Comment: Private Eye - a history of modern Britain Published on: 26 October 2021 Writing for The Conversation, Dr Martin Farr discusses how Private Eye's prime ministerial parodies provide a political history of modern Britain. , The fortnightly magazine turns 60 this year. When it launched, it helped initiate the 鈥渟atire boom鈥�, and, more profoundly, the increasing lack of deference those in positions of authority could expect from the press, television, and, consequently, the public. One of the magazine鈥檚 most popular and longest features has been the prime ministerial parody. Commenting on the state of politics, it provides a potted political history of Britain. The life and times of a Downing Street housewife Though Harold Macmillan was prime minister when Private Eye appeared in 1961, and Alec Douglas-Home soon succeeded him, the first to become the subject of a regular satirical column was Harold Wilson. Labour had won the 1964 general election invoking a 鈥溾�� to replace the old establishment constraining a country on the cusp of a technological revolution. Rather making the point for him, a new prime minister conspicuously northern of provenance and accent found himself immediately patronised by the behind the magazine. Harold Wilson and his wife Mary. Mrs Wilson鈥檚 Diary was the idea of Peter Cook, the most prominent of them, partly inspired by the radio soap opera Mrs Dale鈥檚 Diary. The Wilsons鈥� 10 Downing Street was a household of mundane domesticity, of spam garnished with brown sauce, accompanied by Wincarnis sweet wine. In skewering Wilson鈥檚 provincialism, the column also connoted . In this way, Private Eye is, among other things, a unique example of conservatism and iconoclasm. It was born of the very establishment it was created to debunk. Its defining characteristic was to parody whoever is in power. Wilson, who cultivated a pipe and a pint persona in public despite being a cigar and cognac man in private, could hardly complain 鈥� though complain he did, even to censor the script when Mrs Wilson鈥檚 Diary was adapted into a West End play. Tetchy Ted鈥檚 memo to Heathco staff The Conservatives , and the new prime minister Edward Heath鈥檚 intention was to replace Wilson鈥檚 tired government of gimmicks and cronies with a gleaming, modern, almost corporate, administration. But Private Eye presciently rendered Heathco as a struggling medium enterprise which duly collapsed . Callaghan: a blank space A case can be made for the 1970s parodies being the best because it was the dottiest decade, replete with singular scandals and improbable conspiracies, many of which were brought to light in the Eye. Perhaps the most damning aspect of Jim Callaghan鈥檚 beleaguered premiership was that it, alone, went without a parody. The comic strip The Brothers had to suffice, depicting the breakdown between the Labour government and the trades unions, the end of . The gripings of a golf-obssesed husband The landmark incarnation of the parody began in 1979 with the landmark prime ministership of Margaret Thatcher. Dear Bill, in which Thatcher鈥檚 spouse Denis wrote to his friend Bill (Deedes, a prominent conservative journalist), allowed for the comic exaggeration of a certain commuter-belt conservatism, centred on gin, tonic, golf, and reacting against all manner of modern norms. Private Eye could characterise the husband as comic because his wife was far from funny. Suitably enough, it was the 1980s incarnation that was the most commercially-minded. The were bestsellers, while audiences for the stage version included the Thatchers, smiling unconvincingly. Major growing pains The shift in scale from Thatcher to her unprepossessing successor in 1990 had Private Eye cast him as an overgrown, and equally dynamic, Adrian Mole in The Secret Diary of John Major (aged 47戮). With the widely-ridiculed , which provided the public with means of redress about local traffic calming methods, a flagship policy, and the government descending into a pit of endemic corruption, the long Conservative era that was clearly ending was not unlike which had occasioned the satire boom in the first place. New Labour arrives in the parish After 18 years of Tory rule, the column shifted from the stale to the sanctimonious in 1997, when Tony Blair鈥檚 proclivity to play guitar in overly-tight jeans inspired his depiction as a trendy vicar addressing his congregation in the St Albion Parish News. Reverend Blair issued updates from officials such as church warden Peter Mandelson, in charge of the on the village green, and from his American friend George Bush鈥檚 鈥淐hurch of the Latter-Day Morons鈥�. Ten years later, the Prime Ministerial Decree presented Gordon Brown as a Stalin-like dictator. It was effective for no other reason than that his hapless regime showed him to be Stalin-like. An appropriately narrow, joyless, iteration. 2000s: Dave and Theresa鈥檚 school days The 2010s was a decade of scholasticism. The first multi-party government since 1940 had David Cameron as headmaster of the New Coalition Academy, the fortnightly newsletter of which foregrounded his . When Cameron happily shed his Liberal Democrat partners after the 2015 election, the magazine appointed him head of the Cameron Free School, penning another newsletter. Mr Cameron was unfortunately soon made to resign by a disaster of his own making (Brexit), and his successor, Mrs May, took over as headmistress of St. Theresa鈥檚 Independent State Grammar School for Girls (and Boys) for two painful years before she was unfortunately made to resign by a disaster of hers (Brexit). The Johnson years: beyond a joke? In its sixty years, the parody has taken the form of private musing or public communication. But to work it had to be plausible. The best that can be said of the latest version, in which the Prime Minister responds to questions from the public on social media, is that Boris Johnson鈥檚 Live on Fakebook is so like its subject that, depending to one鈥檚 disposition, it鈥檚 either unmissable or unreadable. The purpose of the Private Eye prime ministerial parody was to render its subject unserious. When the subject manages that all by themselves, satire might be seen to have died. , Senior Lecturer in Contemporary British History, This article is republished from under a Creative Commons license. Read the . Share: Latest News 缅北禁地 expert highlights climate crisis in a new film A leading 缅北禁地 climate scientist is featured in a new film about how the climate and nature breakdown will affect the UK. published on: 14 April 2026 Neolithic tombs reveal ancient kinship ties Male individuals buried in Neolithic chambered tombs in northern Scotland were often related to each other through the paternal line and some were interred in the same or nearby tombs, research shows. published on: 14 April 2026 We are our Memories New exhibition by Fine Art graduate Trish Hudson-Moses, 22 April 鈥� 4 May 2026 published on: 10 April 2026 Facts and figures
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