![redacted email hacking cartoon redacted email hacking cartoon](https://itdaily.be/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/phishing.jpg)
![redacted email hacking cartoon redacted email hacking cartoon](https://media.newyorker.com/photos/59095bae1c7a8e33fb38c002/16:9/w_1280,c_limit/daily-cartoon-140806-russian-hackers.jpeg)
On Diana death coverage: ‘They got the mood of about half of the nation right and then the rest of the nation was very disgusted by it…’ Over the decades it has covered the Jeremy Thorpe scandal, Robert Maxwell, the Thatcher-era, Princess Diana, PFI deals, tax evasion, the Leveson Inquiry and recently Brexit and Covid-19. Private Eye began covering the City of London at the very end of the 60s with “Slicker”, aka Michael Gillard. And with good reason: a strong front cover can put on some 30,000 additional sales for the magazine. The idea was actually pinched from a New York magazine that Monty Python’s Terry Gilliam worked on.Ĭhoosing the cover is no laughing matter, says Macqueen, with the Eye’s editors and joke writers examining options like doctors round an X-Ray chart. The first of the Eye’s now instantly recognisable speech bubble front covers appeared on 12 February 1962, reporting on Prince Charles emergency appendectomy of all things. Since 1986 the Eye has been edited by Ian Hislop, who tells Press Gazette he “inherited a very good template from my predecessors and what I’ve tried to do is just expand it and keep it interesting”. The first decade, which saw the arrival of investigative journalist Paul Foot, set the template for the magazine – “two solid slices of journalism sandwiched the jokes in the middle” – which has remained firm with a few aesthetic changes and more pages added over the years. “It is a joy to go back and read things like Dear Bill and Mrs Wilson’s Diary again, because they are just brilliantly funny”.
![redacted email hacking cartoon redacted email hacking cartoon](https://s3.amazonaws.com/lowres.cartoonstock.com/families-identity-identity_crime-identity_crimes-con-identity_theft-mgrn486_low.jpg)
While some of the jokes have been obscured by the passing years, “there are some things that just absolutely stand the test of time,” he tells Press Gazette. Macqueen, who writes the Eye’s Street of Shame section dishing gossip on Fleet Street, wasn’t even born for the first 14 years of the fortnightly satirical magazine, which launched in October 1961. Over the decades there’s been a lot of both and self-titled Eye “hack” Adam Macqueen has spent the pandemic scouring back issues to bring the best bits together in new book Private Eye: The 60 Yearbook. The secret to its success is apparently simple: its unique formula of jokes and journalism, or “spoofs and scoops” as the Eye team would have it. Private Eye is celebrating 60 years in print next month.