Andrew Osmond

PRIVATE EYE may not be quite what it was when the bright young things led by Peter Cook set it up in 1961 with #300 capital provided by Andrew Osmond, who has died aged 61 of a brain tumour, but it is still a source of information, scandal, satire, and entertainment aimed at upsetting the Establishment.

Osmond, who gave the magazine its celebrated name, sold most of his shares nine months after the magazine was launched, but without him it might never have been. The son of a Lincolnshire businessman, he was educated at Harrow and was one of the last people to do National Service in 1956. He was in the Rifle Brigade, won the Sword of Honour at Eaton Hall, and was commissioned in the Gurkha Rifles. He saw service in Malaya, and enjoyed telling how he once led a patrol into the jungle, asked for artillery support for an attack on enemy positions, gave the wrong co-ordinates - those of his own platoon - and had to endure the consequences.

He went to Oxford, where he was a contemporary of Richard Ingrams and Paul Foot, another Eye institution at present very ill in hospital, and contributed to their humorous magazine, Parson's Pleasure. He was aiming for a career in the Foreign Office and on graduating went to Paris to learn French.

Peter Usborne, with whom he had set up the magazine Mesopotamia at Oxford, Ingrams, Willie Rushton, and Christopher Booker called him back to London because he was the only person they knew with the necessary cash they required for the satirical magazine they wanted to set up.

Osmond joined in, helping to distribute it in his Mini round the bars and restaurants of Kensington where it sold mainly at first. He also delivered the copy to their printers in north-west London, where it was done on a then-new photo-litho process. The journey proved an inspiration. Neasden and Private Eye became inseparably linked.

In 1962 the lure of the Foreign Office proved too strong and he sold his controlling share to Peter Cook and Nick Luard, who owned the Establishment, the Greek Street nightclub, and embarked on a diplomatic career. To relieve the tedium of diplomatic life, he started to write thrillers with one of his colleagues in the Rome Embassy, Douglas Hurd. They were Send Him Victorious (1968), The Smile on the Face of the Tiger (1969), Scotch on the Rocks (1971), and War Without Frontiers (1982). Scotch on the Rocks, about the Nationalists embarking on a campaign of street violence and Scotland becoming independent, caused something of a sensation. The Guardian called it ''sizzling''. Jim MacTaggart filmed a serial version for the BBC, the SNP protested, and the tapes of what was a remarkable production were wiped. It was just too hot a political potato.

Osmond left the Foreign Office in 1969 to embark on a career as a writer, settling with his American wife in Burford, Oxfordshire. He rejoined Private Eye and for several years was its part-time business manager. In 1985 he joined a firm which provided speeches for businessmen, and in due course set up his own business, Company Writers. He is survived by his wife and their son and daughter.