The real hero of Private Eye’s first 50 years is Christopher Booker

The person who tends to get overlooked amidst all the celebrations surrounding Private Eye’s half century is Christopher Booker. As far as I’m concerned he may just deserve the title of Greatest Living Englishman.

Famously ousted as editor of his own magazine in 1963 by Richard Ingrams (after which, as Booker delights in reminding everyone, circulation rapidly plummeted from 93,000 to 25,000) Booker has been part of the Eye’s joke-writing team for over 45 years since patching things up with Ingrams in 1965. He claims to have been responsible for more of the words published in Private Eye than any other writer.

Booker particularly hates trendy, modish obsessions - whenever there’s a particularly vicious piece parodying the latest bullshit being excreted by members of our liberal ruling establishment , I assume Booker’s responsible. In effect, he – along with Auberon Waugh – taught many of us who reached adulthood in the late sixties and early seventies to laugh at the ridiculous enthusiasms of our political-media-academic class.  For showing those of us on the Right that it was perfectly acceptable to loudly shout “Bollocks” whenever we heard some farcical, puffed-up, self-important pipsqueak lecturing us on whatever happened to be the current topic at Hampstead dinner parties, Booker deserves to be commemorated in bronze outside 22 Greek Street, Private Eye’s original Soho HQ. (I remember the address because I went there once in my teens to buy some posters and back issues – I felt like a pilgrim visiting a shrine.)

I met Booker once, briefly, when he was setting the weekly quiz for Melvyn Bragg’s TV show, Paperback Writer, in the late ‘70s. Faced with the choice of talking to me or Harold Robbins, Booker showed enormous good taste by choosing me: he got me a much-needed drink, and we chatted about Cambridge and I told him how repulsive Harold Robbins was. He, by contrast, was terribly nice. I'm not sure I was aware that most of the jokes I laughed at in Private Eye were his, but I read his stuff in the Spectator, and I was excited to meet him. 

I was too young to appreciate his book about the 1960s, The Neophiliacs, but I bought The Seventies when it came out, and loved it. His analysis of that disgusting decade influenced me in many ways – in particular his interest in Jung, his contempt for the unions, and his deep respect for Pope John Paul II. Booker was evidently someone who was happiest swimming against the tide of fashionable opinion - and he managed to do it without coming across as just another Young Fogey.

Booker took over the Peter Simple column between 1988 and 1990 (a fact I’d been completely unaware of – how does he almost invariably manage to avoid publicity?) before swapping places with Auberon Waugh and starting a weekly column in the Sunday Telegraph, which, for 20 years, he has used to crusade on our behalf against the massed ranks of the establishment’s smug brainwashers and social engineers. 

I can’t remember him ever being on the wrong side, whether calling British politicians to account for their betrayal of the Cossacks at the end of WWII, or relentlessly exposing the attacks on British sovereignty and business efficiency by the EU and our own zealous bureaucrats, or his authoritative, long-term rubbishing of the whole Anthropogenic Global Warming argument and the honesty of its main proponents, and, currently, the determination of local council gauleiters to drag children away from their parents on the flimsiest of pretexts. He has also  given the Theory of Evolution a regular kicking, and finally completed a 30 year project in 2005 by publishing The Seven Basic Plots: why we tell stories – a masterly Jungian analysis of the psychology of story-telling.

Ultimately, what makes Booker special is that he is, above all else, an absolutely superb journalist: he evidently spends an awful lot of time going through deeply boring documents and getting the facts straight before sounding off.

I’ve occasionally worried that Booker's wisdom wasn’t being sufficiently recognised, and that’s undoubtedly true. But I have a feeling that when he finally retires (if ever – he turned 74 last month, and his biggest-selling book, The Real Global Warming Disaster, was published just two years ago) we’ll suddenly realise what we’ve lost.

If our government wasn’t being led by a vacuous, spivvy PR pimple and a silly, meaningless Eurofanatic - and if Prince Charles hadn’t swallowed all that AGW claptrap wholesale – I reckon Booker would be in line for a knighthood.

Of course, the Great Man should be awarded a peerage without delay. And, it goes without saying, the title of Greatest Living Englishman (Media Category).