What Is Going On At Private Eye?

Good afternoon, and welcome to the second part, to date, of I Don't Know What Private Eye Is Coming To. As before, I write as one whose next sole-authored book (there will be at least one edited volume before that) is to be dedicated to the memories of Paul Foot, Alan Watkins, Auberon Waugh and Michael Wharton.

The latest edition of Private Eye once again contains a passage which would be more suitable to the comment pages of The Times, and which might indeed have been written by Aaronovitch, Finkelstein or Kamm. This time, it gloats over what may well be the impending demise of the Council for the Advancement of Arab-British Understanding, with the closely associated British Syrian Society.

But the decline of CAABU is the decline of precisely the Toryism, quite distinct from the Conservative Party as a vehicle, to which the Eye was once closest, and to which its position, insofar as it has one, would still be closest if that type of Toryism were still a vibrant force. Closely associated with Keynesianism and with support for the Commonwealth, but also not without its Eurosceptical side, it was therefore extremely hostile to Thatcherism on at least three grounds. It is true, though, that occasional representatives of this school, such as Waugh, Stuart Reid and Sir Peregrine Worsthorne, have seen a certain form of European federalism as the last hope.

It had grave reservations about the American Republic, the embodiment of classical liberalism. It honoured the memory of the British fallen in Palestine, to whom there is scandalously still no memorial anywhere. And it often had a Recusant or a High Church affinity with the ancient indigenous communities of Catholic, Orthodox and Oriental Christians in the Middle East, while the Assyrians, and those Arab Christians who have become Anglicans or Lutherans since the nineteenth century, have long been the objects of a certain tendresse on the part of the more staunchly Protestant traditionalists in the Church of England.

This type of Tory had close ties to those Americans who sought to locate the great American experiment within a deeper and broader British, especially Burkean, tradition which was not without influence on their use of the Republican Party as a vehicle for Keynesian economics and for progressive social measures. They resented the excessive influence of any ethnic lobby over American foreign policy, so that their Anglophilia and Burkeanism were by no means always the same thing as a pro-British approach to the international affairs of the day.

They fiercely resisted any such influence by any foreign state as such. They honoured the equally un-memorialised memory of the USS Liberty. And they were in every sense in touch with the thinking of those universities in the Middle East which had nurtured Arab nationalism as foundations of their own "mainline" American Protestant denominations, which were themselves still defined by such basic orthodoxy as kept them within global Anglicanism, "Calvinism", Methodism and Lutheranism.

Both the British (including the wider Commonwealth) and the American sides of the family had such connections to the region that they would have had no sympathy whatever with, for example, any Islamist insurrection that had already purged one Syrian city of its Christian population and which sought to do the same across the whole country.

All very Christopher Booker, at least until recent years, and in large part even today. All very Richard Ingrams. All very Ian Hislop. Yet only a month ago Private Eye sided with some hedge fund trader and neocon activist who landed a job writing for Murdoch, against one of the world's most distinguished and influential theologians, one of the greatest living definers and defenders of the traditionalist critique of neoliberalism and neoconservatism, and the greatest (or, at the very least, the most cerebral) living definer and defender of High Anglicanism. And now this. What is going on?