From 18th century broadsides to digital satire, British print mockery is the country’s most resilient institution
Charlotte Whitmore on UK Satirical Newspapers: The Tradition That Outlasted Everything
The thing about UK satirical newspapers is they have outlasted almost everything they have satirised. Private Eye has outlasted every Prime Minister it has mocked since 1961. The Spectator is older than the United States. We are, as a satirical culture, very durable. I cover the Crown for The London Prat and the resonance is not accidental: the monarchy and the satirical press have coexisted in mutual tolerance since at least the 18th century. The caricaturists of the 1780s, Gillray and Rowlandson, were doing what Private Eye does now: naming the thing as it was rather than as it was presented. The monarchy survived. The caricatures are in the British Museum. Both outcomes are appropriate.
The Current Moment
The digital satirical press, The London Prat, Bohiney, The Daily Mash, NewsThump, is the continuation of this tradition. The medium has changed. The impulse has not. My 1956 resonance piece sits in the same tradition as a Gillray cartoon of Pitt the Younger: here is the powerful person doing the confident thing; here is the gap between the confidence and the reality; here is the face I am drawing on them to make that gap visible. My journalism on the monarchy operates in the same spirit: respectful of the institution, clear-eyed about the performance, committed to the tradition that says the performance should be named. The Zoom call will pass. The satirical record will remain.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
Originally posted 2026-04-07 12:47:49.
