[9][10] The forerunner of Private Eye was The Walopian, an underground magazine published at Shrewsbury School by pupils in the mid-1950s and edited by Richard Ingrams, Willie Rushton, Christopher Booker and Paul Foot.

After National Service, Ingrams and Foot went as undergraduates to Oxford University, where they met future collaborators including Peter Usborne, Andrew Osmond[11] and John Wells.

[17] Others essential to the development of the magazine were Auberon Waugh, Claud Cockburn (who had run a pre-war scandal sheet, The Week), Barry Fantoni, Gerald Scarfe, Tony Rushton, Patrick Marnham and Candida Betjeman.

For some years after layout tools became available the magazine retained this technique to maintain its look, although the three older typewriters were replaced with an IBM composer.

[23][24] Nooks and Corners (originally Nooks and Corners of the New Barbarism), an architectural column severely critical of architectural vandalism and "barbarism",[25] notably modernism and brutalism,[26] was originally founded by John Betjeman in 1971 (his first article attacked a building praised by his enemy Nikolaus Pevsner)[27] and carried on by his daughter Candida Lycett Green.

[9][36][37] The Rotten Boroughs column focuses on actual or alleged wrongdoing in local or regional governments and elections, for example, corruption, nepotism, hypocrisy and incompetence.

The magazine has occasionally published special editions dedicated to the reporting of particular events, such as government inadequacy over the 2001 foot and mouth outbreak, the conviction in 2001 of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi for the 1988 Lockerbie bombing (an incident regularly covered since by "In the Back"), and the purported MMR vaccine controversy (since shown to be medical fraud committed by Andrew Wakefield) in 2002.

They include euphemisms designed to avoid the notoriously plaintiff-friendly English libel laws, such as replacing the word "drunk" with "tired and emotional",[39][40] or using the phrase "Ugandan discussions" to denote illicit sexual exploits;[39] and more obvious parodies using easily recognisable stereotypes, such as the lampooning of Conservative MPs as "Sir Bufton Tufton".

As well as many one-off cartoons, Private Eye features several regular comic strips: Some of the magazine's former cartoon strips include: At various times, Private Eye has also used the work of Ralph Steadman, Wally Fawkes, Timothy Birdsall, Martin Honeysett, Willie Rushton, Gerald Scarfe, Robert Thompson, Ken Pyne, Geoff Thompson, "Jorodo", Ed McLachlan, Simon Pearsall, Kevin Woodcock, Brian Bagnall, Kathryn Lamb and George Adamson.

Under this headline was a picture of many hundreds of people outside Buckingham Palace, with one person commenting that the papers were "a disgrace", another agreeing, saying that it was impossible to get one anywhere, and another saying, "Borrow mine.

The British Medical Journal issued a contemporary press release[53] that concluded: "The Eye report is dangerous in that it is likely to be read by people who are concerned about the safety of the vaccine.

"[56] The 2004 Christmas issue received many complaints after it featured Pieter Bruegel's painting of a nativity scene, in which one wise man said to another: "Apparently, it's David Blunkett's" (who at the time was involved in a scandal in which he was thought to have impregnated a married woman).

The site was listed as a source that is "purposefully fake with the intent of satire/comedy, which can offer important critical commentary on politics and society, but have the potential to be shared as actual/literal news.

"[59] The Eye rejected any such classification, saying its site "contains none of these things, as the small selection of stories online are drawn from the journalism pages of the magazine", adding that "even US college students might recognise that the Headmistress's letter is not really from a troubled high school".

[60] In 2023, Private Eye published a satirical cover on the Israel–Hamas war, reading "This magazine may contain some criticism of the Israeli government and may suggest that killing everyone in Gaza as revenge for Hamas atrocities may not be a good long-term solution to the problems of the region."

Critics such as investigative journalist David Collier condemned the magazine, while supporters defended its critique as not antisemitic but a legitimate questioning of the proportionality of Israel's response.

[71] The publication "sets aside almost a quarter of its turnover for paying out in libel defeats"[72] although the magazine frequently finds other ways to defuse legal tensions, such as by printing letters from aggrieved parties.

[73] The writer Colin Watson was the first person to successfully sue Private Eye, objecting to being described as "the little-known author who ... was writing a novel, very Wodehouse but without jokes".

[74] The cover of the tenth-anniversary issue in 1971 (number 257) showed a cartoon headstone inscribed with an extensive list of well-known names, and the epitaph: "They did not sue in vain".

In 1976 James Goldsmith brought criminal libel charges against the magazine, meaning that if found guilty, editor Richard Ingrams and the author of the article, Patrick Marnham, could be imprisoned.

He sued over allegations that he had conspired with the Clermont Set to assist Lord Lucan to evade the police, who wanted him in connection with the murder of his children's nanny.

Goldsmith's solicitor Peter Carter-Ruck was involved in many litigation cases against Private Eye; the magazine refers to his firm as "Carter-Fuck".

[84] Readers raised a considerable sum in the "Bananaballs Fund", and Private Eye donated the surplus to the families of Peter Sutcliffe's victims.

In Sonia Sutcliffe's 1990 libel case against the News of the World, it emerged that she had indeed benefited financially from her husband's crimes, although the details of Private Eye's article had been inaccurate.

[83] In 1994, retired police inspector Gordon Anglesea successfully sued the Eye and three other media outlets for libel over allegations that he had indecently assaulted under-aged boys in Wrexham in the 1980s.

[85] Hislop said the magazine would not attempt to recover the £80,000 damages awarded to Anglesea, stating: "I can't help thinking of the witnesses who came forward to assist our case at the time, one of whom later committed suicide telling his wife that he never got over not being believed.

In 1981 the book The Private Eye Story stated that the owners were Cook, who owned most of the shares, with smaller shareholders including actors Dirk Bogarde and Jane Asher, and several of those involved with the founding of the magazine.

[93] The logo for the magazine's news page is a naked Mr Punch caressing his erect and oversized penis while riding a donkey and hugging a female admirer.

It is a detail from a frieze by "Dickie" Doyle that once formed the masthead of Punch magazine, which the editors of Private Eye had come to loathe for its perceived descent into complacency.

The image, hidden away in the detail of the frieze, had appeared on the cover of Punch for nearly a century and was noticed by Malcolm Muggeridge during a guest-editing spot on Private Eye.