Editors make lots of instant decisions, big or small. I once counted 15 significant ones in a day. And, inevitably, you’re going to be wrong some of the time. Frailty goes with the job.
That’s difficult on any daily, or major website. But it’s particularly hard when you’re a tabloid editor who lives and works on the edge. Many a time and oft, then, Kelvin MacKenzie teetered on the edge at the Sun. When police lied to his reporters about what happened at Hillsborough, he fell off. And Merseyside neither forgives nor forgets.
Now, almost three decades later, Liverpool has its closure. Columnist Kelvin writes an asinine, ill-informed piece about an Everton footballer. Outrage ensues. After a pensive “suspension”, he gets the sack. No more service or contact with the paper he, more than any other journalist, put on a circulation perch. Begone, vile spot …
But there is one difference between then and now. When MacKenzie went over the top about Hillsborough – big headlines, duff information – it was his decision. He ran the Sun. He either took plaudits or the rap.
Columnist MacKenzie is in a quite different situation. He writes his piece. The Sun prints it, or reaches for the spike. Not his decision. And nor, of course, is this sacking his decision, either. That’s his old paper, hearing the roar from Anfield and the Kop, opting for a quieter life, a Kexit sacrifice.
I don’t expect to encounter much sorrow over MacKenzie’s end: but I do rather wonder if his booming Sun, 30 years ago, or the younger Murdoch he served, would have passed the buck or the cotton wool quite so sheepishly.
• The Labour manifesto can be blessed or derided for promising many things to many people. But not everyone, including almost the entire press. For there, nestling among hundreds of other pledges, you can find this terse promise. “We will implement the recommendations of part one of the Leveson inquiry and commence part two of the inquiry that will look into the corporate governance failures that allowed the hacking scandal to occur.”
Who will welcome part one enforcement, via the royal charter? Not the Mail, Express and Sun, of course: but not the Guardian, FT or Observer either, for different and cogent reasons. And part two? Not the Murdoch titles, of course: but not – as we now see, with events of 10-plus years rolling through the courts – the Mirror stable either, the friendliest redtop Labour can find. If, that is, friends are still wanted.
