So the Sun is no longer concerned about trying to mend fences with the people of Merseyside. Its rehiring of Kelvin MacKenzie as a columnist suggests that it recognises the impossibility of winning back a Liverpudlian audience.
Ever since MacKenzie published his notorious front page (“The Truth”) about the 1989 Hillsborough tragedy, the people of Liverpool have boycotted the paper.
After he left the paper, most of his successor editors tried unsuccessfully to distance the Sun, and themselves, from that issue. Some even sent deputations to Liverpool.
One, however, rehired him. In 2005, Rebekah Brooks thought she could put Hillsborough behind her by recruiting MacKenzie as a columnist. It served instead to provoke more criticism of the Sun, just as his latest return is likely to do.
MacKenzie quit his Sun column in 2011 for the Daily Mail, but it proved to be an unhappy experience for both - he departed abruptly a year later in mysterious circumstances.
A year later the Daily Telegraph dared to give him a column. It was pulled after just one effort following hostility from the paper’s sports writers.
Again, that was entirely due to Hillsborough. And what’s so strange is that the Sun should hire him now during the inquests into the deaths of the 96 victims.
Given the determination of the current editor, David Dinsmore, to give the Sun a less acerbic image, the hiring of MacKenzie makes no sense. It flies in the face of all that he has been seeking to achieve.
I’m sure this wasn’t his idea. It smacks of a demand from News UK’s ultimate boss, Rupert Murdoch, who has always had a soft spot for MacKenzie, the man he once affectionately called “my little Hitler”.
Dinsmore will be the one to suffer. It might sound like fun to welcome back “the legendary Kelvin MacKenzie” by claiming that he will be “sticking up for the man and woman in the street and sticking it to anyone who takes them for granted”.
But here is a man who has previously boasted: “I want to get the Lonsdale Belt for vile and be personally rude to as many people as possible.”
In so doing, he has regularly stuck it to men and women in the streets of Scotland (“Tartan tosspots”), to men and women in the streets of Wales (example in the Telegraph) as well as men and women in the streets of Merseyside.
I note that his appointment has been billed alongside that of the Sun’s “brilliant new astrologer” and “renowned psychic” Frank Pilkington. Perhaps he’d like to predict how long it is before Dinsmore has to tell MacKenzie that the men and women in the streets of the UK would rather he stopped writing.
Or will the paper’s football reporters and columnists follow the lead set by the Telegraph sports staff and put him on his bike right away?
