Soon after I began working for Private Eye’s lawyers, the solicitor Peter Carter-Ruck, the libel lawyer who made an enemy of the Eye by bringing expensive lawsuits against them, phoned. The Eye mentions him often and deliberately misspells his name – putting an F rather than an R in Ruck. He asked if they would do this less often. The message was passed on, and the following week they simply changed the misspelling (the F replacing the C in Carter this time) and used his name twice as often.

When I tell other people I work for the Eye, they assume it is a full-time job. The editor, Ian Hislop, has appeared in the Guinness Book of Records as the most sued man in English legal history. If I were to try and make an issue of the Eye non-libellous, it would just be blank pages. My job is to help them get away with as much as they can. Once, the Eye received a letter from S.J. Berwin – a big City firm that thinks it’s very smart – following a Slicker item about Ladbrokes that quoted anonymous sources. The letter read something like: “We act for Ladbrokes. We’ve read this story, please advise us of your sources.” It was stupid. Journalists never reveal sources. So, instead of replying, we published the letter, headlined “F*** off”. We never heard another word.