Here’s a rum do. Ian Burrell, of the Independent, gets it bang-on about about the Eye’s digital strategy (or pointed lack of one).

But – writing just a couple of months back – he refers to the mag’s “monochrome presentation”. And when I mentioned this to someone else who probably looks at the magazine as regularly as Burrell does, his reply was “it is still black and white, isn’t it?”

Private Eye has been printed in colour for more than a decade now. Here – lovingly fished from a bin by me in the knowledge that they’d come in useful at some point – are some of the practice covers produced in March 1998 as the mag prepared to wave goodbye to black and white forever…

Next week: how much hacks on the Independent enjoy the Secret Diary of John Major and Jeff Bernard’s racing column in the Eye each fortnight…