Kelvin MacKenzie launched his new Sun column with a lead item suggesting that if the Charlie Hebdo-style massacre happened here, then Nigel Farage would end up forming the next government.
But the main thrust of his article is about “the liberal classes” (including the Times’s columnist, Matthew Parris) supposedly acting as apologists for Islam.
He highlights two incidents of Islamist repression - the lashing of a blogger in Saudi Arabia and the slaughter of 2,000 people by Boka Haram in Nigeria - plus the flight of Jews from France in fear of Islamic terrorism.
He points also to “aspects of Islam... which are wholly unacceptable to the majority of Sun readers... the demeaning of women... [and] the treatment of gays”.
He concludes: “If our political leaders value our vote they need to address our fears and do something about them”.
I cannot overlook the fact that another item is devoted to me. He takes me to task for a sin I committed 25 years ago when editor of the Daily Mirror. I obeyed the paper’s proprietor, the late unlamented Robert Maxwell, by fixing a Spot the Ball competition to ensure no-one could win the £1m prize.
I owned up to the fact in a book I wrote about Maxwell, which was published in 1992. I had previously revealed the deceit in a Panorama months before Maxwell’s death in 1991.
I apologised at the time and have been apologising ever since. But, unlike Kelvin’s response to his greatest sin, also of 25 years’ standing - the grotesque insult to Liverpool fans over the Hillsborough tragedy - I have never retracted my apology.
His item on me was clearly aimed at spiking my guns. It won’t work. I will continue to treat his column on its “merits” as I will his contentious journalistic history.
