A Year of Private Eye

Last year I was gifted a year's subscription to Private Eye. This has now completed, so it seems like a good moment to offer some thoughts on it. Since they have a regular section "Street of Shame" which criticises other media outlets, I'm sure they won't mind.

It's... a mixed bag, to be honest. The first thing that struck me was the utter lack of dumbing down, to the extent they provide almost no context for any of their stories whatever. Consequently unless you're already familiar with the basics, it can be very hard going (though since they cover many stories regularly, this gets a bit easier after a few issues). They almost never lead with a simple bit of background to highlight the main point or context of a story, but dive straight into whatever they want to discuss. It doesn't help that the style of prose is sometimes rather tortured. Sometimes so much so that I can't understand if the "killer punchline" of a story is just not as clever as they think it is or if I've failed to spot an obvious point they were trying to make.

This makes reading it quite the slog. I'm glad it doesn't come out more than fortnightly because it takes me that long to muster the will to sit down and read the bloody thing. Even then I usually skip some stories.

The overall impression I get is that their journalists are more analytical than others, but not necessarily more critical. They've very good at getting the nitty-gritty details of a story and working out precisely what happened. But they're not anything special in terms of reasoning as to why someone did something the way they did or what the consequences might be. They can be irritatingly judgemental, which does tend to be the only bit of colour in many of the serious stories but doesn't make them feel especially credible. And just like every other newspaper, they hardly ever report any positive developments and do seem quite determined to spin everything in the negative. The most they do is acknowledge that there might be some benefits here and there, which is more than most ever do, but is still nowhere near enough.

Often their being judgemental slips into unbearable smugness. Their arts reviewers in particular strike me as the standard elite literatti types who think that only one sort of novel is ever worth reading, who are happy to laud the merits of Tolkien now but never would have done so when he first published. They essentially never review anything they like but always, always focus on mocking that which they don't. And really, they're just not very good at this. Their reviews can be quite fun, but generally tend towards dullness.

On individual columnists I have to say I'm particularly unimpressed by their farming and energy correspondents. The one insists that all rewilding is bad and Britain must massively ramp up internal food production while the other hates renewable energy yet offers no alternative. Never do they say how exactly we're supposed to help environmentalism without undoing the damage we've already done. In particular, what the alternative to renewable energy sources is supposed to be is never mentioned. This is extremely irritating, because by implication I suppose we're just going to have to make do with fossil fuels, which is clearly a valid but also catastrophically stupid choice. I'd expect better than this.

But of course, it also has many redeeming qualities. To bring in the positives, to their enormous credit they cover many stories that others don't. Sometimes this can be at the expense of other, more worthy stories that everyone is talking about and I feel it's a shame that they don't offer their perspective on the big topic of the day. And most of these alternative articles aren't of the slightest importance, but every once in a while they get something on the scale of the Post Office scandal and, currently, the massive level of corruption and waste at the Teeside Freeport. The latter is something I think deserves national attention; what I don't understand is why some of these stories don't "break" earlier in the wider press. Are they just not paying attention ?

They also, I think it's fair to say, have no political bias whatsoever, or if they do it's incredibly centrist. While as I laid out I think the current situation in government is a non-story, to their credit they were raising the issues of freebies and donations well before Labour took office. They do seem to base their attacks largely on moral lines and genuine points of principle rather than political preference, and that scores them enormous brownie points as far as I'm concerned. They also happily publish criticism from readers, even if they don't always seem to learn anything from it. They certainly don't have any of the dumb opinion columns or idiotic headlines that plague most newspapers.

If the farming and energy columns aren't to my taste, then the medical column is far superior. The recent series examining whether Lucy Letby suffered a horrendous mistrial is in my (utterly unqualified) view incredibly astute, carefully examining the statistics and providing vital context that other examinations have missed. MD's thoughts, even when I don't necessarily agree with them, are carefully thought-through and justified (such as a dose of lockdown skepticism, which appears to be based on a consideration for the overall effects rather than any knee-jerk libertarian nonsense).

Finally the satire is simply outstanding. The Prime Minister's Top Secret WhatsApp Group messages are laugh-out-loud funny, the cartoons are gold, the parodies brilliant, the wit razor-sharp and unafraid of offending as many people as possible. It's honestly almost worth reading for this alone.

When it came to renewing my subscription, I dithered until the last moment. The satire is fantastic, but did I really want to have to commit to this regular slog for another year ? I've often had several issues stack up unread because I can't find the time to face it; my completionist tendencies utterly prevent me from just reading the good bits.

In the end I decided I would. On balance the positives clearly outweigh the negatives, and since I now have the issues covering the last year of an extended Tory government, it's pleasingly symmetrical to have those covering the first year of a Labour government. Whether I'll continue beyond that I don't know. It's rather expensive... but it is, without doubt, an important institution.