As founding editor of the now-defunct Scallywag magazine, which got libelled out of existence with actions against innocent retailers, and which published many allegations which now seem to be finding the light of day (including Archer), am I now, please, allowed a little gloat?

I grew up on Private Eye, which was a compulsive, impulsive, part of my youth during the whole rebellious thing they now call the 60s. This public school rag epitomised the entire rebellion with a sort of daring behind-the-bike sheds bravura.

While PE is still highly readable, it is not what it what it was, because of the influence of lawyers. When it decided to go "commercial," shortly before Richard Ingrams left, it was on the insistence of WH Smith and John Menzies that every issue must be read by their own libel lawyers - who never let anything through which could ever be slightly contentious. So, in effect, Private Eye became "tame".

I started Scallywag magazine in Dorset when PE was going through a positive decline. It was a one man band and just about paid its way. It was a lot of fun and it was no holds barred. I took on the local estate agent mafia; the local brewery (over closing country pubs); the local councils on a quite terrible scandal over methane gas deposits in their main country park. It subsequently resulted in mass resignations from county hall.

I was blackballed from every major venue in town, including the Royal Yacht Club, and twice evaded being murdered by an assassin who later confessed to me how he had tried to do it. But I never once went to a lawyer.

I got sued by the brewery and attempted to be a litigant in person. I was chewed to pieces by a local solicitor who had done his homework and caught me on a complicated point of legal order. I went back into print the next day publishing the extensive defence I would have used if I had been allowed to. The brewery withdrew within hours of publication.

That was a sort of turning point to me. It wasn't a matter of false confidence, but of an innate feeling that if you felt you had 'em by the short and curlies, then publish and be damned.

After some 66 editions of the Dorset Scallywag (a complete set in vintage condition recently went for £7,000), I went into a new venture with two of my brothers: a London Scallywag, which eventually became national. We quite consciously decided never to let a lawyer edit the magazine. We would simply take our chances. We might consider advice, when we could get it, and then, if we still felt we 'ad 'em by the short and curlies, we would publish - regardless of any advice.

We only had one, rather celebrated, libel action - from the then prime minister, John Major. But Major had incorporated into his action something I thought he had rejected in his election manifesto: that libel actions should not include printers, distributors and retailers.

We were willing to take our chances in everything we published, even if occasionally we had to take someone's word for granted. But when the old soldier outside Westminster Tube station and then an obscure bookshop in Camden High Street, among many dozen others, received writs from Conservative central office, and we effectively could not sell the magazine, we were beat.

But nowadays I am watching daily as many of our former targets are getting blown away. We gave chapter and verse, for example, on Michael Portillo's homosexual dalliances. As a student I spent a whole year checking it out, including extensive trips to Cambridge and Morocco.

We were the first on to both Jonathan Aitken and Jeffrey Archer as liars and cheats. We published in some minute detail that, among much else, the lobbyist Ian Greer was the go-between for Al Fayed and Tory MPs.

If you go to the Scallywag website you will find another two dozen names which we have seriously libelled - and would never have been able to do had we been in the hands of the lawyers.

My own definition of "alternative" media is that part not run by accountants and by the all-pervading lawyers. For libel and nearly a dozen other gagging laws have always been the most formidable weapon of the establishment.

An alternative press is not so much anti-establishment but existing and acting independently from it. It should attempt to tell alternative truths, even if they are libellous, and sometimes especially if they are libellous.

They say "opinions are free: facts are sacred". I feel it should be the opposite. Facts are, in modern journalism, often highly suspect. Eyewitness accounts of almost anything differ madly. But opinions should be considered sacred in any society which pretends it is free.

First published in The Guardian - URL: http://www.guardian.co.uk

Simon Regan died on 8th August 2000 after a short illness.
Scallywag Magazine http://www.scallywag.org