Not Tim Ireland, for understandable reasons:
Iain Dale actually tried to take political advantage of my being smeared as a paedophile while simulataneously libelling Tom Watson as a smear merchant. He went on to similarly exploit a man on the brink of suicide and the repeated publication of my home address. He did this primarily by lying about the context, the circumstances and the specifics of attempts to contact him about these matters, falsely giving the impression that he had made a valid complaint of harassment (which quickly evolved into an outright claim of ‘stalking’) and it was your man Adam Macqueen who popped up at the crucial moment on the website of another Private Eye writer, Louis Barfe, likening my correspondence with your magazine to the rantings of a “nutter on a bus”.
Tim has had a long and horrible smear campaign aimed at him in which Private Eye was a bit player, reacting to false information as I understand it and refusing to correct their mistakes since then. This started a longer discussion on various English lefty blogs about the general merits of the magazine. First Jamie:
I kind of gave up on it a while back. Not so much that, maybe, but I just lost interest in its contents. A lot of the gossip and such in it increasingly seemed to be driven by entirely private rivalries and vendettas. That was probably always the case, but I get the impression that the unloading of the silver handled bucket used to be postponed until it at least had some contents. In a way, that connects to Tim’s grievances. The Eye was always something of an in-group. Now it’s nothing much else.
Hislop’s glory years were the 80s and early 90s, when “Have I Got News For You” was in its early days and when he finally drove Punch into the ground and gained the monopoly on British satirical news. Now … well, now he is Punch, isn’t he? Lots of tired in-jokes, the same bunch of cronies editing the thing, imperceptibly shifting into a bunch of old blokes harrumphing at each other in a saloon bar. Basically, Top Gear for people who can’t drive.
but it was splinty who struck the cruelest blow:
On reflection, perhaps D2 is a bit harsh in saying that the Eye has transmogrified into Punch. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say it was a decompression chamber for Oldie readers looking for something a bit more sedate.
Ouch…