At whose expense comes the mild irony when, this fall, the cheaply produced scandal sheet Private Eye will have an exhibition of its cartoons and pictorial covers at the Victoria and Albert Museum, a building consecrated to taste and restraint? Perhaps the show’s modest title furnishes a clue: “Private Eye: The First 50 Years.” Keep in mind that, a half-century ago, the British establishment was almost as near in time to its Victorian forebears as we are to the half-forgotten names—like Harold Macmillan (who even in his own day was described as an Edwardian)—who were so pitilessly lampooned in *Private Eye’*s first issues. I was a mere sheltered schoolboy at the time, but couldn’t fail to notice the exciting fact that the authorities were getting nervous. In spite of a BBC monopoly on the airwaves, the semi-official censorship of cinema and the theater, and the titanic, still-enduring prestige of Winston Churchill and the royal family, you could hear the noise of collapsing scenery as a whole parcel of scandals—sexual ones, property ones, espionage ones—started to unwrap at the same time. Private Eye, which could be bought inexpensively and smuggled under the jacket, was the ideal samizdat bulletin, where you could very often read next week’s real news.

They so nearly called it Bladder, which would have gone well with the bathroom humor, the word bubbles, the dirty paper, and the graffiti-like cartoons. But that image would also have evoked the squeaky rubber balls of the old court jesters, meant to rebound in the end from the armor of authority. Private Eye had a bit more grit and gumshoe to it: We’re on your case, mate. The clever thing was to combine this element of noir and lowlife—the magazine’s premises have always been in the crummier purlieus of Soho—with the antic teasing of the British private-school system, from which almost all the original staff were recruited. Out of sheer effrontery, they could get a nickname fixed to a public figure (or even an obscurely reclusive one) and get everyone to accept and repeat it. (Shall I soon forget my own transition from sylph-like “Christopher ‘Robin’ Hitchens” to “chubby Trotskyist defector”?) The deadpan dubbing of “Dame” Harold Evans set the editor of the Sunday Times on a course of legal action that led the *Eye’*s editor, Richard Ingrams, to call him “the most litigious person I came across.” The classic instance of the magazine’s in-joke, which has graced the pages of almost every single issue for the past quarter-century, is its code name for the generic British book publisher: “Snipcock and Tweed.” This neat bit of non-philo-Semitism, so familiar that nobody any longer notices, let alone objects, is part of the whole affect and furniture of the enterprise.

Establishments don’t implode every day, and so, once launched in the brave days of the early 60s, the Eye had to stay distinctive in banal and ordinary times. It managed this by continuing to look as if printed on the run, by appearing fortnightly instead of weekly, by waging a long guerrilla engagement against Britain’s grotesque laws of libel (which kept it constantly in the courts, the scene of rich satirical material since the 18th century), and by coining new words—and resurrecting old ones—for familiar things: the “pseud” for the pretentious, the “hack” for the journalist, “Spartish” for hirsute student rebels. Hacks in particular rushed to accept their self-description and keep in with “the organ”: a percentage of its copy was supplied for free by cynical reporters who couldn’t get their own stories into print but would take revenge by leaking them.

An unprecedented “team of rivals” was allowed to annex whole pages of the magazine and whistle its own tune. Claud Cockburn, Auberon Waugh, Paul Foot, and (under a chaos of pseudonyms) Christopher Booker and John Wells just paddled their own canoes. Gossip-writing hacks from established Fleet Street titles, like Nigel Dempster and Peter McKay, would moonlight the doings of the leisure class. New euphemisms for the sexual act—“conversations about Uganda,” for example—were pressed into service and, by some alchemy of British manners, became household expressions. Each new prime minister got his or her parody—in Thatcher’s case the cleverness being a parody of her husband—and within weeks the image and idiom would have stuck. And every second Wednesday, under the vinegary supervision of London’s nastiest landlord, an upstairs pub lunch group would proudly ingest the world’s foulest foods and wines, and issue invitations to actors and members of Parliament and businessmen to come and to be insulted and to be indiscreet. Nobody ever seems to have said no to this sadistic hospitality.