Mick Hartley

I confess that after years of buying Private Eye, I'm getting to the stage now of flicking through in five minutes and wondering why I bother. And editor Ian Hislop seems to have become far too much of a BBC establishment figure, with his smug appearances on "Have I Got News For You" a constant reminder of why that show is not just years but decades past its sell-by-date. He knows all the right targets to attack to keep in with the people who matter – and all the targets to avoid….

Which brings us to Graham Linehan, who writes in The Critic today of his interactions with Hislop. He wrote to the Eye editor some years back about serial trans litigant Stephanie Hayden and other gender issues which he thought the Eye might be interested in…but no. Hislop's suspicion was "that the Trans/TERF debate is not quite as important as those involved in it believe".

This was an issue for which the stakes could not have been higher — for women, for children, for gay people, for freedom of speech, and for me — yet those instincts didn’t so much as twitch when presented with the idea that giving cross-sex hormones to troubled people might not be in their best interests.

Additionally, there are few aspects of the trans movement that don’t lend themselves to satire. Women’s sports teams who field at least one player who looks like The Hound in Game of Thrones are currently doing very well indeed. In fact, the Flying Bats, an Australian women’s football team, recently enjoyed a phenomenal winning streak which perhaps had something to do with the fact that five members of the team are male.

One of the members of the team is named Riley Dennis. I first came across him when the late feminist YouTuber Magdalen Berns shared one of his videos (“Are Genital Preferences Transphobic?”) in which he argued that lesbians might be showing bigotry by refusing to sleep with trans-identified, fully intact men.

This kind of rape culture by stealth was abroad also in Stonewall — ex-CEO Nancy Kelly accused lesbians of being possibly guilty of “sexual racism” for refusing to consider male partners, and a man named Morgan Page remains on the Stonewall website. Page ran the infamous “Overcoming the Cotton Ceiling” workshop in Canada, which promised its male students the opportunity to “identify (sexual) barriers and strategise ways to overcome them”. In other words, a workshop on working around the word “no” in the sentence “no means no”.

Here then are half a dozen scandals in just a few lines, and Private Eye journalists reported on none of them. Given Hislop’s 2019 reply to me, one can only assume that the fish has been rotting from the head. His behaviour puts me in mind of the famous shot from Police Squad! movies, with Leslie Nielsen flashing his badge, saying, “Nothing to see here, folks. Move along” in front of a scene of ongoing, spiralling mayhem.

I say I received no reply, but there was one of a sort in the form of an Eye piece years later which mentioned me and my “unhinged Twitter presence, where he frequently accuses transgender activists of being nonces and groomers”. I think I used the word “nonce” once, in which I said most of the central trans figures were members of that category. As a statement it has that unfortunate quality of being true, which is something that keeps biting me in the arse….

Recently, Charlie Hebdo — the French magazine that suffered a terrorist attack which left many cartoonists dead — published a front cover in which crossdressers, Islamists and other misogynists were all standing on a woman’s back. I remain astonished at the bravery of a title that, unlike Private Eye, is unafraid to tell the truth despite knowing first-hand the cost.

One last missive. A few years ago, I wrote a letter in defence of J.K. Rowling and managed to get some big names to sign it: John Cleese, Tom Stoppard, Lionel Shriver and, most thrillingly for me, Barry Humphries. This was what Humphries wrote to me:

Dear Graham,

You have my signature.

Thanks for your letter. I’ve been banned by the Melbourne Comedy Festival which Peter Cook and I launched! I’ve been attacked and branded fascist and “transphobic” (sic) by the “they” brigade, and accused of racism by people who have never met an aborigine.

That actors who have become rich and famous by performing in JKR’s plays and films then vindictively excoriated her, seems to me a cowardly betrayal.

Thanks for writing to me and good luck against a powerful and malign foe.

Sincerely

Barry Humphries

Peter Cook was, of course, the founding editor of Private Eye, but I’m left wondering if the whole sordid affair was even mentioned in the magazine he created.

Why did Ian Hislop run away from doing the right thing? Was he appeasing young staff? Is the magazine being held hostage by a staffer with that most fashionable of middle-class accessories, a “trans child”? Was he protecting his team leader gig on Have I Got News For You, which has also been busy looking the other way for the last half-decade?

Whatever the reason, it’s some sort of tribute to the Eye that when it looks the other way, a scandal can fester for years. Ian Hislop’s only achievement during this time was ignoring the elephant in the room, even as it trampled every value the Eye was meant to uphold.