No end in sight for merciless slights

Next month, the English satirical magazine Private Eye celebrates its golden anniversary. This fortnightly publication, which was nearly called Bladder, began in the same era as Beyond the Fringe and That Was the Week That Was. Fifty years on, Private Eye may continue to provoke and cause outrage, but it has mellowed from a cheap and cheerful scandal sheet of six yellow pages to a fixture of British life. Not only has the magazine transcended the long-ago faded satire boom to become part of the establishment it exposes and sends up so mercilessly, it enjoys a newspaper-strength circulation of more than 200,000. Who said the British were a nation of masochists?

Yet, the ethos of Private Eye has barely shifted from the days it was pasted together in a back room in London's Soho, with regular lunches round the corner at the Coach and Horses. The lunches still happen, and the magazine occupies larger premises nearby. It has had only three editors since its inception: Christopher Booker, Richard Ingrams and (for the past 25 years, or half the magazine's life) the dangerously cherubic Ian Hislop.

The publication, in spite of some of its longer, non-satirical articles, still has a determinedly clubby air about it: one of its staff recently described his colleagues as ''a family made up of mostly funny uncles''. But, in order to understand the codes, you have to be in on the nudges, sniggers and in-jokes that in some cases stretch back for decades.

For example, of the names listed above, it is useful to know that Lunchtime O'Booze is Private Eye's vintage pseudonymous reporter - along with a more recent recruit, Phil Space - and that his near namesake, Lunchtime O'Boulez, has written the scurrilous Music & Musicians column since the days Pierre Boulez called for all opera houses to be blown up. ''Ugandan discussions'', a euphemism for illicit sexual intercourse, came about after a woman journalist and a cabinet politician from Kampala explained that their liaison at a London party was nothing more than being ''upstairs discussing Uganda''.

Nicknames, too, abound. The Eye coined ''the Dirty Digger'' for Rupert Murdoch, ''Capt'n Bob'' for Robert Maxwell, ''the Grocer'' for Ted Heath, ''Wislon'' for Harold Wilson, and ''Baillie Vass'' for Alec Douglas-Home - the last because an Edinburgh newspaper accidentally transposed captions on photographs of the former prime minister and a Scottish baillie (or bailiff), Vass.

Various other Private Eye phrases have entered the lexicon with great success. For example, ''tired and emotional'' (translation: pissed as a newt) was used to describe a bibulous 1960s Labour politician, George Brown, who fell over regularly. ''Just fancy that!'' has also become synonymous with journalistic comment that contradicts itself within the same article or publication - an art form beloved of the Eye's Glenda Slagg, whose fondness for second opinions almost outweighs her preponderance of exclamation marks!! It also helps to know that frequent references at the end of some articles to ''[see P.94]'' means there is no page 94. Similarly, pieces can be stopped mid-sentence by editorial interjection: [That's enough. Ed.].

What has set the tone of Private Eye's irreverence has been its covers. Its recent edition on the News International phone hacking scandal featured, under the masthead ''Private Eye - incorporating News of the World'', photos of Rebekah Brooks, James Murdoch and the Dirty Digger, with the headline, ''GOTCHA!''. One of the Eye's most notorious covers was in October 1971 and the controversial visit to London by the emperor of Japan: ''Hirohito flies in … nasty Nip in the air''. Twenty-seven years later, when emperor Akihito flew in for a visit, a more forgiving Eye popped him on the cover with the words, ''Nice Nip in the Air''.

My favourite has to be one from 1975, when Margaret Thatcher defeated Ted Heath to become Conservative leader: ''All smiles!'' proclaimed the cover, with a toothy photo of the pair, sharing the same speech balloon: ''You blue-rinsed bitch!''

It would be difficult to imagine a publication like Private Eye surviving in Australia, with its far more stringent defamation laws. Private Eye has sharp public teeth that it has used to bite into the rich and powerful over the years, leaving deep and sensitive lacerations. Indeed, those late plutocrats Robert Maxwell and James Goldsmith almost succeeded in suing the magazine out of existence. More lately, Ian Hislop has earned the distinction of being the most sued man in English legal history. Still, as Hislop told The Guardian this week, the Eye should always strive to be ''a bit better than the people you write about''.

Really, there is nothing like Private Eye. Some of its greatest achievements - think of Mrs Wilson's Diary or the incomparably funny ''Dear Bill'' letters of the Maggie and Denis era - have defined not only political eras but transcended them. Reader-generated columns such as Pseuds Corner and Commentatorballs have ruthlessly monitored the literary and verbal blights of generations (classic example: Brian Johnston, BBC radio, ''The bowler's Holding, the batsman's Willey'').

What Private Eye hasn't done - and long may it remain so - is to change the state of Britain's political and social life to render it superfluous. ''The end of the Eye will come when all politicians clean up their acts, when the workings of Whitehall, the media, the justice system and everything in between become entirely transparent,'' says the magazine's biographer, Adam McQueen. Quite. The Eye's still wide open.

Michael Shmith is a senior writer.