Private Eye was never really countercultural. When Richard Neville, founder of the legendary 1960s countercultural newspaper OZ, moved to London, he met with Private Eye staff thinking that they might be on the same wavelength. Instead, he found they were very classist and old-fashioned (and homophobic). The counterculture wanted to utterly tear down the establishment. Private Eye might have poked fun at some establishment figures, but that doesn’t mean it had the same revolutionary aims as the true counterculture.

This is a fair point.