Ian Hislop: satirist in chief | Media | The Guardian Ian Hislop Ian Hislop: satirist in chief He's been called the most influential voice in British politics, the Dalai Lama of satire, a fogey, a moralist, a troublemaker and a cynic. Meet Ian Hislop, editor of Private Eye Ian Hislop: 'It's very flattering to be told you are powerful, important and malign.' Photograph: Kalpesh Lathigra for the Guardian Friday 23 September 2011 17.59 EDT First published on Friday 23 September 2011 17.59 EDT Share on Messenger Close Ian Hislop bustles. There's no other word for it. He exudes urgency and purpose. One minute the reception at Private Eye 's chaotic Soho office is quiet, and a matronly receptionist is making me a cup of coffee. The next Hislop has arrived, and the atmosphere is transformed. He has presence, even at a generous 5ft 6in and with that schoolboyish tendency to scrunch up his face when he laughs.

Dressed in a blue suit, with a pair of sunglasses poking out of his top pocket, he looks like the successful entrepreneur he is. Hislop runs the satirical magazine Private Eye, natural home of anarchists and dropouts, while looking like the head of the local Rotary club . Hislop celebrates 25 years as editor this year – he took over from Richard Ingrams at just 26. He is keen to downplay that anniversary, but is certainly not downplaying the fact that his magazine is about to mark its 50th birthday. A celebratory book by Private Eye staffer Adam Macqueen is being published, and the Victoria and Albert Museum is staging an exhibition showcasing the magazine's covers and cartoons. It is all dangerously respectable, though, as Hislop says, critics have been complaining since 1962 that Private Eye has become part of the establishment. The first thing you see as you come through the front door are photographs of the men – they are all men – who kept the magazine afloat in its early years. "We call this the wall of death," Hislop says.

Most of those photographed have, indeed, passed on, at dismally young ages – Peter Cook , Auberon Waugh , Paul Foot , John Wells , Willie Rushton . "Bons viveurs tend not to live to a very great age," Hislop says of Waugh. The ultimate bon viveur – in the couple-of-bottles-of-vodka-a-day sense – was Private Eye's proprietor, Peter Cook, who died at 57 but at his death looked a bloated 77. Private Eye remains something of a boys' club. Hislop says he employs two women journalists, but admits there aren't many women making jokes on the magazine. For this he blames the women, not the Eye. "Women either don't put themselves forward or they're not part of gangs of blokes showing off at school and university who then turn that into a living or a way of communicating. Maybe women don't have to do that." Fifty years on, men from public schools remain the heart of the joke factory, and Hislop fits squarely into the mould. His father was a civil engineer who travelled widely for work, and Hislop had a peripatetic childhood, spent in Nigeria, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Hong Kong.

He boarded at Ardingly College , a public school in Sussex run on Christian principles, which provided a sort of surrogate family and where he was head boy. It is tempting to see him moving seamlessly from public school to another institution with strong codes, a keen respect for its past and a ready-made surrogate family – Private Eye. Cartoonist Nick Newman , the son of an RAF officer, was a couple of years ahead of Hislop at Ardingly. "We first met in the school play," Newman remembers. "It was an awful sort of 'educational' production about the Peterloo massacre. There was much sniggering in rehearsals as all these posh public schoolboys tried to be working class. Later, we did a few revues, very sub-Python. I was 16 and he 14. At that age you don't really talk to anyone in the year below, but Ian could mix with anybody. He didn't have that shyness that other people have with their elders. When his dad died, I think he grew up very fast." Hislop's father died at the age of 45, when Hislop was 12.

"Because he died young, he was a very strong force," he says. "For a long time I thought I should be a civil engineer. That seemed to be the only thing worth doing, and I chose the wrong subjects at A-level. I read all the sciences to start with, and then had to admit, 'This isn't what I want to do' and changed course." He was close to his mother, who after her husband's death made her home near the school. "It was quite selfless of her really," he says. "I had a built-in life and community, rather than having to share in the grief. My mother was a terrific force in my life. Wartime-generation woman, hadn't gone to university but should have done. Was very funny, very verbal, very clever, very witty." He has an older sister, to whom he is also close. Hislop studied English at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he collaborated with Newman on a satirical magazine called Passing Wind. "I'd been doing it with another friend, but he'd lost interest," says Newman, "so when Ian came up he took it over.

He was more focused than I was." Hislop admits he is a workaholic, and attributes it – as with so much else – to his absent father. "He loved what he did, which was a very strong influence. For him work was an endless pleasure." His father was Scottish born and Hislop sees his own workaholism as a "Scottish genetic, Presbyterian link". Hislop and Newman were by now joined at the satirical hip, and worked together on the influential 80s satire show Spitting Image . Hislop had also started writing for Private Eye, after impressing editor Richard Ingrams when he interviewed him for Passing Wind while still at Oxford. Ingrams was only in his 40s, but had already edited Private Eye for two decades and, according to Hislop, was exhausted after a succession of bruising legal battles. In Macqueen's book, the latter years of Ingrams' editorship are painted in bleak terms, with the tone of the magazine becoming bullying and elitist, and I ask Hislop whether his predecessor, who still attends the collective joke-writing sessions, will be hurt.

"The last thing I would want to do is hurt Richard," Hislop says, "because he's an extraordinary figure in my life." Indeed, Hislop likens him to a "substitute father". One difference between Ingrams and the improbably youthful figure he chose to succeed him concerned gossip. "I thought society gossip was outdated," Hislop says. "It was just leg-over constantly. I'm often accused of being prudish, but the opposite is true. I thought endlessly recounting that people's marriages had failed didn't seem that thrilling." The Hislop alternative? "I'd always thought the thing that defined the Eye at its best was investigative journalism and jokes, and I suppose what I've put in place of society gossip is professional gossip – people talking about how their industries, businesses, professions work, rather than saying the Duke of Cumberland was seen in White's with someone who wasn't the Duchess of Cumberland." The principal purveyor of that old-style gossip on the Eye was Nigel Dempster , and he and fellow Daily Mail journalist Peter McKay staged an attempted coup against Hislop's succession in 1986.

They took Cook, who owned most of the shares in the magazine, out to lunch, got him drunk (never difficult) and marched back to the office to confront Hislop. Instead of firing him, Cook said, "Welcome aboard." "If Richard had appointed Christine Keeler, I might have intervened," Cook said later, "but Ian was the ideal choice." Hislop praises Cook for his support in those early battles and for his comic genius, but wonders whether he could in turn have helped save him from the bottle. "He did a brilliant last show with Clive Anderson, and I got a pang of guilt then because I thought what Clive had done is not indulge Peter. I thought, 'Had we indulged Peter because he was so naturally funny?' I had ended up working for and with one of my heroes, so it was quite difficult to say, 'You know, I don't think you should drink so much.'" Unlike Cook and many of the first-generation Eye stalwarts, Hislop is no hell-raiser.

"Every 10 years he gets a bit drunk in the evening and wakes up with his contact lenses in," says Francis Wheen , one of the first people Hislop signed up when he became editor and now his de facto deputy. "He lives a quiet life down in Kent." Hislop is married to novelist Victoria Hislop, whom he met at Oxford. Her success came in her mid-40s, when in 2005 The Island became a bestseller. "I'm now plus one," he says when I ask how her celebrity has affected their relationship. "I go to literary festivals and hang about while she talks." They live in Sissinghurst, and have two university-age children, Emily and William. Although Hislop was a keen student performer, and took a revue show to Edinburgh with Imogen Stubbs , he is not, says Wheen, "a great one for showbusiness". He is good friends with John Sessions and Harry Enfield from their time working together on Spitting Image but, Wheen says, "he does like to keep parts of his life separate from others.

At his 50th birthday last year, this coach turned up and someone said, 'I'd now like to make a speech on behalf of the Kent friends.' " Wheen does not record any speeches by Hislop's enemies, though there are enough of them to fill several coaches. He has had a decade-long feud with Piers Morgan , prompted by Eye revelations over alleged insider trading as well as stories about Morgan's private life. Morgan was so furious, he sent a team of reporters from the Daily Mirror, which he then edited, to dig for dirt on Hislop. "They managed to find out that I'd once got drunk at university," Hislop says. "He devoted amazing resources to putting people on my door, sending people down to the village, contacting people I'd been at school with." They even got in touch with the vicar of the Hislops' church to ask whether his congregant had confessed to anything distasteful, not realising he was an Anglican and didn't take confession. A complicating factor was that their sons were in the same class at a prep school in south London for a couple of years.

"The two of them were having this huge fight and then having to bump into each other at parents' evenings," Newman recalls. If you're editor of Private Eye, it may be imperative that you have a stainless private life. "I like to imagine that when he was about one year old, a search went out around the country – like the search for the Dalai Lama ," Wheen says. "Where is this boy who is so pure and spotless that he can edit Private Eye and not be accused of hypocrisy? It's amusing to me that he and Rowan Williams seem to get on tremendously well, but I can see why. In his quiet way, he's a vicar manqué. He gets fanmail from bishops." Which is not to say that Hislop is a saint. "He can shout and go red in the face," Wheen says. A section of Macqueen's book is devoted to the editor's furious memos, handwritten on pink paper. Hislop's most recent spat has been with Andrew Marr over the injunction Marr had taken out to block any discussion of an affair he had had.

"There were lots of injunctions taken out by footballers," Hislop explains, "but the one that mattered was Marr's, because he had been asking Gordon Brown about his pharmaceutical usages and interviewing Blunkett about his baby." He labelled Marr's behaviour "stinking hypocrisy". "He knew he was wrong," Hislop says, "and he admitted it in the end." The pursuit of Marr added to the perception of Hislop as a moralist. Macqueen plays up that view, and finds the tenor of his Eye different from that of Ingrams. Hislop is sceptical. "It would be difficult to be more overtly moral than Richard. He has very strong views about morality, and was very insistent on them in terms of marriage and homosexuality in a way that I don't think I am. People say I'm judgmental, but all journalism is judgmental. Vice, folly and humbug – it is the point of satire really. Marr is a very good journalist, and he should know better." What about Angus Deayton , the presenter of Have I Got News For You, who was sacked in 2002 after tabloid revelations about his private life?

Deayton blamed Hislop and Merton for ousting him. Wasn't that unduly moralistic, given most viewers of the programme wanted Deayton to stay? "The moment for me was when Christine Hamilton came on the programme," Hislop recalls. "Angus introduced her as, 'The wife of the disgraced Neil Hamilton' and she said, 'If he's disgraced, what are you?' At that moment I thought, 'Your role is unsustainable here.' I said, 'You may not need the entire moral high ground, but you need a couple of inches' and he didn't have it any more. I felt either the show went or he went." A recent column by Martin Kettle in the Guardian described Hislop as "the single most influential voice in British politics". But Kettle did not intend it as a compliment. He blamed Hislop for public cynicism towards politicians, arguing that "even satirists are citizens, too. They surely have to at least consider whether what they do is harmful as well as enjoyable." How does Hislop plead? "It's very flattering to be told you are powerful, important and malign, but it's an old argument.

All satirists have been told, 'You're making the job of government impossible' when all we are really doing is trying to keep them honest. Of course their job is difficult, but it's better to say that these things are going on than say, 'This is a tough job, give them a break.' That leads to Italy or Greece." He insists he doesn't condemn all politicians. "We have politicians to lunch, we talk to them, they give us stories, if they lead a campaign we support, we give them credit. But this is not the time – so soon after the expenses scandal – for satirists and journalists to leave them alone. I don't think the public would thank us for that." I ask Hislop if he is a good hater. It is one of the few questions that makes him pause. "I don't recognise that," he says eventually, before contradicting himself by pointing to his pet hates. "I did hate Maxwell, and there are various people I get obsessed by. I got obsessed by Brown, just watching him in the Commons exploding about News International. The sheer humbug of it. The man who had Wendi [Deng, Rupert Murdoch's wife] for a sleepover complaining about News International.

It was unbelievable. So I'm capable of that kind of focus, but then afterwards I think, 'Why are you quite so bothered by that?'" Newman defends his partner against Kettle's charge. "Ian has a reasonable and moral core. He's interested in double standards, but he doesn't put the boot in without thinking about it." "He [Hislop] kept a story out of Private Eye recently," Wheen adds, "because he thought the person it was about was a bit mentally fragile, and he didn't want to be responsible for him doing any harm to himself. But he is also very combative when it comes to taking on corporations and institutions – those who can look after themselves." While Hislop can be a formidable adversary, he is also a very good ally. "Once you're a friend of his, you're a friend for life," Newman says. "I've said things about him in the past that I probably shouldn't have, but he's very forgiving." "He's always been terrifically nice to me," Wheen agrees. "When my marriage broke up in January 1993, for example, I had quite a rough time. I was essentially homeless, living in someone's attic.

Ian was fantastically solicitous. He kept asking if there was anything he could do, offering to help financially. He's an absolute rock." At Private Eye, Hislop is a practising Anglican surrounded by atheists. He says it is a misconception to assume satirists must be radical. " Swift was a dean in the Church of England. Byron was a member of the House of Lords and never gave it up. Conservatives are suspicious of what's happening, and if you're enthusiastic about what's happening, which is the traditional, optimistic, liberal position, you're less likely to say, 'It's rubbish.'" The Anglicanism, his love of history, the documentaries he makes on railways, the first world war, the Scout movement, Victorian philanthropists are all of a piece. He has a strong sense of what constitutes ethical behaviour and the good society, and is not slow to castigate those in public life who fall short. It is not that he despises politicians that makes him so severe on them, but that he holds in such high esteem what they can be at their best.

According to Newman, with whom Hislop has written TV series, a film and radio programmes, as well as countless jokes for Private Eye, his fogeyism is reflected in his attitude to sex. "Ian's quite squeamish about it," he says. "Private Eye is full of smut, but when we wrote a film a few years ago and the script editor wanted to put in a scene where the hero walked around the house naked, Ian was very against it. He just thought, would he want his children to see that he'd written that?" Hislop's conservatism extends to the future of the media, and he does not foresee Private Eye embracing the digital future. It has a rudimentary website, but keeps its key content for the magazine, and he gives me a brief lecture on the dangerous culture of free. "What am I meant to do with the people in there?" he asks, pointing to the production department. "Are they meant to work for nothing? As a model it seems to me to be ludicrous." But won't someone eventually produce a satirical website that undermines the Eye? "Possibly, but I'm not going to try to do it in order to prevent that. I want to go on doing the same thing. Obviously.

That's my personality defect." Hislop won't tell me how much profit the Eye makes, but its circulation is well above 200,000 – higher now than at any time for almost 20 years – and it's far from lavishly produced or generously staffed, so one can assume a healthy bottom line. The downside is that it needs to keep a large contingency fund for legal losses. Even when it wins, there is always the danger of losing. Accountant John Stuart Condliffe fought a decade-long battle against the Eye in the courts, dropped the case, declared himself bankrupt and left the magazine to pick up a bill for £1m in costs. "The public imagine that when you win, you get your costs back," Hislop says, "but you don't." He shows no signs of stepping down, and unlike Ingrams has not identified a member of staff he wants to inherit the crown. Wheen says he can't imagine who would take over. "It's quite hard to find someone who can juggle cartoons with one hand and writs with the other." He wants Hislop to carry on for another 25 years. "That will probably see me out.

By then, some child as yet unborn will be taken away and raised in a monastery in the traditional way to edit the Eye." • Private Eye: The First 50 Years is published by Private Eye Productions at £25. The exhibition of covers and cartoons is at the V&A's Studio Gallery from 18 October-8 January 2012. Ian Hislop and Guardian's Alan Rusbridger appear at House of Lords' culture committee inquiry into investigative journalism. By James Robinson Published: 11 Oct 2011 Inside the Private world of Ian Hislop - Telegraph Culture Inside the Private world of Ian Hislop Ian Hislop has been puncturing egos in Private Eye and on Have I Got News For You for quarter of a century. How does he fare when the focus is on him?

Ian Hislop in his office at Private Eye: ‘I do have a residual belief that, if at all possible, you should try not to mock the weak’ Photo: Inzajeano Latif By Ginny Dougary 6:00AM GMT 29 Nov 2012 Ian Hislop is in the first-floor dining-room of the Coach and Horses, a defiantly unreconstructed pub in Soho, London, greeting his guests at the Private Eye lunch he has hosted for the past 26 years, ever since Richard Ingrams made the initially controversial decision to hand over the editorship of the satirical magazine to what the old guard considered a young upstart. Norman Balon, the notoriously rude proprietor of the pub – who used to slap down the plates of melon followed by meat and two veg, then spotted dick and custard – has moved on, and Hislop is anxious about the new 'midlife crisis’ menu, which is exclusively vegetarian with haute-gastronomy ambitions – the foodie equivalent, perhaps, of Pseuds Corner, all twiddles and towers and puddles of intense colour.

I have been to a number of these Wednesday lunches over the years as a guest, but on this occasion I am here to observe how our host works the room, which he does in his convivial, eye-twinkling way. The number of women around the table has increased over the decades; Hislop is sandwiched between two of the four here today: a newspaper editor and a television foreign correspondent. He is very protective of the identities of all his guests and story sources of his journalists, so no names, no pack-drill. Hislop says that the lunches, held fortnightly, are good for making contacts – he would never use the dread word networking – and have often led to stories, although the Eye tends to get beaten to it (gallingly, because of its long lead times) by his journalist guests, rushing off to file the news for the next day’s paper. A case in point was John Hemming, the Liberal Democrat MP, who got 'hogwhimperingly drunk’ at one lunch, as a fellow guest described it (the wine does flow), and confessed to the assembled company that his mistress was pregnant and the story was about to be exposed in the News of the World.

Cue mass exodus of hacks, clutching notebooks. At one end of the table today is the dashing writer and journalist Francis Wheen, who was Hislop’s first recruit, and is now deputy editor (although Wheen resists the title). As Hislop recalls in last year’s book by Adam Macqueen, Private Eye: the First 50 Years, 'Getting Francis was a very important early thing [swiftly followed by the rehiring of Paul Foot]. He was always streets ahead. You could give him stories that were difficult or controversial or tough without him thinking, “Oooh, well… I can’t really make the phone call,” or “I’m a bit worried about my anonymity…”’ Related Articles Ian Hislop: a national treasure 30 Nov 2010 At the other end of the table is the only full-time journalist on the Eye, Jane Mackenzie. The rest of the table is made up of young journalists on national newspapers who are telling disobliging stories about their bosses, which may or may not find their way into the Street of Shame column. There is also an academic who may be good for an item on a colleague who has behaved shabbily.

There is a leading Conservative politician, who leaves before the main course, and various other diners. Hislop writes notes in full view. He used to be more coy about it, he says, and would scribble away with his hand under the table. Hislop with the magazine’s former editor, Richard Ingrams, in 1990. Photo: Time & Life Images/Getty Images A couple of weeks earlier I had been in the studio audience for the first programme in the new series of Have I Got News For You, on which Hislop has appeared for all of its 22 years: there is nothing fly-by-night about Hislop. The host is Clare Balding on her debut HIGNFY appearance; she is intro-duced as the 'hero of the summer’ on the back of her new post-Olympics popularity. On Hislop’s team is the Father Ted scriptwriter Graham Linehan, and on Paul Merton’s team, Ken Livingstone. There’s some amusing pre-recording chit-chat.

Balding says that she is sometimes mistaken for Sue Barker, to which she usually responds, 'F***, yeah,’ so at least she has the satisfaction of members of the public thinking the goody-goody Barker 'has a hell of a mouth on her’. Hislop comments that when he was on a train, a woman said, '“Are you Ian Hislop?” And her friend said, “Leave him alone, he doesn’t look anything like him.”’ Big laugh from the audience, who adore Hislop. Paul Merton tops it, with a typically surreal statement. 'I was in Ireland and someone said to me, “Are you who you think you are?”’ The programme is dominated by Jimmy Savile/ BBC stories, and Abu Hamza and his prosthetic arm. There’s a long chat about Livingstone’s chum Hugo Chávez, whom Linehan is keen on, too, which gets cut right back in the edit that appears on television. The only hitch is at the end, when Balding has to do repeated retakes of her farewells as she keeps pronouncing Ian’s surname in the abbreviated way, as 'Hizlp’.

After the show we all meet up in the hospitality room on the top floor of the old London Weekend Television building, where HIGNFY is filmed, close to the Southbank Centre. This is a lot more glam – with spectacular views of London lit up at night – than the usual BBC Green Room spread of sandwiches and bowls of crisps. Hislop is drinking Guinness. His wife, Victoria, is there (she is a journalist turned bestselling novelist, and they have been married for 24 years) as is Balding’s civil partner, the newsreader Alice Arnold. Paul Merton is moody, and only wants to talk shop with his director and Linehan. Livingstone is moany, and keeps saying that this is the most difficult HIGNFY he has been on because of the depressing subject matter (later, Hislop tells me that Livingstone, who has been on a dozen times, always says that). The following night, when the show goes out, it zips along with all its customary sparkle and repartee. The afternoon after the filming, I go to Private Eye’s office, which is in an old house on Carlisle Street in Soho, to interview its editor.

This has been the magazine’s home since 1984. It was built in about 1685 and, according to the journalist Tim Minogue, who writes the Eye’s Rotten Boroughs column, exposing corruption in local authorities, has variously been home to a hatter, a wigmaker, a lacemaker, a goldsmith, a dance academy and, directly before the magazine moved in, a firm of architects. In the dark hallway is what is apparently known as 'the wall of death’ – photographs of departed Eye stalwarts: Peter Cook, Willie Rushton, John Wells and Paul Foot. There are two secretaries in the first room you enter, including Hilary Lowinger – who is also the office manager and joined the magazine in 1986. The designers and sub-editors work in a large, light room at the back. Hislop in the Private Eye offices in 1989 with Peter Cook, the magazine’s major shareholder until his death in 1995, and its managing director Dave Cash. Photo: Rex Features Hislop is wearing a suit from Marks & Spencer, which looks rather well cut. 'This is from that nice range, Autograph,’ he says.

'I always wear a suit because you don’t have to think what to wear. It’s a very easy, convenient uniform.’ He flicks through a pile of typed paper with the chief sub-editor, Tristan Davies, delivering rapid-fire instructions: 'That’s good for HP [Sauce, the parliamentary news section]’; 'That’s a Wheen’; 'Condense these two for the books pages’; 'That’s his Lance Armstrong piece, we have to run that.’ Afterwards he turns to Tony Rushton, the art director, who has been with the mag for all of its 51 years. There’s a Savile and Boris lookalike photo spread, and various cartoons laid out on the pages. They have a bit of a chat about a cartoonist they like but think they are possibly using too much. Then we go on a quick tour of the rest of the building. Up the narrow staircase, with walls of large high-quality prints of Hogarth’s four 1754 Election paintings; a gift from Sir John Soane’s Museum, after Private Eye sponsored a show of political art – Hogarth’s Election Entertainment – in 2001.

In one room on the top floor there is a female lawyer from Matrix Chambers scrutinising the contents of the next issue for libel, next door to Jane Mackenzie and the journalist Heather Mills (who has had some amusing conversations at Eye lunches, with the guests assuming, what with her long blond hair, that she is Paul McCartney’s ex). We go back to the first floor to Hislop’s office, which he inherited from Ingrams, who is famous for his untidiness. His successor is rather orderly in comparison. Behind his desk, there’s a framed photo of Peter Cook (17.11.37 - 9.1.95, So Farewell Then), and posters of Denis Thatcher and 'Grocer’ Heath, which have been there for ever. On a noticeboard are thank-you letters for Eye lunches including one from the MP Tom Watson, which is remarkably effusive.

'It was a milestone in what I regard as my curious parliamentary career… if I can ever reciprocate…’ and a droll one from Kirsty Young, saying how much she enjoyed herself, 'although my placement opposite Grayson [Perry] did leave me feeling somewhat underdressed.’ Ian Hislop was born in Mumbles, south Wales, in July 1960. His father, David, was a civil engineer who worked on projects around the world, taking his wife, Helen, as well as his two children (Ian has an older sister, Anne) with him. The Hislops moved to Nigeria, then Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Hong Kong. His parents revelled in the warm climate and pleasantly cushioned lifestyle. 'Both my parents had lived through austerity… my father was from Scotland, which I imagine in the 1950s was quite bleak, and my mother was from Jersey, which had been occupied in the Second World War and had gone through austerity-plus.

'And then they were working abroad and my dad had a speedboat and we had a bar in the living-room, with a sort of leather top and stools and I remember looking at my father and thinking, “With your DJ, you’re wearing a frilly dress shirt?” and then, “But it’s the 1970s! You can do what you like!” I also remember Burns Night and there being a lot of Scottish engineers around who were good fun. My father used to dress in shorts and long socks; my mother in sundresses with very pointy sunglasses. For them, the expat life was extraordinary and very glamorous.’ David Hislop sounds like quite a character. Ian Hislop was sent a photo of his late father – 'one of the good things about being in the public eye is that people just write to you’ – diving into a swimming-pool that he had just opened (the arresting fact being that he was fully clothed). 'And I thought, “You must have been the one they asked to make a speech and do something quite silly.”’ In fact, Hislop senior didn’t need to be asked to do daft things.

On a trip back to Hong Kong, on a quest to discover more about his father as part of the TV programme Who Do You Think You Are? Hislop met his father’s old secretary, who said, '“Have I shown you the photo of your dad leading a conga through the fountains outside the Hilton?” and I said, “No, you haven’t! Can I see it please?” It did look like a lot of fun.’ When Hislop was 12, his mother came to his school – Ardingly College in Sussex, where he had boarded since he was eight – to tell him that his father had died of stomach cancer. The family had known that David had been ill but it was only a few brief months between diagnosis and death, at the age of 45. How did his mother handle the loss? 'She was pretty devastated; I don’t think she ever really recovered. My mother was fab and a very capable and strong woman but she was, well, you know, very much in love with my father and missed him for the rest of her life.’ Hislop is famously reserved and private.

In his late 20s, his mother – still in her 60s – was dying, at the same time that his wife, Victoria, was in hospital having suffered a miscarriage, and yet no one at Private Eye had a clue. Part of the Hislop mythology is the true story about him recording an episode of Have I Got News For You while suffering from acute appendicitis. He seems to be the living embodiment of the stiff upper lip, which was the title of his most recent television series, exploring how this phrase came to be seen as the defining English characteristic when we had started out as a nation of wusses and emotional incontinents. He admits that the series – a perfect example of erudition worn lightly – was a way of considering his own attitude to this fascinating subject. Now that he has revealed something of his feelings in this series (although it’s hardly Oprah), it makes it easier to ask more sensitive questions than would normally feel appropriate. We have known one another, I should say, as friendly acquaintances for two decades, but have never talked about anything deep and meaningful. I ask him how well he felt he knew his father and what effect that early death had on him as a boy.

He replies that he didn’t know him nearly well enough (something he hopes to have remedied with his two children, Emily, 22, and William, 19, neither of whom were sent to boarding school – 'It was a selfish thing. I wanted them to be near me and around’) and as for the other matter, 'I think losing a close relative early is a fairly hardening blow – in that my childhood sort of ended when my father died. Once that’s happened you haven’t got a huge illusion about what life may or may not hold. I think it made me increasingly independent, because I had to be.’ In Stiff Upper Lip, Hislop returns to Ardingly, where he was head boy, and tries to reconnect with what it felt like to be sent to boarding school at such a young age, saying that he wants to try and ascertain what that experience had done to him. Did he find out? 'Well, as I said, with distance the nature of those boarding schools does begin to look like a very odd thing to do – and most people who come through it don’t do it to their own children.

I mean, they’re much more parent-friendly now – everyone has a room of their own and goes home every afternoon,’ he laughs, 'but when we were there, there was just one large Victorian room with 30 boys in it, and it didn’t have any curtains and it was cold. 'So, yes, I was always homesick, but usually I was flying from somewhere like Hong Kong and there was quite a time-lag – which meant I did the being homesick on the plane, then I arrived and there was this world of friends and excitement and interest.’ Does he think the experience has made it harder for him to express himself emotionally? Would he say, for instance, that he has been scarred by it? 'Er, well, I am trying to answer that honestly… I mean, one of the reasons I wanted to do that programme was to have a look at that – and it ends up being a very nuanced answer, rather than, “No, no, I’m fine. It never affected me.” It obviously did affect me. It moulded a certain sort of Englishness and a certain sort of response to things.

It’s that British thing – in that it’s not that we don’t feel it but we don’t think it’s appropriate to show that feeling in public, or at all times, or with people we don’t know. So I still probably behave like that – but that doesn’t mean that there’s nothing going on. I am not without emotion.’ Is he able to examine himself with any depth? 'Erm… probably being very busy suggests that I am not doing so.’ Hislop with his wife, Victoria, in January. They have been married for 24 years. Photo: Rex Features In such a rationalist age – where the prevailing culture among media types tends to be aggressively atheist – Hislop’s Anglican faith is an intriguing anomaly. The avowed raison d’être of his two main gigs – HIGNFY and Private Eye – is to knock bullies off their perch, expose idiocy, corruption and moral weakness.

While I am extremely grateful for its existence (the Eye goes from strength to strength – with recent record sales figures of 267,834 for its anniversary issue, and 253,000 for the Gotcha – Murdoch Goes Down issue) it hardly fosters a warm feeling towards one’s fellow man and the human condition. I wonder how harmoniously his religious beliefs sit with his love of satire. Ingrams, before him, shared a similar duality, and there are notable antecedents, such as, for instance, Jonathan Swift. He starts by telling me about a funny phase at his Anglican school, when two old boys came back on an evangelical mission as born-again Christians, and metaphorically set the whole school on fire, swelling the membership of the Christian Union from a membership of 12 to 300. 'It was very, very bizarre – we didn’t go to bed, and people were having prayer meetings in dormitories, and the staff were terribly worried because most of them were Anglicans and they were thinking, “What if this is the real thing?” and not knowing whether or not to stop it because it was getting completely out of hand.

'You know, being sort of C of E, people want a very quiet and moderate faith. They don’t want hundreds of boys singing Kumbaya and getting up in the middle of chapel services and confessing that they’ve seen the light.’ What did his mother think about all of this? 'She was marvellous. I had told her, “I have to see you because something incredibly exciting has happened – I’ve been converted! We’ve all been converted!” And my mother asked me two things. She said, “You didn’t sign anything, did you?” And I said, “No.” And she said, “They didn’t ask you for any money?” And I said, “No.” And she said, “Oh, that’s fine, dear.” Because she was brilliant, my mother, she realised it was all fine and that it would probably die down and there was nothing to worry about. And after everyone went away for the summer holidays and came back, it did die down.’ I ask him about how he feels surrounded by so many Dawkinsian non-believers.

He remembers going to the launch of Francis Wheen’s book How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World and Martin Rowson, the cartoonist, drew a picture of all the people there 'and there was an arrow next to me in the middle of all these ultra-rationalists and it just said, “Anomalous God-botherer”.’ His faith waxes and wanes and it is going through the latter phase at the moment. Hislop sounds a tiny bit downhearted about the whole subject. He goes to church but not very often, and at the moment, not at all. 'I go through periods of lack of enthusiasm and increasing doubt… it’s not a great, confident, burning faith, really. I can’t do the ultra-rationalism denial of it all and all the sort of human bits that I feel come through that but then, you know, sometimes I worry that my faith is so vague as to be sort of not really there at all. I’m so lukewarm I’m about to be spat out, I think.’ What comforts him in times of sadness? He laughs. 'I thought you were going to do the Simon and Garfunkel song… well, all the normal things.’ Like?

'Oh – family, friends. Other human beings.’ His voice becomes a bit curt. Not nature or music or books? 'Any of those things can, but it’s the people first.’ So not faith, in that regard? 'Yes, it can – but faith is often shown through other people. Faith working through other people tends to be goodness working through them or sympathy even if it’s not declared as religion… it doesn’t have to be the vicar coming round. 'But I do like the rituals of the Church and, yes, I have found them comforting.’ With Angus Deayton, the original host of Have I Got News For You, and Paul Merton, in 1992. Photo: Rex Features Hilary Lowinger and her colleague had been joking with me, while I waited for Hislop to appear, about the deranged people who sometimes insist on coming into the office, with this or that conspiracy theory. Shortly before the conclusion of our interview, a wild-haired man bursts into the office and I fear, for a moment, that the lady gatekeepers have not been able to keep the lunatics at bay. 'So sorry to barge in like this,’ the man begins with elaborate courtesy.

'It’s so, so rude of me. I’m ever, ever so sorry…’ and then he proceeds to tell Hislop that if the editor ever has the opportunity to commission a nice oil painting for the magazine, he’s the man. It turns out that the interloper does draw for the Eye and is feeling the pinch; he needs more money, he needs a bigger byline, he is a man full of all-too-recognisable needs in these tricky times. Hislop listens to him, doesn’t make him feel uncomfortable or shoo him away and, actually, seems to care. It is this sense of decency that, I think, is a strong motivating force in Hislop. He’s by no means perfect; for instance, for a Christian – even a rather half-hearted one – he seems incapable of forgiving his enemies (Piers Morgan, and the diarists Peter McKay and the late Nigel Dempster among them). But his instincts are always about picking on the powerful, not the weak. For this reason, he is pretty scathing about a lot of today’s comedians in the Ricky Gervais vein (with whom he had a well-publicised spat).

'I do have a residual belief that, if at all possible, you should try not to mock the weak. There seems to be a slight tendency in contemporary stand-up to have a go at the weak and say you’re being edgy. You know, attacking the disabled. I think you should go for stronger targets.’ He is not a political tribalist, having voted for all the three main parties, as well as the Greens. 'Most of your judgments are about whether people are behaving well or not in your eyes – and that doesn’t matter whether they are left or right. You know, are they corrupt or are they bent or are they trying to make things better or worse for people? That is where my bottom line is, and so that must be what drives me.’ I ask him what he is insecure about. 'Oh, health,’ he says quickly. Is his health OK? 'I think so, but you never know. If you have a history of your family keeling over you’re never sure how much time you’ve got left yourself. That may be another reason why I try to cram a lot in.’ We part on a more upbeat note. I ask him what he considers to be his most lowbrow tastes, and he struggles to answer.

Later he calls me to say that it is Toy Story 3. 'It’s incredibly funny, beautifully made and very good on being a boy.’ And also: 'I’m quite big on Elvis. I went to a show in Las Vegas with three Elvis impersonators – young, middle and old – and it was one of the best nights of my life.’ Who knew? But in his office, he says that it’s box sets of Clint Eastwood westerns and 'sort of terrible war films’. Do you blub when watching the latter? 'Oh, no, I’m taking my example from Brief Encounter!’ I beg to differ, saying that I have even seen him get moist-eyed on television. 'Surely not. No.

I’m going to end the interview now, and I’m going to storm out!’ 'The Private Eye Annual 2012’ (Private Eye Productions) is available for £9.99 plus £1.35 p&p from Telegraph Books (0844-871 1515; books.telegraph.co.uk ) Ian Hislop | Have I Got News For You Wiki | Fandom powered by Wikia Edit Hislop was born in Mumbles, Swansea in Wales, to a Scottish father and a Channel Islander mother of English descent. When he was five months old, his family began to travel around the world in accordance with his father's job as a civil engineer. During his infant years, Hislop lived in Nigeria, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Hong Kong. On his return to the United Kingdom, Hislop was educated at Ardingly College, an independent boarding school, where he started his satirical career, directing and appearing in revues, and also becoming Head Prefect. He then attended Magdalen College, Oxford, where he graduated with a degree in English literature in 1981.

At Oxford he founded and edited the magazine Passing Wind, in which he interviewed Richard Ingrams, who was then editor of Private Eye. He joined the latter immediately after leaving Oxford, and became editor in 1986 upon Ingrams' departure. It was revealed in an interview with The Independent that this was despite opposition from Eye hacks Peter McKay and Nigel Dempster, with the former taking the magazine's majority shareholder, Peter Cook, out for lunch in an attempt to dissuade him from appointing Hislop. However, Cook pressed on, and his new editor sacked both McKay and Dempster from the magazine without hesitation. Ian Hislop - Oxford-educated Edit When Hislop was 12 years old his father, David Hislop, died; his mother also died when he was quite young. His mother was born in Jersey and left in her late teens. She was 11 at the start of the German occupation of Jersey in 1940. Hislop did not know his grandparents. Hislop's paternal grandfather, David Murdock Hislop, died just before Hislop was born. He was Scottish and became a deacon at a Presbyterian church and a school headmaster at Newton Academy in Ayr.

In World War I he fought in Northern France with the 9th Highland Infantry. Hislop's maternal grandfather, William Bellows, was originally from Lancashire. He joined the army in 1895 and fought in the Second Boer War with the Royal Lancashire Regiment in major campaigns including the Battle of Spion Kop. He moved to Jersey to serve as a sergeant having signed up in 1906 for another ten years in the army. Have I Got News For You Edit Ian Hislop Hislop is the only person to have appeared in every episode of Have I Got News for You's eighteen year history, despite suffering from appendicitis (Episode 7x7) during one episode and having to go to hospital immediately afterwards. His satirical views and broad knowledge of politics complement the wry surrealism of fellow panellist Paul Merton, and this interaction contributes greatly to the success of the show. Hislop often suffixes potentially slanderous statements with "allegedly", although this provides little or no legal protection. Apart from one episode, where Hislop and Merton swapped places (and dress styles), he has only ever sat in the far right seat (far left from the audience's point of view).

Question: Who was editor of Private Eye before Ian Hislop?
Answer: Richard Ingrams