Edward Heath: Wasting Police Time

Detectives investigating lurid abuse allegations against Sir Edward Heath have interviewed key figures at Private Eye – because the satirical magazine joked about his sexuality 40 years ago.

Police even visited the current editor, Ian Hislop, to ask what he knew about the former Prime Minister, despite the journalist being a teenager during the period under investigation.

Officers have also tracked down former Downing Street staff to ask them if young men were ever sneaked into Number 10.

Wiltshire Police’s controversial inquiry into Heath – Operation Conifer – has now cost taxpayers almost £900,000, with 17 people still working on it, despite growing demands for it to be shut down.

However, Chief Constable Mike Veale has apologised to MPs and peers for the operation being launched in front of cameras outside Heath’s former house.

It comes after The Mail on Sunday revealed how an expert brought in by police to assess claims that Heath had been linked to a network of paedophiles who held satanic orgies, dismissed them as

In the latest example of what has been branded a farce, Wiltshire Police rang former Private Eye editor Richard Ingrams earlier this month because the journal often made jokes at the expense of Heath when he was PM from 1970 to 1974.

Unmarried Heath had been jokingly dubbed ‘Sailor Ted’ in a reference to rumours that he was gay.

‘The policeman said he wanted to know whether I had any information on Mr Heath,’ said Mr Ingrams.

‘I said, “You’re talking about jokes.” They’d obviously looked through old copies of the Eye to some extent. There were plenty of “Hello, Sailor” type of jokes.’

He added: ‘I told the policeman there was a general subject of speculation about whether the Grocer [Private Eye’s nickname for Heath] was gay or not. He had a dislike of women. He was very rude if he was sat next to women at lunch parties, just ignoring them completely.

‘It did all look like he was gay. But I never heard any evidence of paedophile rumours. It’s a waste of time and public money.’ ...

Mail On Sunday. 

Sake. 

PS Richard Ingrams is a homophobic shitbag.

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.

Private Eye: Happy 50th Birthday!

The special 50th anniversary issue of Private Eye is - as they say - in your newsagent's now!
It's my favourite magazine, and always a highlight of my fortnight.
Ian Hislop took over as editor in 1986 - one of his greatest achievements remains unsung;
Steering Private Eye away from the public schoolboy sniggering homophobia that often infected it when Richard Ingrams was editor.
Thank you Mr Hislop, as ever, you done a very good job.
And many happy returns, my Eye - don't look back.

• You can revisit some of Private Eye's worst excesses - eg the cartoon strip The Gays (!) - at this great blog Streetlaughter - A Gay Cavalcade Of Comic Stereotypes.

Richard Ingrams: "There Is No Such Thing As Community"

"Purists are fighting a losing battle to preserve proper punctuation, their special concern being the apostrophe and correct use thereof. I would like to make a plea for more rigorous use of inverted commas, so important when words are being so regularly commandeered by propagandists.
"Take, for example, the Church of Scientology, recently attacked yet again by the fearless BBC investigator John Sweeney. The word church when used by Scientologists ought always to be put in inverted commas because it is certainly doesn't belong to one of the world's great religions...
"Also deserving inverted commas is the word marriage, as in the expression gay marriage. Marriage, by its definition, involves a man and a woman. You cannot logically have a marriage between two men or two women. The same applies to the expression gay community, as there is no such community in any meaningful sense of that word."

Richard Ingrams, seasoned Oldie homophobe, writing in The Independent.

Logically!?? It's hardly Bertrand Russell, is it?