Barry joined AA and Peter tried to, you see, he went to clinics and things. He certainly made efforts at various times during his thirties. I don’t know whether he gave up trying, but I’d be interested to find out. When I knew them first in the Sixties, they were these two drunkards. “It’s true in a way, but the salient fact about Peter is that he was an alcoholic, which is something that nobody ever says It was something he shared with his friend Barry Humphries. I feel that in the end Peter is going to be blackened.”It sounds as though Ingrams does not subscribe to the popular notion that Cook wasted his talents by largely dropping from view after his split with Dudley Moore. He would like to give the same appreciative treatment to the comedian Peter Cook, his old friend and collaborator and the controlling shareholder in Private Eye until his death earlier this year.”I would like to do a biography because as with Mugg I could present a sympathetic picture.

Ingrams and Deborah, who is also a writer, are now living in the family home.Whether or not it is domestic bliss that has drawn his teeth, supportive biographies could become an Ingrams industry in future. She gave her story, or her side of it, to Nigel Dempster, an old enemy of Ingrams’, and besieged the Eye offices with abusive faxes and phone calls. Mary accused him of having an affair with an American journalist, which he denies, and kicked him out, before moving out herself to their holiday home in Rye. The writer Claud Cockburn, who introduced him to Muggeridge, was an early influence.Ingrams was desperately homesick at prep school, but things looked up when he went to Shrewsbury and met his fellow founders of Private Eye, Willie Rushton, Christopher Booker and Paul Foot.He met his former wife at Private Eye, where she was a secretary They have two grown-up children, Margaret and Fred The split was unpleasant and high-profile. “I never had a father that I knew, so I have always had father-figures in my life,” he says.

He has always been close to his mother, now 87, but his father is a slightly mysterious figure, a “freelance merchant banker” who was often away and who died when Ingrams was 15. He fiddles with his glasses as he talks, carefully lining them up against the headline of the newspaper he is leaning on. His silences seem less morose than those of legend and more the considered pauses of a careful speaker.He is 57 now His childhood does not seem to provide happy memories. He was the second of four boys, and spent his early years living in Aberdeenshire with his mother’s family After the war, the family moved to Cheyne Row in London.