'BBC's Laura K was tainted by extreme attitudes' | Ian Hislop interview

i think they need someone who's who's let's face it less anti-government i think laura was tainted by her extreme right-wing attitudes which i failed to detect um but i think it's time for me now um with my impartial view to be quite honest i think you know the media we do love ourselves a great deal so the idea of well who's going to be the political editor it may not matter that much privatize is a very strange mixture i mean if you're starting a magazine now to say we're going to have it half jokes and half journals and people are thinking you're mad you know how does that work but it does i suppose i've been most scared really when i thought um i'd bankrupt the magazine or i've ruined everything um i do as people often remind i do hate being wrong um and i do hate losing um which given how often i've lost in court is probably not a very good position but that that i do find that frightening you have been described at various points as the most sued man in the country in his lap hello hello how's it going yeah it's good good i'm glad happy birthday as well to private eye magazine thank you 60th birthday this month you've been editor of the magazine for 35 of those years yes so we'll start there thank you and your editorship um have you ever been scared as the editor of private eye do you mean for my own welfare or for the welfare of the magazine let's do both um yes i mean i've been personally scared um uh you get a lot of threats um in this business and after charlie hebdo um you know the home office sent some people around um to ensure that our security was better so those those aren't great times i mean the thing with private prototypes we once had a package came in containing a death threat um on a tape and my secretary who's called hillary's marvellous uh woman she said um oh i don't think it's seriously and it's from coventry um we actually when we had a briefing in here from very serious uh senior police person and uh the staff were assembled and they said um if um uh anyone should ask break in and say who's the editor what do you say my friend nick newman said oh you say it's him hear me him here point him out to make it easier for them so yes i i mean sort of personally there have been uh times i suppose i've been most scared really when i thought um i bankrupted the magazine or i've ruined everything um i do as people often i remind i do hate being wrong um and i do hate losing which given how often i've lost in court is probably not a very good position but that that i do find that frightening you have been described at various points as the most sued man in the country which is where where that perhaps comes from but let's let's talk highlights then what about something you're most proud of i i am a i'm most proud recently i think of just keeping going during the pandemic i'm literally a year and a half ago we shut the office down and uh essentially everywhere we sell the magazine uh was no longer open um so some someone's saying oh you can't sell in news agents they're not open airports no railways um tube no gone um so essentially we had to um hope that our readers would find us um in terms of taking out subscriptions and then we started selling in the supermarkets so a just being there b the coverage of the pandemic particularly dr phil hammond's column which i think has been the um the saving of many many of our mental health is reading what phil has to say and like a lot of our contributors phil is like a mouthpiece for every other doctor medical professional he knows all feeding in um to this incredibly sane and um useful column so i'm very proud of that um i you know privatize a very strange mixture i mean if you're starting a magazine now to say we're gonna have it half jokes and half journalism people are thinking you're mad you know how does that work but it does um and i am equally proud of say the recent journalism the post office workers stories probably the biggest miscarriage of justice um you know bi-state institution totally covered up by government people put in prison ordinary people who run post offices told you're a thief because the computer system says you are you're going to go to jail and the computer system which they knew was malfunctioning and they weren't thieves i mean it was absolutely disgraceful and it was one of those stories we ran for god i mean nearly 10 years you know with the help of you know some of the people involved who said we didn't steal the money um but no one believed them and that's that i think is what private i can do it can take a story and i can i can put it in every fortnight for a decade and if people say it's really boring i say there you go um and i suppose the trick is you always wrap somewhere else in the magazine there's something else you like there's some jokes um there's the cover there's something that sweetens the pill i mean i often say you know mary poppins is really um the philosopher we should all take to heart it's a spoonful of sugar and then the journalism goes down helps it on its way i mean it was it wasn't just it wasn't just the distribution the magazine that was affected either because it was the production right i mean this room that we're currently sat in now as i understand it big old table scraps of paper that's how you arrange the layout and all of a sudden you're not allowed to come here no and it was all entirely put together in you know people's kitchens in um on the south coast in hastings and surrounding places where our design team were so you know there was a st leonard's is a big design hub now so essentially we had to reinvent that too um but the essential i mean the essential process was um we will get this out and generally speaking as well you the eye has sort of steadfastly refused really to put much of its journalism online there are some select highlights on there now i assume the pandemic was probably one of the strongest tests of of that decision and largely you stuck to that approach didn't you yeah i mean i i literally do not want to give people journalism for free um i think it's a quite a difficult craft um uh i was gonna say noble profession but i just slipped back but you know it's it's difficult to do well it takes time it takes money and you have to pay for it um and i'm not giving away the i free to people because i have to pay journalists and to get anything this good you need to pay people i also believe you know you should be paid properly for the work you do so the traditional model as it's now become in journalism of saying to people between 20 and 40 would you like to work for free it'll be really good for your career it'll really build your profile and i'll give you no money ever i don't think that's fair so i don't do it neither do i uh do how long do you do you think do you think it's sustainable do you think it's sustainable to turn away from the internet do you think that's a long-term strategy that could last forever well i mean at the start of the internet i made another decision which is i um put on um essentially double the amount of cartoons and having been told by people um yeah cartooning it's a dying business there are no young cartoonists um it's amazing if you offer people money uh they suddenly become cartoonists and people who can draw and are funny start putting the two together and sending it to you so um that was another i i think the reason we survived is you know i've now got 50 really funny cartoons um out of a selection of much much more for which i pay proper money and there's a wonderful guy called moose who used to be a lot on online and fantastic jokes and i said to him if you send them to me i'll give you money um and then a lot of people will think moose you're really funny um and it's an odd model um but let's try it and so uh i do think it's sustainable a i think um the pleasure of a physical object everybody spends too much time on screens a lot of people are trying to get off screens they're trying to you know for reasons of disconnecting from the people who are commoditizing and buying them and ruining their lives um generally and also uh it's you know it's a basic human pleasure i think if you've been working the screen all day to pick up a physical object particularly with drawn material in it and say well i can read that so and in private eyes sorry i'm wanging on but you just the serendipity of having a piece here which is saying this old building is falling down it's really beautiful could we not have it falling down next to a piece which is from beijing saying um sheeping he's not coming to cop night uh uh to the uh environmental talks partly because he doesn't leave china much now due to reasons of not being that confident is quite interesting and it's just all those things together you get you get a broad range of of um of things you wouldn't necessarily have have decided to read just to make it topical for a moment you mentioned you mentioned the social media companies there and we've seen in response to the the very sad death of the mp david amity was killed and in response to that i'm not sure the logic here necessarily follows but there's been some discussion indeed some campaigning by mps for us to remove anonymity from the social media platforms that there's this cesspit of abuse on social media and that perhaps if we were to remove anonymity things might calm down what's your assessment of that view firstly i couldn't understand the debate um following amos's death it seemed to have absolutely nothing to do with it um and the people who um immediately stepped up all seemed to announce their own agenda as far as i can see an islamist terrorist who seems to have had no social media presence at all is suddenly discussed as an example of uh toxic debate now i'm not sure he was interested in debate of any sort let alone toxic debate um and he murdered the mp for really religious and political reasons of his own so i didn't get it i mean there obviously is a place to talk about um uh social media and how people use it but that seemed to me entirely not the place and mps i mean if mps want to talk about themselves fine um absolutely i'm all for that but you know uh in the um the trolling of the the labour mps during the anti-semitism morale that would be worth having a look at the trolling of anybody who voted the wrong way on say the school lunches let's have a look at that the decision um uh not to pursue various people who went after the footballers or marcus rashford i'm quite interested in that you know there are a lot of debates to have um but i think i think amos was a misfire um you know the shock of one of our elected representatives being murdered is is big but i don't think everything isn't about social media and that seemed to be slightly about uh can we have a look at the prevent strategy is that working and um why why isn't this person known to mi6 what are they doing yeah that those questions seem to follow perhaps more naturally than the one about social media i agree with you there's a place for the conversation whether it's the right one or not yeah absolutely and i guess the other issue and actually in in this this week's this fortnight's issue of uh the eye you've covered it is it doesn't actually also follow whether whether removing anonymity would soften the discourse because as you've documented people are quite willing to put some things in print um that perhaps they would never say to someone no it does seem to stop a lot of people and there was i mean the piece also highlights a number of mainstream figures who said this toxic debate is absolutely awful these people who run particularly unpleasant columns which have their name at the top they're not anonymous either so um i'm not sure um the amount of humbug that followed was was actually worth it um you know much better to start thinking how important is it that we meet our representatives face to face pretty i think um and what can we do about that you know to make them safer yeah i agree um let's turn back to your editorship of the magazine what do you think your time in charge has been characterized by how do you think people will look back at it and remember it i hope they'll look back and think what he did do is is from the 70s onwards is massively increased the journalism um uh i rehired paul foote which was you know perhaps the best thing i ever did he was the sort of the ultimate eye journalist um and then i hired francis ween um it's the first two things i did as editor um i mean it's quite important to surround yourself by people who are very good i just offer this as a tip um because in political life um people now seem to do the opposite um our current prime minister's particularly keen on the strategy of let's have everyone around me who's useless so i'll look better in the end you just look useless um so i've taken uh the line that i've hired a lot of very very good people and then i take the credit for everything they do very good uh maybe i'll adopt that in our strategy at politics joe um no you've said you've said in the past that you had to hire three people to replace paul ford um you know i wanted to ask you about him so i'm glad you mentioned him because he produced some of the greatest campaigning journalism i think this country has ever seen you know the birmingham six come to mind would probably be a standout what was he like to work with paul fantastic incredibly modest um incredibly um good fun i mean funny um and you know he was extreme left winger which would have annoyed um a great deal of um uh some of the readers but uh the great thing with paul as i mean we have an extreme in the joke section in a very extreme left winger called dave smart um and i used to say to paul when i read his copy i'm just going to run the spartometer over your copy i just want to check how extreme it is um and then i'd take out the bits that i thought were too much but basically he was a fantastic reporter and what he reported were the facts and whether it was miscarriages or whether it was um uh uh he was the first one who started in on the um overseas tax havens which he then recruited this wonderful journal called richard brooks who we have who does all the money now and richard used to be a tax inspector he worked at hmrc and was quite senior and paul foote lured him over to our side um which again is something else i owe paul because richard he did the post office but he did the tax he did corporate tax he did the sweetheart deals he's done all that money stuff which is really good and paul essentially initiated a lot of that um i mean forgive me if i've said this before but paul paul used to give talks to students and and he was incredibly funny because um they would say earnestly what's the secret of investigative journalism and paul said um the secret is people ring me up and uh i write it down so uh that is basically it it's uh he was he was willing to talk to anyone interested um and um um dogged i mean it's from him that you know essentially i gets the idea that you can run the same story forever i mean in the annual i couldn't believe this um it's my favorite page in the entire we produced this 60-year annual and every year it shows you a bit of journalism and bit of the jokes from 1985 you'll see there's a page we had to redact um that's a story from liverpool that we ran in 1985 which is still going on in court so i wasn't even able to run it um and that seems to me about as long um as you can go uh with you know the sort of um uh the doggedness of an early story the reason i asked about uh paul is because you have touched on this already and i was hoping to contest it and tease it out a little bit more no is is how compatible hard journalism is with satire because there are plenty of people who say the two don't mix that there needs to be a distinction that whether it's just for the sake of editorial purposes or commercial ones that the two don't mesh and obviously private eye is sort of testament to the fact that they can yes and i don't agree with that and i think that paul i mean in his character he loved the jokes i mean you know and basically um we used to tease him about it but we said he took as long coming up with a bad pun on the top of his piece as he did writing the piece um so he was he was he was aware of this and he found things funny and there is a sort of there is an earnestness about investigative journalism that can i think be counterproductive so um you know when uh the guardian says we've got the pandora files there's 12 billion bytes of information we've read through 86 zillion files and i think oh [ __ ] that have you um was there anything good um and then we've got 38 000 pages where we and you see oh no uh tell me the story what's a good bit is that are there some humans in it also i don't want to know how much work you've done as a reader i really don't care and it's great you've done a lot of work good um yeah but also with investigative journalism you can do a lot of work and there's no story it is sort of quite wasteful you can charge around after things and nothing happens so i do i do think you need to leven it um and you know the early model which was um my predecessor richard ingram was sort of very keen on was he said you know you make jokes about things people know and then you tell them things they don't know and then the next issue they do know so you can do jokes about that and then come up with some new things and that way you keep it rolling so i do i do think um uh the two are compatible this is an intro you talking about someone self-importantly charging around i'm going to use that to segue to the next thing i want to talk to you about which is the reports that the bbc is going to replace its political editor laura gunsberg um are you interested in taking the job yeah i've applied have you yeah i think they need someone who's who's let's face it less anti-government i think laura was tainted by her extreme right-wing attitudes which i failed to detect um but i think it's time for me now um with my impartial view who do you think would be a good fit if you were if if for some some miracle yeah obviously because you are the front rider in in the runners and riders to take the job who do you think would fit in and do you think it's as important a job as some people make it out to be well i think the obvious candidate is mark francois um i think that would that would keep the back bench happy um and i you know i think both for sort of perception and insight and intellect and uh uh that would be a very very good choice obviously if we can't have him uh jeremy corbyn uh would be good i think he's he's short of things to do at the moment so i think that would be quite an exciting fit um to be honest you know i again because of her role during the frantic brexit um sort of uh pandemonium um where nobody seemed to know from one second to the next what was going on she became the focus of what's happening now in that incredibly immediate news cycle of oh god they've resigned out there and who's uh all that then the pandemic in which the government has you know eventually got to tell us what it's doing whether it's made the decisions and what so we need the bbc there um you know to say what are the guidelines you know what are we going to do um you know obviously it was a problem is the government a lot of the time didn't know what it was going to do so the messaging was i loved the idea the messages were mixed um i.e completely incoherent um so her role became very important to be quite honest i think you know the media we do love ourselves a great deal so the idea of well who's going to be the political editor it may not matter that much you know um there are other jobs i mean there are other jobs in the bbc you know who's the editor of the today program um who's running panorama there are plenty of other jobs that are pretty important and her job involves a lot of running around saying what's happening this minute in many ways that isn't that vital um because the next minute something else is happening and what we've all learned i think from the pandemic is uh a slightly longer view on the country's problems is more useful so rather than saying um well who's up who's down in cabinet i mean who's um deputy um minister for paper clips and are they are they pro um the other person who's just got their job or some of that is a bit so what and a slightly longer look at you know in the middle of an energy crisis why why did we sell off that reserve gas tank uh uh when the europeans kept vast um capabilities for you know 80 days of gas who who was responsible for that was that a good idea or you know the sewage crisis which i absolutely love you know because a private guy about a month ago said you know there is this bill going through and you should have a look at it because it basically means you can you can chuck sewage everywhere and you know a lot of people have said our job as journalists is essentially throwing sewage in the national infrastructure um which i don't mind it's quite flattering um but it would help um if politically people had been having a look at that rather than saying um well this new minister for um vaccination um who is she we haven't seen much of her well does that matter hugely you know how's the rollout going give us the figures um there are other subjects that i think are slightly wider brief and you know political journalism you know i don't like talking about the westminster bubble because um you know that's what people who don't like democracy do um you know it's important but there there are other areas outside it there's this trend isn't there within political journalism what's happening now what's going to happen an obsession with that and then perhaps not so much of an interest in what happened and why and actually a fortnightly magazine can provide you not only with the space to reflect and to analyze but as you've just mentioned to actually be ahead of everyone you know on social media at the moment everyone is talking about this sewage problem but in actual fact last month yeah it would have been good if they'd been talking about it before the vote and those mp's saying you know did i vote that way i had no idea well perhaps read the bloody order paper then that would be good um don't get too ahead of yourself ian no no no but i you know uh i think you're you're absolutely right i mean the budget is absolutely classic you know uh all the journalism i mean oh we've got a bit of the budget beforehand soon that's leaked him into the budget who leaked the budget he should he should go to jail for leaking the budget can we look at what's in the budget um you know maybe that be good you know our story about the budget this week is just having promised that they would tax the tax companies they haven't they're going to pay less after this budget now i'm you know i think that's interesting they've got more money than everyone else on the planet and they're giving us less i think that's more important than which bit of it was leaked when our view of the budget is so important that i think literally right now as we're speaking rishi sunak is about to stand on his feet and we instead have chosen to speak to each other in so that's that's i think the right way to go about things um i just like to i i need to discuss the sort of the role of the wallpaper role of private eye front pages behind you before we before we finish things off i understand these are your favorites or some of your favorites at least obviously there are many people yes these are a lot of my favorite from the past and some of the best-selling covers i mean the i mean the royal family i mean we we have covered a lot over the years but uh woman has baby at the birth of prince george's one of my favorite covers ever in terms of sheer disinterest i love um george bush because people have forgotten that we have had a very stupid american president before trump wasn't new um and uh it does a bit and bush's countdown to war in which bush says ten nine eight nine five five four was was very much my favorite cover um probably our one of our readers least favorite covers was the 911 cover which i loved when bush was sitting in a primary school when the attack happened one of his aides came up to him we just put a bubble on it with the aid saying it's armageddon sir and bush said well i'm getting out of here yeah he took a runner didn't he when they flew him flying around in the plane after that happened he did disappear to a bunker um so i i love those and just before we started rolling you were talking about the rebecca brooks halloween special there god your segways these are fabulous it's good morning britain for you come on it was the trial of rebecca brooks um on the phone hacking for which i should say very clearly now she was found innocent and um but it was halloween and she chose to wear this sort of um new england puritan outfit um for her trial which we found very very funny and the shops were at that time um withdrawing various halloween costumes as being too scary so we thought it'd be very amusing to put rebecca on the cover and say that this particular halloween witch costume had been withdrawn from the shops now unfortunately this came out on the first day of her trial and the barristers for the murdoch empire um who were representing ms brooks thought this was a fairly straightforward contempt of court and they said to the judge this is a contempt of court the editor of private eye who at the time was me um should really be punished possibly with a committal to one of her majesty's prisons and fortunately um the judge being an incredibly wise and enlightened example of just how good the judiciary is in this country decided it was not a contempt of court and various policemen had gone around removing this from the newsstands and then we managed to get it put back again so it was on sale again so i'm particularly fond of that one because it just shows the law in action possibly a private eye subscriber that member of the judiciary who knows ian hislop thank you very much for taking the time to speak to me i really appreciate it it's been very insightful thank you you

Channel: PoliticsJOE

Views: 1,255,224

Keywords: Politics, UK politics, British politics, Parliament, Government, Westminster, Ian Hislop, Private Eye, Have I Got New For You, HIGNY, Paul Merton, Hislop, Laura Kuenssberg, BBC

Id: OylUquvFEz0

Length: 29min 41sec (1781 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 04 2021