NEWSLETTER

INTERVIEW BY ANDY CAPPER

Private Eye covers from years gone by.

Your circulation has gone up recently hasn’t it?

It’s about 200,000, yeah.

What do you think drives people to keep buying your magazine? I thought British people were only meant to buy trashy crap about TV stars or interviews with footballers’ girlfriends?

I think the intelligence of audiences in this country are always underestimated, especially with television and newspaper magazines. People say: “They’ll only buy Heat or Nuts”, but it’s not true. If you provide something better people will go and get it. The worst times for our circulation figures were the height of Blair’s rule — when the economy was booming and everyone said he was marvellous and nobody wanted to read us.

Ha ha. Everybody was doing cocaine and listening to Oasis and going, “Waheeey!”

Yes. Haha.

What did the circulation go down to?

We were slipping down to sort of 180s, 190s. There was a sense of: “You guys you just complain all the time. You are a bunch of whiners”. Over years of the magazine you can see those public perceptions change. They are periods of satisfaction.

How was it in the 80s, AKA “the decade of excess”?

In the beginning of the 80s it was very good for us. Society was very polarised with Thatcher and the miners’ strike. There was all that aggro around and that was good for us. Then the complacent 80s weren’t very good for us. That’s when I took over the mag actually.

So human suffering is great for circulation?

Ha, yes. It is on the whole. And so is dissatisfaction. When people start asking questions again they read us. When everything’s fine, people don’t really care.

I’ve met a lot of kids in the past few years. They were supposedly “underground” or “alternative” kids and they all want to vote Conservative in the next election which, before Blair, was anathema to a kid like that.

I think there are a lot of those kids about.

I remember saying things like: “But do you not remember what the Conservatives were like? I mean, they really weren’t that great.” And they came back to me saying things like: “We don’t like Blair’s stance on the war.”

And that’s enough for them.

Ha ha, yeah. They would have preferred the Conservatives’ stance on the war which would have been a lot more cool or something. What do you feel when you hear kids making statements like that?

Well, a) It’s quite funny, and b) I think the current lot of Tories also don’t remember what they were like before, so they don’t know what they’ll be like when they get in either. I think that is why people are prepared to give it a punt. Politics are very peculiar now, with the Conservative leader David Cameron saying “green taxes” and you’re thinking, “Hang on, you’re a Conservative, aren’t you?” and then you have Labour leader Gordon Brown saying: “We’ll build the power plant and we’ll have some more nukes as well.” It’s no wonder the kids are very confused.

But they have more access to information than ever before now.

Yeah, they have a lot of information but there’s less analysis. It’s sort of a tsunami of information really and no way to work out which bits of it matter.

From your insiders and knowledge of the workings of the Houses of Parliament, do you think the Conservatives will win the next election and, if so, what do you think they’ll do?

I think the Tories will win the next one. I think they’ll be exactly like Blair when he started. When you take over you don’t do much, you sit there for a bit and see how the land lies. They’ve said things about keeping up the spending programmes. All the scare stories—about the Tories coming in and slashing the NHS and giving up on teachers—I don’t think they’ll do any of that.

Do you not?

No, those sort of Tories, on the whole, aren’t there any more.

You don’t think they would get rid of the National Health Service?

No, I think they would be no more keen to privatise it than the current Labour lot are. I don’t think they’ll do that, particularly because Cameron’s got a personal invested interest in having his child born in the NHS. That has done him pretty well.

What have you found out about that guy then?

About Cameron? Does anybody know anything more than: “What you see is what you get”? He’s had one job working as a PR man for a television company, which is not the greatest CV you have ever seen, but then Brown’s never had a job either. They’ve been full-time politicians all their life, that’s what we get now. Politicians used to be people who had jobs first then went to politics but they don’t now. They’re all sort of the people you met at college who were very interested in politics very early. And you have to think: “Why?”

I always thought it’s a weird thing to want to be a politician.

Being a politician is the thing that defines them. It’s no more weird than wanting to be on TV or be in a band.

What about Boris Johnson?

Boris is the ultimate showman, but very effective. Very popular with your lot, I would guess.

What do you mean “our lot”?

Well, that younger readership. That seems to be where his base is.

I guess so, yeah. Are you pally with him?

It comes and goes. He’s furious with me sometimes depending on what we’ve written about him. I’ve done three, four television shows with him, which were hysterical. I don’t know how much he knew why they were funny but he is innately entertaining. There is something very appealing about him.


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