yes indeed, but at everybody else with political power, too. Instead he’s saying, ‘Aren’t our newspapers marvellous?’, and following the line of the government. It is a pitiful sight.

Gareth Roberts is a screenwriter and novelist, best known for his work on Doctor Who.

Picture by: Getty.

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