Monty Stubble

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Monty Stubble is a nom de plume of Ian Hislop, editor of the British fortnightly satirical magazine Private Eye. He used it for his collaboration with cartoonist Nick Newman, which produced the cartoon strip Battle for Britain that appeared in the magazine during the 1980s and was later published in book form by André Deutsch in 1987.

The name "Monty Stubble" is a play on the title of the film I Was Monty's Double, about the career of Clifton James, who famously impersonated Mongomery for espionage purposes during World War Two.

The strip ended because Stubble "was tragically lost in action in the last week of the war, believed to have been hit by a stray pencil sharpener".

The strip, widely considered amongst the best ever to appear in the magazine, featured the struggles of the Labour Party led by Neil Kinnock against the Thatcher government, in the format of the war-story comic books published principally by Fleetway in the years following World War II. "Taffy" Kinnock is portrayed as the hapless leader of a British platoon battling against superior forces led by "Thatchler", and always coming off second-best. The platoon was made up of thinly-disguised members of the shadow cabinet and other leading Party members, such as "Barmy" Benn (Tony Benn), "Fatty" Heffer (Eric Heffer) who often had the last word ("cruel Cockney humour") and "Chatterjee" (Roy Hattersley). The platoon was usually depicted as backbiting, inept, bolshie and unco-operative, which was the main reason for their constant defeats.

Hislop skilfully translated contemporary political satire into the stock words and phrases of the Fleetway comics. Newman's illustrations were an uncanny visual parody, contributing greatly to the popularity of a strip which generally displayed a highly successful marriage of storyline and pictures.