The stench of dirty Mac: Kelvin MacKenzie is right to say The Sun is done but his explanation is stuck in the 80s

The 'veteran' Sun editor has used The Spectator to start a currant bun fight.

In a society with any moral fibre, Kelvin MacKenzie would be a cave-dwelling exile rather than a ‘respected’ media veteran whose opinions are actually sought out. But Britain is a cursèd island where horrors can only be removed from the media or politics by the bony fingers of death.

It is no surprise that The Spectator, a pompous fanzine for racists, head measurers, eugenics enthusiasts, and people who willingly consume the opinions of pickled egg-brained family embarrassment Toby Young, turned to MacKenzie for his analysis of the modern-day Sun newspaper.

MacKenzie was editor of The Sun for 13 years — from 1981 to 1994 — his reign of (t)error stretching from the early days of Thatcher right into the Major era. His was the demonic mind behind Gotcha!, Freddie Star Ate My Hamster, and most notoriously The Truth — the front page that defamed the Hillsborough victims and for which he has only ever made half-hearted, excuse-drenched apologies.

To understand how MacKenzie ran The Sun, you need to know how he saw its readers. In Chris Horrie and Peter Chippindale’s peerless history of the paper, Stick It Up Your Punter! The Uncut Story of the Sun Newspaper, recount a story from 1982 when John Blake, brought in from The Evening Standard to helm the newly-created Bizarre pop and showbiz column, backed an idea from one of his team to do a feature about legalising marijuana:

MacKenzie exploded at the idea. ‘You must be fucking joking!’ he screamed, poking Blake in the chest. ‘You don’t understand the readers, do you, eh?’

MacKenzie rapped out his picture of the Sun’s older reader. ‘He’s the bloke you see in the pub — a right old fascist, wants to send the wogs back, buy his poxy council house, he’s afraid of the unions, afraid of the Russians, hates the queers and weirdoes and drug dealers. He doesn’t want to hear about that stuff!’ he finally yelled, veins bulging.

He gave the entire desk a bollocking on its duty to know the ‘old fascist’ so well they could predict his every word. ‘When you can imagine that bloke saying, “‘ere I tried that marijuana last night — not bad,” then we’ll write about it. And not before!’ …

Over at The Mirror, the tabloid sage Keith Waterhouse [would] later characterise The Sun reader as the ‘skinhead with a six-pack’.

MacKenzie was 35 when he became editor of The Sun, but skilled in masking his own middle-class Kent¹ origins by cosplaying as an East London hardman, he was well able to project himself into the mind of that “old fascist”. Now 74, MacKenzie has completed his metamorphosis into that man, albeit a version with a far bigger platform to spout his opinions than the end of the bar and a lot more money at his disposal than the average British bigot.

Vicount Ian Kerr CGC @IanKerr

Kelvin MacKenzie's L!VE TV lasted four years and never made a profit. It lost £9,000,000 in it's final year.

In his Spectator article, The Sun goes down, MacKenzie turns the techniques of lies, distortion, half-truths and hyperbole that he honed in his years at the paper against his old masters. His second defenestration from The Sun in 2017 and News UK’s decision to sever all ties with him, including giving back shares in his financial advice website A Spokesman Said, after he compared the footballer Ross Barkley to a gorilla in his column, clearly still rankles.

MacKenzie begins his piece with a striking bit of colour that we will see quickly unravels upon contact with reality. He writes:

A couple of weeks ago Ally Ross, the longtime TV critic at the Sun, was summoned to the managing editor’s office. Such confrontations normally involve expenses. At the Daily Express in the 1950s one Middle East correspondent submitted his — one camel: £125. The narrow-eyed managing editor pointed out that if the camel was bought, it must have been sold, and they would be grateful if the claim was adjusted. Another form turned up 30 minutes later — burying a dead camel: £200.

This conversation with Ally was not about money. It was much more serious. It was solemnly explained to him that he had used the word ‘woke’ in his column — and it had been decreed on high that ‘woke’ was synonymous with racial injustice. So, from now on, columnists should not use the word in a disparaging manner in the Sun.

I review The Sun several times a week and there is never any shortage of stories castigating ‘wokeness’ and the culture war stench includes Ross’ reliably awful TV columns in which the overriding impression is of a man who despises the medium that he has chosen to write about.

In its exasperated response to MacKenzie, also published by The Spectator, News UK offers up multiple uses of the word ‘woke’ from The Sun in recent weeks as if saying, “Look! We are still as awful as we’ve always been. How dare Kelvin suggest we’ve got more pleasant!” The unsigned statement screeches:

It is complete nonsense to say that the word 'woke' has been banned from the Sun. No such conversations have taken place — with Ally Ross or anyone on the paper. We cover 'woke' stories on the front page regularly, including today, and we use the word throughout the paper and in leader columns.

MacKenzie uses the apparently-invented conversation between Ross and Victoria Watson, The Sun’s Managing Editor², as a jumping-off point to discuss the paper’s recent financial woes:

But to my mind, that bizarre chat in an office which is supposed to be the hub of free speech does explain one thing: why Murdoch announced last week that he had written down the value of the Sun newspaper to zero, acknowledging that the paper that created his fortune was now worthless. Broke. Skint. Potless.

I wrote last week about Murdoch writing down The Sun’s value and MacKenzie inevitably came up:

Kelvin MacKenzie @kelvmackenzie

Rupert Murdoch has written down the value of The Sun to zero accepting the tabloid is worthless. In my time we sold 4.3million a day and made £200m profit. Today it sells 500,000 and loses £100m.Over time The Sun has gone from feisty to cowardly. Rupert, go woke and you go broke.

Of course, Kelvin MacKenzie, the most racist, homophobic, sexist, and sinister of Murdoch’s rabid dogs believes The Sun is struggling not because of the new media environment, an advertising crunch caused by a global pandemic, and changing public opinion, but because it’s simply not horrible enough anymore. MacKenzie’s Sun was not feisty — it was Britain’s biggest bully, harassment and terror protected by bylines and a billionaire proprietor.

He repeats the 4.3 million copies boast again in The Spectator, forgetting how he threw away a whole city’s worth of circulation with his lies about Hillsborough and that he edited the paper in a pre-internet age.

MacKenzie did the job on easy mode, in an era when lies were easier to get away with and print newspapers were still a mass media product rather than the vestigial tail of News Corp’s holdings, retained partly for nostalgia and partly because of their remaining political clout.

Another broadcast from MacKenzie’s personal reality rather than the one we all share is the claim that The Sun only prints positive stories about celebrities now — that’ll come as a surprise to Rita Ora, for one — because of legal agreements stemming from phone hacking case settlements. He writes:

Its readership is mainly male, white and working class. They love a celebrity scandal, and would prefer to read the back page before the front. Instead of keeping this dwindling band happy, the Sun ignores their requirements and now imposes its own agenda on them. For instance, the chances of reading a celebrity scandal in the Sun today are non-existent. Under a legal deal with stars who have been phone hacked, the company has agreed to run only positive stories about them in the future. So that’s half of showbiz gone.

The other half of showbiz disappeared when, following This Morning presenter Phillip Schofield outing himself as gay in a spectacularly successful PR campaign, ITV CEO Dame Carolyn McCall went to the Sun’s London Bridge offices as she felt the paper had been unhelpful in the process. It was agreed without threats of either withdrawing ITV advertising or access to their stars that it would be better for everybody if, in the future, the Sun would only write nice things about ITV’s stable of talent. And that is the case today.

As you’d expect, News UK denies the claim about the McCall meeting, writing in its statement that:

There is also no agreement with ITV to only write positive stories about their celebrities, nor was there any meeting with Carolyn McCall, CEO of ITV, to discuss this or to discuss Phillip Schofield coming out. There are many other factual errors in this piece, and outdated assumptions about the Sun's readership and editorial position.

Were he not so determined to sell the story of The Sun gone woke, MacKenzie might recognise signs that the Schofield scoop had a lot more in common with his time in charge. It was one of Victoria Newton’s first ‘big’ stories after she became Editor of The Sun in February 2020 and multiple sources say despite Schofield’s claim that he made the decision to talk about his sexuality he was, in fact, pushed by the paper.

Byline Investigates published an investigation into the negotiations last year:

A source close to the matter told this website: “Dan Wootton spoke to Phillip Schofield and told him The Sun titles had information about his sexuality and that a story was highly likely to be published.

“The Sun’s position was that, because Phillip Schofield is a public figure, and a father of two daughters, and in a long marriage to a woman, having a sexuality that did not fit with that image, made him guilty of some sort of hypocrisy.

I was also told at the time by people within News UK that Newton and Dan Wootton, now of GB News and an ex-ITV celebrity news pundit, had met with Schofield and told him that a story was coming and that it would be better for him to cooperate. It was close to an open secret.

It’s a classic tabloid move — confronting someone with information and telling them they had better play along or the angle will be much worse. It’s the same tactic The Sun used to out Sir Simon Hughes, the former Lib Dem MP who won a hacking settlement against the paper earlier this month, and a method of getting ‘the story’ that MacKenzie himself sanctioned often.

In September 2019, the former rugby player Gareth Thomas discussed his HIV positive status in The Sunday Mirror after having been approached by a hack from another paper, widely believed to have been The Sun, who told his parents about the diagnosis before he was able to. He told BBC Radio 5Live:

I needed to be able to understand everything before I sat down with my parents and before I could do that a journalist decides to knock my parents’ door and ask them to make a comment on it. Now if that’s not the lowest form – you know what it’s wrong of me to even call it a journalist because as somebody who’s put my parents through a lot I didn’t want to put them through anymore.

In the same month, The Sun ran a story about a violent crime in which members of the cricketer Ben Stokes’ family were victims that occurred 3 years before he was born. It had the cooperation of another family member and tried to push Stokes into commenting on the record. He released a statement that read:

… The Sun has seen fit to publish extremely painful, sensitive and personal details concerning events in the private lives of my family, going back more than 31 years. It is hard to find words that adequately describe such low and despicable behaviour, disguised as journalism… To use my name as an excuse to shatter the privacy and private lives of — in particular — my parents is utterly disgusting… The decision to publish these details has grave and lifelong consequences for my mum in particular.

The paper sent journalists to Stokes’ parents’ home in New Zealand.

This is The Sun that MacKenzie claims is ‘woke’ and afraid of celebrity stories. His ‘it was worse in my day’ act doesn’t hold water. The Sun may be warier of legal costs now — especially after spending hundreds of millions of pounds and counting on phone-hacking settlements — but it remains as sinister and snide as it ever was under MacKenzie. It’s just not as powerful.

M-Double-You @BigBadLeem

@kelvmackenzie @afneil @OpenUniversity @GBNEWS @SkyNews Kelvin MacKenzie calling something disgraceful:

MacKenzie is like an evil old soldier, holed up in the forest, fighting a war that ended decades ago, with scant ammunition and a blade that’s been blunted by repeated contact with hard reality. His final criticism of the modern The Sun — modern being a relative term since it still deploys the vocabulary of an idiot trapped in 1976 — is that it now cares/claims to care about climate change:

The strangest volte-face is the paper’s sudden concern for climate change. The tabloid Sun has been published for 52 years and until 30 minutes ago it couldn’t give a damn about it. In fact, when I ran the place, we were vaguely in favour as it meant holidays in Norfolk would be warmer. But in a ludicrous attempt to attract the young (can you imagine anybody under 40 reading the Sun?) the paper has now launched a ‘Green Team’ to lecture readers on cutting their carbon footprint. It asks them to ‘join our campaign and save the planet’ by dropping used face masks into special bins at Morrisons where they will be recycled and ‘turned into benches and building materials’. I suppose the readers need something to sit on.

Stuck in the 80s, the most throwback of throwbacks, MacKenzie ignores that two-thirds of the British public say they see climate change as a major concern. The 1982-version of MacKenzie told the newsdesk that he’d publish stories about legalising marijuana when his red-faced fascist reader started sparking up. Well, the surveys suggested a significant number of those fury-filled fulminators now believe in climate change.

UK TV On This Day @UKTVOnThisDay

#OnThisDay 1995: L!VE TV, Mirror Group Newspapers' departure into cable television headed by Kelvin MacKenzie initially with Janet Street-Porter as managing director, begins.

Similarly, the notion that The Sun should just give up on trying to get to readers under-40 is just the kind of thinking you’d expect from a man who was middle-aged from his teens onwards, a bilious binbag of wind, whose biggest complaint about Stick It Up Your Punter! was that it said he had a fat arse:

In the immediate aftermath of ‘The Truth’ front page, the radio and TV presenter Brian Hayes delivered a stinging monologue on the Granada TV show Out of Order. He had invited MacKenzie to appear and be interviewed but The Sun editor had declined. So Hayes say at a desk with a red telephone, an egg-timer, and a framed photograph of MacKenzie. He told viewers that MacKenzie had the telephone number and could call anytime to stop him talking. He turned over the egg-timer and began:

Life’s pretty simple if you’re a Sun reader. It’s all knockabout, exciting stuff featuring a cast of clichés which parade through the pages for your entertainment. You know — the Japanese are fiendish, the French are frogs, the Germans are Krauts, women are sex-mad housewives, and randy pop stars roam the nightclubs two-timing their girlfriends with anyone they fancy.

Mr MacKenzie, you’re living in cartoon land where no one ever gets hurt and nothing last for longer than a moment. But the pain you and your paper cause to many people last much longer than the moment it takes to read the page. Tittilation for a few column inches destroys lives, Mr MacKenzie.

Tells us why you printed the photograph of a distraught London rape victim shortly after the attack. Tell us why you make up interviews… Tell us why you do this, Mr MacKenzie.

Of course, you know, accidents do happen. Just last week a hospital consultant wrote to you telling you how a child’s life had been saved because the mother spotted symptoms of meningitis in time. She read about them in The Sun. So there you see, Kelvin — you can do it if you try.

Why do you have an inferiority complex about ethnic groups? You seem to be frightened of them, so you attack them. You appeal to the lowest common demonimator such as the swastika-tattooed, Union-Jack-carrying, brainless wonders and you insult the rest of your readers with trivia about TV and showbiz, and more importantly, lies…

And this week you danced on the graves of ninety-five football fans under the banner headline ‘The Truth’. The Hillsborough disaster should have brought out the best in your paper, but it seems to me it probably brought out the worst. Mr MacKenzie, your paper lied again…

… Maybe some of your millions of readers will think twice before reaching into their pockets for twenty pence to buy The Sun.

Think of recent Sun stories — talking up ‘war’ with the French over fish, writing scare stories about Muslims, obsessing over sex, and slapping Union Jacks all over its pages — and it’s clear that little has changed beyond the price and the media environment. The lies are simply cheaper, more plentiful, and much more entertaining online and The Sun cannot compete.

MacKenzie vs. Murdoch is one of those fights where you hope both boxers don’t simply get knocked out but end up battering each other into a pile of minced meat. There is no just universe in which Kelvin MacKenzie’s opinions should be considered anything more than mendacious shit from one of history’s most consistently mendacious shits.

Sadly, you can expect a lot more from The Sun’s most infamous editor as he’s got a book about Murdoch — Murdoch, Me and Other Madmen — due out next year and the British media will give him lots of space to waffle about his old boss while really talking about his favourite subject: Himself.

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2. A job once held by Stig Abell, during which time he oversaw the publication of the Katie Hopkins ‘cockroaches’ column.