When a photograph of the two was suggested, Hislop was heard to say: “Only if I can have my hands round his scrawny little neck.”Libel lawyers believe that the magazine has made an impact upon the law over the last 40 years. As Mark Stephens puts it: “They’ve exposed the hypocrisy in the libel laws that allowed scoundrels to come into the courts with the intention of trying to get a clean bill of health for their reputation.”Certainly, the magazine took on those libel litigators that have otherwise effectively used the law to muzzle their critics. Business tycoon Sir James Goldsmith issued over 60 libel writs in 1976 against the magazine and 37 of its distributors. He also resurrected the law of criminal libel in his attempts to sue the magazine out of business.Desmond Browne QC, of 5 Raymond Buildings, was advising the magazine at the time. He pays tribute to editor Richard Ingrams, and to the other writers who faced criminal charges, for “not losing their nerve” in the face of “overkill”.”The outrage that people felt at the perception that Goldsmith was trying to destroy the magazine meant that no one else, with the possible exception of Robert Maxwell, was so heavy-handed again,” Browne says.

Geoffrey Bindman believes that such oppressive use of the law to hound distributors eventually led to the Defamation Act 1996, which provides a defence to the innocent disseminator of a libel.Last week also marked the anniversary of the death of Robert Maxwell. In 1986 Maxwell won £55,000, after the magazine claimed that he had funded an overseas trip for Neil Kinnock so that he would be recommended for a knighthood.The magazine’s old proprietor, Peter Cook, was on hand to raise flagging spirits. Maxwell called upon a series of character witnesses to establish his good name, including the Lord Chancellor, Lord Elwyn-Jones and Michael Foot, the former leader of the Labour party. After one gruelling morning in court, Cook came up with the idea that the Eye needed someone to vouch for its own good name “He thought about it for a while,” Kevin Bays recalls. “Suddenly, he said ‘Right, I know what we’ll do, we’ll call Myra Hindley’.”In the end it might not have made much difference.

The magazine had to pay £50,000 punitive damages because, according to Bays, the jury felt that Private Eye had “not behaved well”. “One of our witnesses was asked if the Eye ever told lies, and they said: ‘Yes, they’re called the apologies’,” he recounts. “That might have been a turning-point in the case.”The last time Robert Maxwell issued a writ against Private Eye was in October 1991, over an article alleging that he had misappropriated large sums of money from the Mirror Group pension fund Now we all know about the missing funds. A fortnight after that writ was issued Cap’n Bob, as Maxwell is dubbed in the magazine, fell off his yacht, bringing the case to an early end.The Condliffe litigation might not be on a scale to compare with some of its epic libel battles, but it illustrates that the Eye is still prepared to go down fighting. “I don’t think that Ian Hislop has ever deliberately stuck his head over the parapet,” Desmond Browne notes. “But on the other hand, he has been extremely brave in fighting a case that was immeasurably hazardous in financial terms, and without any issue of pubic interest or principle arising from it.”. The wife of Harold Shipman, who has steadfastly refused to co-operate with police inquiries into the serial killer, was ordered to appear before the public inquiry investigating his crimes.