Richard Ingrams: So Farewell Then...

In 2005 he quit the Observer as columnist over its pro-Iraq war stance. "That was a said affair. I got on with Roger [Alton, the then editor] fine but unfortunately he was seduced by Alastair Campbell when he was invited round to No 10. These people are impressed by those sort of things." He was, though,fired from the Independent as a columnist by then-editor Chris Blackhurst in 2011. "He invited me to his club, the Reform Club and we had a very nice lunch. I went away thinking he's a decent bloke, seems to like the column. Two days later I got a letter from him saying: 'I enjoyed our lunch and you're fired.'"

"And they brought in this new columnist to replace me, Chris Bryant, the gay vicar." That must have really hurt, I suggest to Ingrams, particularly as you're a committed homophobe? "No, no, no," says Ingrams. He waves away the question when I ask him to expand on this – leaving me unsure if he is denying the hurt or the homophobia. But his hostility to homosexuality is certainly longstanding – it guided Private Eye's long-running opposition to the gay rights movement during his editorship and has led him in the past to tell one interviewer: 'Don't you think it's disgusting what they do?' I think it's very hard, if you're not that way yourself, not to think it's disgusting … The idea that they're just the same as everyone else seems to me just wrong – most of them have terrible lives."

Profile in The Guardian.

Richard Ingrams - one of England's stately homophobes - has resigned, under something of a cloud, as editor of The Oldie, a magazine he founded 22 years ago.

Under Ian Hislop's editorship, Private Eye's infamous homophobia soon disappeared.

Fagburn understands they even employ a known homosexual these days.

Mr Ingrams must be turning in his grey y-fronts.