Interview: Ian Hislop, Private Eye (Evening Standard)

David Rowan

Ian Hislop is going through one of his serious phases. From Sunday night, he presents a four-part Channel 4 series on the social impact of the first world war, and he is brimming today with heartwrenching accounts of battlefield injuries, prosthetic limbs and bleak village war memorials.

It's not quite the mischievous tone you would expect from the Have I Got News for You regular and editor of Private Eye - but then Hislop has never been one to narrow his opportunities. There were his Channel 4 investigations into education and the Church, his Radio 4 documentary on taxation, as well as a string of television plays and sitcoms written with his school-friend Nick Newman. Not forgetting his Spitting Image jokes, his scripts for Harry Enfield (including the memorable Tim Nice But Dim character) and the newspaper and magazine columns.

So now he's a war historian too?

"What a very boring man, obsessed with the first world war," he says, all self-mockery, behind his cluttered desk in Private Eye's defiantly unmodernised Soho townhouse. The series, he explains, follows a genealogy programme he made last year for the BBC's Who Do You Think You Are? series, in which he explored the battlefields where his two grandfathers had fought. "I think it convinced them that family history is not dull, but a surprisingly watchable commodity," he says. "And if you can do it for celebs, you can do it for ordinary people - picking names from first world war memorials and going to find their descendants."

The series, Not Forgotten, reinforces for Hislop what a "monumental catastrophe" the war was. He recounts the experiences of Annie Souls of Gloucestershire, who lost five sons between 1916 and 1918 and simply "got a note". Yet for all Private Eye's criticisms of the current government's push for war in Iraq - including its exposé of the fake "Niger memo" - Hislop avoids drawing any wider political conclusions. "No, there's no great overarching thesis," he says. "I try to let the stories speak for themselves, to see if it is possible at this distance to make those men come alive."

But why not stick to satire? It is not as if his income - reportedly nearing the mid six figures - needs the boost. Partly, he says, because that era fascinates him. Besides, he adds, it's not often these days that you get a chance to make "serious" TV. "I probably get two or three offers a week to do Celebrity Detox or the History of the Y-Front. I was offered Celebrity Love Island, I'm a Celebrity... There's an awful lot of terrible television which I could do, but I mostly stick to Have I Got News for You."

Hislop had an unconventional route to fame. Born in Wales, he travelled extensively as a child because of his father's work as a civil engineer. He met Newman, his writing partner, when boarding at Ardingly College, Sussex, and at Oxford ran a satirical magazine. He contributed parodies to Private Eye, catching the attention of the editor, Richard Ingrams. In 1986, when Ingrams declared that Hislop would succeed him, there was apoplexy. Nigel Dempster, who wrote gossip items, said: "I don't think people like midgets, especially pushy midgets."

Did Hislop finally earn his critics' respect? "No," he says simply. "I sacked most of them."

Now 45, he lives in Kent with his wife Victoria, a writer, and their 15-year-old daughter and 13-year-old son. Does he consider himself a celebrity? "That's the ultimate put-down in this office," he says. "If [Francis] Wheen or [Christopher] Booker think I'm getting above myself, they sneeringly say, 'I expect you've got to go off and be a celebrity now'." Ah, that would be his irreconcilable roles as both satirical mirror to the famous and an increasingly prominent member of their own ranks. "I think it's possible to be both," he answers. "Start with Byron, go through to Peter Cook. I remember Paul Foot telling me that Private Eye was first accused of becoming too 'establishment' in 1963. It's not a problem."

Ratings have been falling for Have I Got News..., where Hislop has been a team captain since 1991. Is its future assured? "Oh, I think so," he says. "We're up and at it for, what, the 29th or 30th series, and we had a very good one recently with Alan Duncan. The Tories are still game, but it's almost impossible to get anyone from Labour on. Perhaps we'll get a few more Labour rebels now."

As for the day job, Private Eye has prospered on rising dissatisfaction with the present regime. Circulation, around 170,000 when Labour came to office, is now 210,000, which Hislop attributes to the war and "growing disillusionment" with Blair. "There was an initial reaction that we ought to have given him a chance, but that's all gone. Now everyone else has joined in, which makes it a lot less fun." Blair, he adds, has only once reacted to Private Eye's teasing in its St Albion Parish News: "He told a foreign newspaper that it wasn't clever or funny, which was music. Very housemasterly, and just what you want to hear."

Some of Hislop's targets have proved less acquiescent. Piers Morgan famously denounced him as a "moon-faced little midget". Hislop's response has been to run a stream of stories taunting "Piers 'Morgan' Moron". The current court case over insider alleged insider share trading, he stresses, is being reported in the Eye "obviously fairly and contemporaneously". He grins widely.

Hislop's coutroom appearances generally involve libel. The magazine currently has four unresolved writs, and even its victories can prove Pyhrric: it won a nine-year libel battle with an accountant, John Stuart Condliffe, but was left with £1 million in costs after he declared bankruptcy. "All the libel lawyers will tell you there's no libel any more, that everyone's given up," he says. "The climate has changed - partly through the [Sonia] Sutcliffe decision, after which the rules were changed so anything over £100,000 tops could go to the Court of Appeal, and partly through The Guardian winning cases against Jonathan Aitken and the Police Federation. [Alan] Rusbridger's not boasting - that did have a huge effect on plaintiffs' willingness to sue."

The Guardian's readers' editor claims to have cut its libel bill by resolving complaints quickly. Yet Private Eye has no such mechanism, nor any in-house rules about sourcing stories. Some critics claim that, for all its highmindedness, its reports are too often inaccurate. "No, there are no hard and fast rules about sources, no printed booklet to help journalists through," Hislop admits. So how can readers know that what they are reading is truthful? "That is a matter of trust," he asserts.

But surely he can see the danger of allowing anonymous sources to use the Eye to settle scores? "People don't ring us up out of the milk of human kindness," he says."Yes, there is often an axe to grind or a grudge to bear. But the skill of the hacks here is to separate the story form the grudge." Wouldn't it be fairer to put damaging allegations to the parties concerned? "They may well say not only is this not true, but I will put in an injunction to prevent publication. No, stories don't go in unless I'm convinced by the people who write them that they're true. And if I'm wrong, then so be it."

That puts him in a powerful position. "It never feels like it." He sidesteps a question about whether, perhaps, his magazine's stand against the powerful reflects a need to avenge bullies during his own schooldays. "This job certainly doesn't win you a huge amount of friends, I accept that, but it is very enjoyable, and deep down I think it's probably quite a worthwhile job. Just this morning I read in the papers that Scope the charity is closing down one of its schools while paying its administrators more. That was in the Eye three weeks ago."

He has now been editor for almost 20 years. Does he intend to stay? "I'm certainly not going," he says. "It might be a long time in any other publication, but here it doesn't feel like that." Besides, there are too many public figures just calling out to be ridiculed.

"Sir Christopher Meyer has got off quite lightly," Hislop muses. "What's he going to say the next time there's a complaint to the PCC? That it's a shocking breach of confidentiality? It's going to be wonderful."

(Evening Standard, November 16 2005)

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