Victoria agrees, pointing out that Private Eye used to mock the Punch edited by Coren for being fuddy-duddy and Establishment, but that Punch was run by ‘the working-class boys, the grammar-school boys, the revolutionaries, while Private Eye was a bunch of right-wing, privileged public-school boys, sons of diplomats’ who looked down on the staff of Punch ‘because they thought they were common. And, in Daddy’s case, Jewish’.

I don’t think you could call Paul Foot ‘right-wing’ — he was nearer the loony left; but the rest of that comment is spot on. Richard Ingrams of Private Eye always claimed, especially at the time of his row with Jimmy Goldsmith, that he was not anti-semitic. But, as the editors of this book point out, when he parodied Coren’s mockery of Idi Amin, he headed the spoof ‘The Yiddy Amin Monologues’. When I had a book out in 1984, a life of John Betjeman in pictures, I was puzzled to find in Private Eye a paragraph beginning: ‘Bevis Hillier: Bar-Mitzvahs organised …’ What was that all about? I suddenly realised that Ingrams must have thought I was named after Bevis Marks, the oldest synagogue in London, whereas I was actually named after Richard Jefferies’ 1882 novel, Bevis: The Story of a Boy. Not even circumcised, ducky. Coren was Jewish (grandpa came from Poland) but an Oxford landlady’s serving him bacon and eggs was ‘the end, really, for all things Jewish’, though he was ‘always sentimental about Jews’.

After postgraduate work at Oxford, he spent two years at Yale and Berkeley on a Commonwealth Fellowship. He sent articles over to Punch. They were published and he was offered a staff job. In the chronological course of this book, you see his prose style not so much changing, as having annexes added to it. In the early pieces, sent from America, the guzzling mode is to the fore. It is gloriously managed. In one article he records how the Americans’ Wodehousean image of the Englishman was changing under the onslaught of gritty new novels, plays and films.

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