Richard Ingrams: 'I have lots of enemies, some of them enduring'

Once, in Fawlty Towers, Basil and Manuel were trying to hide a corpse in the hotel. They rushed into a room carrying the body, only to find a guest called Mr Ingrams sitting on the bed and blowing up an inflatable sex doll. They made their excuses and left. There is "absolutely no doubt", says Richard Ingrams, that John Cleese took his revenge for being criticised in the Spectator. "Everyone was saying: 'He's brilliantly funny.' I was the one person saying: 'Oh no he's not.'" The former Private Eye and Oldie editor giggles, eyeing me over his glasses. "He was really annoyed."

Ingrams is sitting at a sun-dappled table in the garden of the House of St Barnabas club in London's Soho. He is joined by his second wife, Sara, who is younger by three decades and is, also, his goddaughter. "Some may think they're odd - or worse," he says of these two facts. "But oldies like me don't care what some people think. Why should I?"

Ingrams has just quit, in acrimonious circumstances, his job as editor of the Oldie after 22 years, but he couldn't look happier.

Ingrams has had a charmed career in journalism skewering the pompous and powerful, but has suffered a great deal in his private life. His father died early, two of his three brothers have died, his first marriage of 30 years ended bitterly and his wife later died. Two of his three children have died too – one of them, Arthur, who suffered from cerebral palsy, aged seven in 1977, while his daughter Jubby died of a heroin overdose at 39, alone in a bedsit, leaving three children and her husband. And he has lived long enough to grieve over the deaths of many of his best friends and most talented collaborators in journalism and satire – Paul Foot, Willie Rushton, Auberon Waugh, Peter Cook, among them. Hard to begrudge that late marital happiness – still less, perhaps, for getting his kicks from needling people.

"Sometimes to really annoy people is a badge of honour." Quite so. A few years ago I wrote a stinking review of Joanne Harris's novel Coastliners. She took Cleese-like revenge in her 2010 novel Blueeyedboy by creating the character of a sleazy Guardian journalist called Jeffrey Stuart. At least, I suppose, he wasn't inflating a sex doll. "You should sue," advises Ingrams. "People have got money for that sort of thing."

It's never occurred to me, probably because I don't have Ingrams' talent for enmity. Once, for instance, when he was editor of Private Eye, Ingrams took revenge on the gossip columnist Nigel Dempster for publishing marital misdemeanours alleged by his first wife, Mary. Ingrams sent an anonymous letter signed "Mail reader" to Dempster, saying that Ingrams had been seen walking arm-in-arm through Hastings with former Miss India Pamella Bordes. Dempster duly published the story, then Ingrams issued a press release saying it was a hoax. Ian Hislop, who succeeded Ingrams as Private Eye editor, joined in the resultant glee: "We always knew Dempster was stupid. But was he that stupid? The answer – gloriously – is yes.''

"I have a lot of enemies," Ingrams concedes, looking and sounding as bufferishly toothless as an Anglican bishop but with vitriol, one suspects, boiling in his veins. "Some of them enduring." And some of them dead: he has outlived not just Dempster but grudges with Robert Maxwell, Kenneth Tynan, Sir James Goldsmith. "Some are still going. Max Hastings. Can't remember what that was about now. The Falklands, probably."

But Ingrams is in the middle of a new, all-consuming feud now. Last month he resigned as editor of the Oldie, the magazine devoted to reversing the advances of youth culture that he founded with his journalistic friends Auberon Waugh, Alexander Chancellor and Stephen Glover 22 years ago. He has fallen out with its publisher (and former business manager), James Pembroke, who bought the magazine in 2007.

"For a long time I got on with James well on the Oldie, he was very good and did a lot of subscription marketing and got the magazine on newsstands."

"Thanks to his [Pembroke's] enthusiasm and business flair," writes Ingrams in a potted history of the magazine that's still on its website, "the Oldie's circulation has just passed the 41,000 mark. Onwards and upwards!" It's an old piece because the circulation is now above 45,000. Not bad for a magazine that prompted Julie Burchill to write to Ingrams in 1992: "Congratulations on producing the most pathetic magazine ever published."

"It was this letter from Julie Burchill," argues Ingrams, "that persuaded me that we might have a future. It was such a magnificent tribute from exactly the right sort of icon of modern Britain that I took some convincing that it wasn't a hoax."

But onwards and upwards? No more. The Oldie is reportedly not a happy ship. Relations between Ingrams and Pembroke have soured.

Two weeks ago, Pembroke summoned Ingrams to a disciplinary hearing. Ingrams said he was too old for disciplinary hearings, and resigned. "The sad thing in a way is that I had a very good team there with great contributors. But there's a cuckoo in the nest. James told the contributors that the reason I'm resigning is because I found the workload too heavy. But it isn't. The Oldie magazine really wrote itself – all I did was choose the cartoons."

There is, Ingrams says, an hilarious coda. The acting editor is planning a three-page special on Ingrams. Sara, who has been working at her laptop, looks up and says: "The staff are apparently refusing to work on it." The couple laugh heartily.

Ingrams has been lucky in journalism to be spared such office politics until his eighth decade. "Absolutely. In the old days at the Eye, the owner was Peter Cook. He was a lovely man. He never even took any money even though he owned all the shares." And his creative input was, Ingrams suggests, unlike Pembroke's, welcome. "Cook thought up quite a few of the covers. There was one where the SAS shot a lot of people in Northern Ireland. There was an army officer saying: 'Why did you fire 18 rounds?' And there's a man saying: 'We ran out of bullets.'" He laughs again.

Ingrams began his journalistic career early, editing the school magazine with his chum Willie Rushton at Shrewsbury public school in the 1950s. In 1962, he and Rushton were among the founders of Private Eye, which Ingrams edited from 1963 until 1986. The magazine caught the satire wave that was rising in Britain and Ingrams' undeferential spirit, tilting at politicians and celebrities, whom he airily designated pseuds or bores (or both), caught the public mood.

He, though, often wound up accounting for Private Eye's heroically unchecked stories in court. "People would say: 'Didn't you check out this story?' But I would say if you check the story you run the risk of alerting the subject the story is coming out so that they could injunct. Or they could deny it and then what are you going to do – retract? That was not how we worked. There definitely were cases where if we were convinced that the story was true we would put it in."

Once, for instance, Private Eye was sued by drama critic Kenneth Tynan. "We said he had taken his trousers off at a party and there were young girls there. He issued a writ for libel. Many years later, it came out that Tynan was addicted to flagellation and spanking and he kept a diary of his spanking activities. Shortly after this libel action began the diary was stolen, went missing, and Tynan became convinced I'd stolen it. When the case came to court, it was going to be presented as evidence and read out. So he dropped the libel action." Had Ingrams stolen it? "No! But I was flattered by the suggestion."

Ingrams says that Private Eye was divided between jokesmiths such as himself and real reporters such as fellow Old Salopian (the name for Shrewsbury school alumni) Paul Foot who developed the satirical magazine's reputation for investigative journalism. He says he resigned in 1986 because he was spending too much time with lawyers rather than writing gags and instead appointed Ian Hislop, who remains editor. "I didn't concentrate on these meetings with lawyers and that was fatal because you really had to have a grip and Ian is much better at that than I am."

He has subsequently become a serial resigner. In 2005 he quit the Observer as columnist over its pro-Iraq war stance. "That was a said affair. I got on with Roger [Alton, the then editor] fine but unfortunately he was seduced by Alastair Campbell when he was invited round to No 10. These people are impressed by those sort of things." He was, though, fired from the Independent as a columnist by then-editor Chris Blackhurst in 2011. "He invited me to his club, the Reform Club and we had a very nice lunch. I went away thinking he's a decent bloke, seems to like the column. Two days later I got a letter from him saying: 'I enjoyed our lunch and you're fired.'"

"And they brought in this new columnist to replace me, Chris Bryant, the gay vicar." That must have really hurt, I suggest to Ingrams, particularly as you're a committed homophobe? "No, no, no," says Ingrams. He waves away the question when I ask him to expand on this – leaving me unsure if he is denying the hurt or the homophobia. But his hostility to homosexuality is certainly longstanding – it guided Private Eye's long-running opposition to the gay rights movement during his editorship.

Though 76, Richard Ingrams isn't ready to retire quite yet. He has nearly finished his book on four miscarriages of justice that were investigated by the late broadcaster and journalist Ludovic Kennedy. Or, rather, he has handwritten the manuscript and his wife Sara is typing it up before it is sent to the publishers. He would like it to be known that he is available for work.

A friend of mine would like to investigate the possibility of Ingrams writing for the music magazine Mojo. He perks up unexpectedly (after all, he hates pop music), and proposes an idea for his first column. "I was thinking of writing a piece about hymn singing because there's such a contrast between the Catholic and Protestant hymns."

Ingrams played organ regularly in Anglican churches and converted to Catholicism in 2011. Religion has always been an important, if vexed, part of his life: he was brought up by a fiercely Anglican father, Leonard, and a no less ardently Catholic mother, Victoria. "I was, technically speaking, Catholic. My mother had all her children baptised as Catholics without telling her husband." He went to the funeral of Rose Foot, widow of Paul, recently. "It ended up with Bob Dylan's Mr Tambourine Man and I thought that was all wrong. I felt there, as I do so much in my life, out of step with modern times." He and Sara attended a funeral more to his liking last year, for Guardian sports writer Frank Keating. "It was at Douai Abbey, a Benedictine School. There were around five priests there and he was sprinkled with holy water and incense and I thought: 'This is how it should be. That's how I want to go.'"

Sara, raised like her husband an Anglican, is now taking instruction from Catholic priests. Though the couple have known each other all her life, their romance began four years ago in court when Sara, a medical researcher, was fighting a case involving a fraudulent neurologist. He was eventually suspended for 12 months, but only after Sara had lost her job and her relationship with her partner, the father of their two small boys.

"Sara had blown the whistle on a neurologist who was falsifying his research and nobody wanted to know. Only at the last hearing at the appeal court did she finally emerge victorious. And, unlike me when I went to court to fight libel, she did it on her own with the medical profession against her."

How beautiful, I suggest, that the appeal court, so often the scene of feuding, was the birthplace of their love. They both chuckle. "It all came good in the end," says Sara. "At least we're happy together whatever happens. The fact that he's facing all this is astounding to me."

Ingrams believes that there is a parallel between Sara's court battle and his dispute with the Oldie: "It's one of the things I have in common with her – we're not going to be pushed around by these bastards."