so i thought "perha ps a blank page will be good" and so we have the theresa may memorial issue — her legacy in full. and a little thing at the bottom, saying "er, thank you". which, again, seems quite cruel, but was quite funny at the time. do you know how each of those — do you ever keep tabs on how each of those sell? yeah. yeah, that was a seller. i'm afraid that was popular! and nigel farage? nigel farage. this is great. he's always good. partly because he always does photo opportunities, so having been accused of having a party full of fruitca kes, he does a photo op eating a fruit cake. i mean, it is fantastic. i mean, he does thejoke for us. borisjohnson‘s private life has furnish you with ideas and this time you had a pretty busy one withjennifer arcuri. there was a proper public interest

in the story, public money had gone to those women who dances around the lap dancing pole but essentially the joke was that borisjohnson had been caught out. he is saying, i need technology lessons, and she is saying, floppy disk or hard drive. there is a properjoke here, with boris into his new girlfriend, i do not lie to women any more, and she says, except the queen. that is not a legal problem. that is the supreme courtjudgment. this is ourjob, reporting. and you sometimes jump on anniversaries, too. yes. this is when boris became prime minister, which many people equate with an event as unlikely as landing on the moon. but he did, and there's this brilliant picture of him just going into number 10, so we did it as the lunar landing, a souvenir issue — one small step for man and a giant

leap in the dark for mankind! and put it in black and white. and in terms of your annual, when you've got a year to get through — you've done many of these annuals, of course — when you've got to curate a year, what you were saying a moment ago is whatjournalism is about, what is your starting point with thinking about how we deal with this? do you just think "let's get the bestjokes" or do you think "we really need to reflect the yea r"? i try and get the bestjokes and if we've been dull about a particular subject or have not covered it well, i try and leave it out. i mean, we're exhaustive, but the idea is to be entertaining. you've been personally committed, haven't you, to trying to reverse the decline of the english cartoonist? yes. why have you and private eye kept up with your investment in cartoons? um, because, um, people like them and the mag sells. no, obviously, it's a much more elevated reason than that. no, i love cartoons! and i think that one of the things that print can do is reproduce sort of beautiful drawings that are funny.

and english cartooning tradition is very old and i think absolutely remarkable. so i am basically — i doubled the number of cartoons um, and people said, "well, you know, there aren't any young cartoonists. you won't get anyone." it is funny — if you offer money, people become cartoonists! it's amazing. we have got a brilliant raft of young cartoonists. i mean, this is a genuine skill and there are lots of people who do it really well. i mentioned politics, which is what most of your covers are about. now, we seem to be in an age of polarisation, don't we? and genuine differences. why has that happened, do you think? is is the delayed effect of a financial crash? um, i think the referendum was a question about, you know, whether you are essentially happy with the way britain is or not, whether you think it is too unequal, whether you think you have been left behind by the international world that has come into business, whether you would rather your life was structured in different ways. in the end, for me, it wasn't really about europe at all.

i mean, the question that people answered was a question about themselves. it's perfectly reasonable, but it did not have anything to do with the eu. so we managed to politicise, essentially, a cultural divide. which is why we have ended up with three years of people shouting at each other. and interestingly, the last three years has furnished your covers with some very loud characters. what does that do for satire, though? does satire become easier or harder when you have the stranger—than—life characters? i mean, it does two things. one is everybody says to you "satire is over now because you cannot satirize trump — he's doing it to himself". or, you know, "boris is funny," you know? "there's nothing more to add." which is not true. but you have to work harder. because you have to find the areas where they are vulnerable, the areas where they genuinely are funny and where you can get under their skin. obviously, it's incredibly flattering where we have done some joke about trump which turned up in a tweet, saying, "this was unfunny and not clever and not funny"

and that is the ultimate prize. and to find that boris is furious by something, that's what you want. does he still get — does he ever get in touch? do his people ever get in touch? i mean, he's blssed your cover many, many, many times. do you think boris is still cheesed off when he sees himself, perhaps with jennifer arcuri, on your front page? oh, i do hope so! chuckles what's your technique for dealing with people who are readily offended online? well, i'm not online, which helps. have you found that that's hard to sustain over the course of the development of the internet? you've two children in their 20s — i mean, what do they think with the fact that dad is not online? i've no idea, presumably because i haven't looked online! no, it's very restful. i do recommend it! i think i could get used to that idea. unfortunately, the bbc‘s media editor may not be allowed to do that. one of the things about the age which we live is that the truth

seems up for grabs in a way that it has not been for a long time — maybe not ever in the course of your career. do you think it is fair to say that these days, the penalty or sanction faced by those caught lying has almost disappeared ? there are people getting away with lying as never before. i mean, i do think it is a real problem now, the idea of fake news, and that is one of the things that is why i don't spend a lot of time online, because i'm infuriated by, you know, perfectly reasonable people who say to me, "pfft! i notice you did not run that story about hillary clinton murdering everybody". and i said "i did not run it because it is not true". and they said "i read it online!" and these are people who, they say to you, "the mainstream media, ian, is just full of lies" and then they believe the biggest and stupidest lie that someone in a bedroom has written up on the internet and sent out as a blog. i mean, there's a real divide between the sort of supposedly scepticism, sort of fierce refusal to believe anything you read in the normal media, and then believing almost anything you read online.

and this is weird and it makes it — it makes the idea of truth polluted, which, as we know from the history of fake news, this is what the original putin doctrine was and this is what trump wants. he does not want you to believe this rubbish he pumps out. he wants you to believe nothing. and yet, i know that people watching this on bbc or listening to this via a bbc podcast will think that, "actually, the bbc is part of the problem". that there is, you know — these days, if you want to go viral, you say, "there is a conspiracy of silence at the bbc". whether or not there is one or not, why are people so keen to believe conspiracy theories about a cover—up by journalists? in other words, why is trust injournalism so low? well, i mean, we have not distinguished ourselves over past 20 years! you know, the phone hacking thing was not good. the levison enquiry was not marvellous. so, i mean — i mean, there is a reason for people to be slightly sceptical about journalism.

but it is in much the same way as the, you know, the expenses scandal made people very sceptical about politicians. but i believe that — and i have said this before — but that being sceptical is not the same as being cynical. it does not mean you believe in nothing, you try and assess and evaluate. there is really good journalism going on. the alternative is literally sitting at home thinking "i wonder what i believe". you have said in the past you do not talk about your voting habits. is the really striking about the election campaign that we saw at the end of 2019 that a lot of the fake news was actually pumped out by official channels. it was coming from the main parties. is that not really what fake news is, and is that notjust old—fashioned political spin? i think the thing that really shocked everyone in that political campaign was not the idea that hidden on the internet somewhere, there were messages going out that were being paid for and we did not know about. i mean, it is reasonable to criticise. it was the fact that political parties were pretending

they were fact—checking outputs or pretending they were another outfit in order to pump out their own messages. the old —fashioned political spin is "we are the tory party and we promise you 80,000 more trees, houses, nurses" whatever it is. "we are labour party, we have 80,000 and another 80,000 nurses, trees," whatever. that is old—fashioned political spin — that's what people know about. the fake messaging and then when you get caught out and you say, "oh, it was a joke". it is satire. no, it is not satire. we are doing bloody satire. get the tory party out of it. you said in the past you don't talk much about your voting habits but you said you were a democrat and believe in democracy. as you look around the world, do you think we are in this sort of period of democratic recession which is a correction that has been readjusted but in order to survive, or do you have to think we are entering a darker, post—democratic age? no, i don't believe that, but that

i am on the whole quite optimistic. i mean, we are in the middle of a cult of the strongman and a lot of leadership around the world is very autocratic. and populist movements have, i think, done democracy no favours in forgetting the normal checks and balances and the structures and sort of boring sets of standards and values that allow democracy to function. none of that is very encouraging. but essentially, i think most periods — and one of the good things about getting older — think "this is a terrible time" and "british politics has never been so divisive?" and i think "poll tax, riots, the miners‘ strike" — that was not a cohesive period. in british politics. and you know, i was quote my mother—in—law said to me "i have never been so worried

as i am now about the world". and i said "you were a teenager in 1939". and she said, "so i was". i do think that you have to keep a certain amount of perspective. i'm conscious as i see that behind you, there are endless letters. in terms of threats you have had this year, legal and otherwise — you have had many legal threats over the year — how does this year rank in terms of the threats to ruin you and your family's welfare? interesting, because i think that something about brexit, people must be a bit more depressed. we have had quite a lot of very rich people suing. what sort of stuff? mostly russian or thereabouts. about money and why it's in london, where it is going to, so we've had quite a lot of that. is there ever any danger that these

cases are going to end up bankrupting you and private eye? that's why i have a wooden table. we will see. we survive on the favour of our readers. they pay up and that is where our money comes from. and, you know, most of our stories are about unexplained wealth. you know where ours is from and we don't know where theirs is from. so that's the difference. ian hislop, thank you very much indeed. here is the good news — from tomorrow, the days will start getting longer. a whole second longer on monday. how about the weather? a mixture of sunshine and showers, but most of the time the weather will be dry and bright. that is because we will be between weather systems on monday. one low pressure and its weather front clearing to the east, then we get

this big gap before the next low arrives afterwards. let's concentrate on the early hours of monday first, so clear spells in the south. it won't be particularly cold, showers affecting northern ireland in western scotland. the only real frost will be in north—east scotland. milder in the south. on monday, there is a low pressure approaching us, but it won't reach us until late monday night, so the bulk of monday itself is looking fine across most of the uk, not absolutely everywhere, because we are expecting showers in the north—west of the country. to the north—west of the country. to the south, across wales and england, it will be mostly dry. and also in the north and east of scotland, some sunshine. here, the weather will be cold est, sunshine. here, the weather will be coldest, around four celsius in aberdeen, and double figures in the south. monday night, rain spills into the south—west and western

parts of the country, and with that also comes a lot of mild air, so that means that christmas eve is going to be a mild day, particularly across the south of the uk. it will bea across the south of the uk. it will be a cloudy one with rain at times, too. we don't expect an awful lot of rain, but in the southern half of the uk, it may not be particularly pleasant. later in the evening on tuesday, the weather will start to dry out and we will start to see clearer spells developing, and that isa hint clearer spells developing, and that is a hint of things to come for christmas day itself. the good news is, on christmas day itself, we could be waking up to a lot of sunshine, slightly colder weather, maybe even a touch of frost across the north—east of the country, really quite a beautiful day for many of us. and still mild, temperatures around nine or 10 celsius in the south, closer to six in the north, before this arrives for boxing day.

this is bbc news. i'm lukwesa burak. the headlines at seven. australia's firefighters in the state of new south wales are still battling to bring more than a hundred blazes under control. chelsea's match at tottenham is marred — after the crowd were warned three times over the tannoy, about racist behaviour. tesco suspends christmas card production at a chinese factory — after a 6—year—old girl in london finds a message claiming that prisoners are being forced to pack them. we were writing in them and about on my sixth or eighth card, there was... somebody older had already written in it. the home secretary meets the family of harry dunn — the teenager killed in a road accident in northamptonshire