First the humblebrag – I am, in my opinion, the only person in the world to have letters published in The London Review of Books, The Financial Times, Viz and Private Eye.
Second, the annotated and hyperlinked version of the letter in Private Eye.
(For those who don’t live in the UK, Private Eye is a fortnightly publication, started in the early 1960s by a set of well-educated young troublemakers. It has settled into a very potent mix of satire (when you want to leak, Private Eye is one of your first ports of call) and fine investigative journalism. Many a national scandal has started life in the pages of Private Eye, and if you subscribe, you get a head start on what bombs will blow up in the Establishment’s face (the PFI disasters, the post office scandal, you name it). It has had its blindspots (autism) and historically it was not good on science, not terribly good on gender and race. But so what, nobody and nothing is perfect. Over the decades a ‘code’ has sprung up for submitting letters – some of them appear below, and I will annotate. There are others… If you don’t subscribe, well, you’re missing out (shout out to the dear MIL, btw).)
Please allow me to be (1) the 94,000th (2) eco-loon (3) reader to raise an eyebrow at the characterisation in issue 1600 of Extinction Rebellion an ‘extreme’ organisation, a word Mr/Ms Rottenboroughs (4) used twice in their report on the Greens.
The real extremists, as even such fringe figures as, er, the Secretary-General of the United Nations have pointed out, are those who think we can keep on extracting and burning fossil fuels.
I hold no particular brief for XR and JSO, and have written on them critically in The Conversation [see here and here, for example], but I do think Private Eye could invest a thesaurus – perhaps ‘radical’ or ‘self-defeating’ or ‘scientifically-literate’ would work – and perhaps be a little less “reddy” with its green-baiting, leaving that to the people who do it so well (the Hate Mail, the Daily Depress and so on).
It’s a pity, because on the whole Private Eye is now pretty good on climate and clean energy (see Old Sparky’s coverage of various Drax scams, and cartoons aplenty – including the ever-brilliant Banx on page 32 of the same issue. I would cancel my subscription, (5) but where else would I get such a fortnightly dose of satire and sterling investigative journalism?
Dr Marc Hudson
Footnotes
(1) “please allow me to…” is one of the ritualistic ways people write to Private Eye, a kind of mock-humility
(2) 94 is, for reasons that escape me, a magic number for Private Eye – “please turn to page 94 – there are never that many pages in the magazine)
(3) “eco-loons” – you’re supposed to do self-disparagement/self-deprecation, to show you are part of the peri-Establishment, I think
(4) Rotten Boroughs is the name of the page that covers local government malfeasance – corruption, incompetence etc
(5) Letters often end with people threatening to cancel their subscription, or doing so, or saying something like “your last issue was juvenile, unfair and disgusting. Excellent work! Please renew my subscription.” This paragraph also echoes the “I would get out more” line.
There are plenty of other parts of the code…
Check out this PhD thesis
And this recent thing
marchudson.net 
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