Ian Hislop

Ian Hislop (born 13 July 1960) is editor, and part-owner, of British satirical magazine Private Eye and a panelist on Have I Got News for You. Owing to the many writs for libel Private Eye once received, Hislop has sometimes been described as being "the most sued man in Britain".

Ian Hislop in 2009

Quotes

• If this is justice, I am a banana.
  • Statement to the press outside court, following losing a libel action brought by Sonia Sutcliffe, wife of serial killer Peter Sutcliffe, the "Yorkshire Ripper" (24 May 1989), quoted in UPI article and Oxford Dictionary of Modern Quotations p. 154

• Boris Johnson, people always ask me the same question, they say, 'Is Boris a very very clever man pretending to be an idiot?' And I always say, 'No.'
  • Parkinson, ITV (19 November 2006).

• The trouble about working on a tabloid is that they tend to be run by bullies.
  • Room 101, BBC (9 February 2007).

• For fifty years Private Eye has pretty much in most issues exposed a miscarriage of justice, and a lot of them have been murders. Over the years, large numbers of these cases have been found to be entirely wrong, and the men convicted -- almost always men, there was a couple of women -- have been found innocent, so we would have killed those people, and in some of those very high profile cases which involved terrorism cases, we would have made very dangerous new martyrs by executing people who turned out not to have committed the murders involved. So on a purely practical basis, whatever you think it says about the civilised nature of your society or not, I think it would be incredibly dangerous to have capital punishment back.
  • On capital punishment in the United Kingdom in response to its advocacy by Priti Patel MP (later Conservative Home Secretary) on Question Time, BBC One (22 September 2011).

• I do have a residual belief that, if at all possible, you should try not to mock the weak.
  • Interview with Ginny Dougary "Inside the Private world of Ian Hislop" The Daily Telegraph (29 November 2012).

• In Britain we have a free press. It's not a pretty press, but it's free. The people who can't bear the Daily Mail, they say: 'you should ban it'. No no, no no, you don't ban it... you don't buy it."
  • On Have I Got News For You (11 October 2013).

• So no, I'm not in that camp, but I do think that statutory regulation is not required, and most of the heinous crimes that came up and have made such a splash in front of this Inquiry have already been illegal. Contempt of court is illegal. Phone tapping is illegal. Taking money from - policemen taking money is illegal. All of these things don't need a code. We already have laws for them. The fact that these laws were not rigorously enforced is, again, due to the behaviour of the police, the interaction of the police and News International, and - I mean, let's be honest about this - the fact that our politicians have been very, very involved, in ways that I think are not sensible, with senior News International people, and I hope you'll be calling the Prime Minister and Tony Blair and Gordon Brown to explain how that comes down from the top."
  • At the Leveson Inquiry (17 January 2012).