So good in fact that the managing editor is usually the most sued person in the UK.

Ian Hislop is a national treasure and his evidence to the select committee on press intrusion was both erudite and hilarious.

His TV panel show, "Have I Got News For You" is also wonderful. Just comedians, discussing and making jokes about the news, for something like 25 years now. And most of it is on YouTube.

Angus Dayton used to host that show

He couldn’t keep it in his pants, so was ridiculed by the guests (including Hislop)

That led to him resigning

Which led to Boris Johnson hosting a few episodes

A charismatic buffoon, that catapulted him to wider attention

He was then selected for London mayor

During the 2012 Olympics he was pushed further into the world’s eye

That led to him being a key role one way or another in brexit. He flipped a coin and backed Leave.

That backing tipped the scales and road to leave

That eventually led to him becoming PM, after a lucky backstabbing by Gove in 2017, meaning he managed to get a large majority in 2019

It’s an interesting example of the butterfly effect.

I think it was Dayton's drug use that caused the initial situation.

Possibly, such a long time ago.

The tactics that won brexit with vote leave were used later to elect trump.

It amuses me to think how the world can change from tiny changes

To be clear he didn't create the show, he's one of its stars.

The show was a successful transition to television of the Radio 4 classic, "The News Quiz"

Indeed, I love The News Quiz though I still miss Sandy, the new host is great but not a match.

I've never paired them, curiously.

The News Quiz is still a R4 show so transition would perhaps be the wrong word. Extension, assuming they have the same source as you imply with your comment.

Our PM was also a regular.

"I just cut a fat Czech a fat cheque"

I strongly urge UK-base HNers to subscribe. It is one of the few national publications still doing proper long-term investigative journalism into local government (in a way that local papers haven’t had the resources to do for years) and usually signals important stories before the main papers pick them up, especially wrt stories about the rest of the news media. Many people stuck in large media orgs leak to the Eye so they can report that e.g. the Telegraph hasn’t been allowed to report on something that might damage the financial interests of its owners.

And it’s quite funny.

Agreed. I think their level of investigation is peerless. They go where others fear to tread. They ruffle more feathers in every single edition than the FT does in a year.

I can't think of any other UK publication that comes close.

It's an overall excellent and very dense UK-specific read (~40 pages of editorial, cartoons and letters every fortnight). Several stories broken by Private Eye have ended up featuring on Hacker News much later too such as Horizon - an IT system for the UK's Post Office which somehow executives managed to persuade the courts was infallible, so if a bug in Horizon said your Post Office ought to have £10k of cash that it didn't you (the "Postmaster" of that office, typically a small local store owner making a little bit of extra money offering this vital service) might literally go to prison for stealing this money that never even existed.

It does have its own unique culture you'd need to spin up on to really grok what's going on. For example it just calls the Queen "Brenda", and various government agencies get more apposite names like the "Fundamentally Supine Agency". And there are a lot of running jokes after existing for so long.

It's basically what the press looks like when they are doing their job. They are privately owned and on a mission to tell the truth, not to make as much money as possible.

Hislop and before him Cook are actual real people trying to do something good instead of just attempting to get rich for the sake of it before dropping dead.

There are lots of in jokes and also "code phrases", such as "tired and emotional" == drunk, more here [1].

I used to subscribe to it but cancelled it after I left the UK.

The UK press are an absolute disaster. Most are partisan, including:

Telegraph: torygraph Daily mail: torygraph FT: bankers times Guardian: with you until you need actual help then it's back to mi5 Sun/Times: Murdoch incorporated

Private eye is literally carry everything on their shoulders. There is nothing else.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recurring_themes_and_in-jokes_...

Private Eye has also created one of the best legal responses that they cite now and again. In the case of Arkell v. Pressdram.

If you're curious about it details are on Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_Eye#Litigation

It has consistently had (IMHO) the best pandemic coverage of any media. The MD section is brilliant, challenging and thought provoking... and it's a satirical magazine!

(this says a lot about the poor state of media in general).

A print subscription is £34 a year, delivered (in the U.K.). It’s ridiculously good value.

Private Eye is very good, but they don't always get it right.

> Even when an error does not end up in the law courts, it can still prove embarrassing. The magazine was at the forefront of challenging the MMR triple vaccine - devoting a special-edition pamphlet to the subject. A defiant Hislop insists that the Eye was right to raise the questions it did and to defend the reputation of Andrew Wakefield, the controversial doctor who first suggested there might be a link between MMR, autism and bowel disease - a theory ruled out by the latest comprehensive review of evidence. "There's nothing there that I don't think is right. We came into the story about the hounding of Wakefield and the idea that he wasn't a bona fide doctor, who'd done a huge amount of good looking after these children - the parents certainly bear witness to that. All his stuff beforehand was peer-reviewed and no one said, 'This man's a lunatic' about the link between bowel disease and autism. The work he's still doing is still perfectly OK. I don't accept the claim, 'You added to a climate of hysteria, which means herd immunity will go down and therefore it's all your fault.' I think the questions we asked at the time were acceptable to ask."

That leaflet was published in 2002, when the science was pretty clear. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1123186/

Private Eye avoided the paywall problem by not putting itself online at all, it only publishes selected articles online to leave you hungry for the rest :)

It also avoided becoming accessible to the blind and other parts of the population who cannot read print.

This is a good point, accessibility is very important and it's a shame you've been downvoted.

Private Eye is available in audio form through the RNIB, though it may just be a digest version as it looks like it's part of a weekly compilation from various publications.

https://www.rnib.org.uk/daisy-magazines

I think RNIB do an audio read version