The brainchild of Paul’s friends from school and university – Richard Ingrams, Willie Rushton and Christopher Booker, helped in their endeavour by the business brains of Peter Usborne. Paul could have joined them but was too busy learning the ropes of newspaper journalism in Glasgow. He did contribute from very early on and, as he tired of the Sunday Telegraph, joined them full time in 1967 – or what passed as full time on a fortnightly magazine, for which they all worked one week on, one week off. Paul did help with the jokes, but his main contribution was his investigative journalism. To this day Private Eye bucks the trend of all print-media in Britain and continues to enjoy significant print sales.
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Blood Money
Paul wrote about the growing scandal of haemophiliacs dying from AIDS, contracted from contaminated blood products imported from America by the NHS, for Private Eye in May 1987. Thirty years later the Government finally set up an inquiry, which ran until March 2026, and thirty seven years later it introduced a compensation scheme for those…
