Ian Hislop

"The trouble about working on a tabloid is that they tend to be run by bullies."

"I do have a residual belief that, if at all possible, you should try not to mock the weak."

"If this is justice, I am a banana."

"For fifty years Private Eye has pretty much in most issues exposed a miscarriage of justice, and a lot of them have been murders. Over the years, large numbers of these cases have been found to be entirely wrong, and the men convicted -- almost always men, there was a couple of women -- have been found innocent, so we would have killed those people, and in some of those very high profile cases which involved terrorism cases, we would have made very dangerous new martyrs by executing people who turned out not to have committed the murders involved. So on a purely practical basis, whatever you think it says about the civilised nature of your society or not, I think it would be incredibly dangerous to have capital punishment back."

"In Britain we have a free press. Its not a pretty press, but its free. The people who cant bear the Daily Mail, they say: you should ban it. No no, no no, you dont ban it... you dont buy it."

"So no, Im not in that camp, but I do think that statutory regulation is not required, and most of the heinous crimes that came up and have made such a splash in front of this Inquiry have already been illegal. Contempt of court is illegal. Phone tapping is illegal. Taking money from - policemen taking money is illegal. All of these things dont need a code. We already have laws for them. The fact that these laws were not rigorously enforced is, again, due to the behaviour of the police, the interaction of the police and News International, and - I mean, lets be honest about this - the fact that our politicians have been very, very involved, in ways that I think are not sensible, with senior News International people, and I hope youll be calling the Prime Minister and Tony Blair and Gordon Brown to explain how that comes down from the top."