Kelvin MacKenzie

Kelvin MacKenzie
Born	Kelvin Calder MacKenzie (1946-10-22) 22 October 1946 London, England
Nationality	English
Occupation	Editor
Spouse(s)	Sarah McLean (2nd)
Children	2 sons, 1 daughter

Kelvin Calder MacKenzie (born 22 October 1946) is an English media executive and former newspaper editor. He is best known for being editor of The Sun newspaper between 1981 and 1994, by then established as the British newspaper with the largest circulation.

Early life and career

MacKenzie was born in South London to Ian and Mary Mackenzie,^[1] both journalists working for The South London Observer. When the South London Press took over their paper, Mary became Press Chief for the Conservative leader of the Greater London Council, Horace Cutler. Kelvin's father died in April 2004 at the age of 84.^[2] Educated at Alleyn's School in Dulwich. MacKenzie left school with one O-level, in English literature. He joined the South East London Mercury at 17, and worked on local and then national newspapers, such as the Daily Express for the next ten years.

MacKenzie stated that he discovered early on in his career that he had little writing ability and that his talents lay in making up headlines and laying out pages.^[3] By 1978, at the age of 32, he was Managing Editor of the New York Post, two years after it had been purchased by Rupert Murdoch.

Editor of The Sun

After moving back to Britain and a period as night editor of the Daily Express, Murdoch appointed him Sun editor in 1981. Conflict between the two groups meant that MacKenzie performed both jobs for a time.

In 1978 The Sun had finally overtaken the Daily Mirror in circulation figures, now becoming the newspaper with the highest sales in the UK. It was MacKenzie though who cemented the paper's image as a right-wing tabloid, not only increasing its profile, but also making it known for its attacks on left-wing political figures and movements and its sensationalist front-page celebrity 'exposes'.^[4] These often proved to be misleading or false, with many controversies in this area occurring during MacKenzie editorship.^[5] Commentators including The Guardian contributor Roy Greenslade and left-wing journalist John Pilger, have commented on the alleged 'Murdoch effect'. MacKenzie himself stated that he feels that his own spell as editor of The Sun had a "positively downhill impact on journalism".^[3]

MacKenzie is quoted as saying in the early 1980s (on the subject of how he perceived The Sun's target audience:

You just don't understand the readers, do you, eh? 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 the weirdos and drug dealers. He doesn't want to hear about that stuff (serious news).^[6]

Frequently accused of dumbing down public discourse because of its preoccupations, Pilger blamed the paper for the promotion of jingoism, racism, homophobia, and intolerance.^[5] In fact, this image of the 'average' Sun reader may be misleading to some extent: polls have consistently shown that a majority of readers claim not to take the paper's content seriously, and the number voting Labour in 1992 was roughly equivalent to those voting Conservative.

MacKenzie was widely criticised for his perceived cruelty to both the targets of his (sometimes false) newspaper allegations, his choice of targets frequently being not only left-wing politicians and celebrities but even previously unknown ordinary members of the public, and also his alleged cruelty to his own staff and colleagues, to which MacKenzie has since responded:

Look, I am not here to be helpful. I am here to help myself, right, so I have no regrets to how I treated some people.^[3]

Notorious headlines

More controversially, MacKenzie was responsible for the 4 May 1982 "Gotcha" front-page headline, which reported the contentious sinking of the Argentinian cruiser General Belgrano by a British submarine during the Falklands War. MacKenzie was heavily condemned by some commentators who felt he was glorifying death and the headline caused a storm of controversy and protest, although MacKenzie had actually changed the front-page of later editions to "Did 1,200 Argies drown?" after it was established that there had been a large number of Argentine casualties. MacKenzie later defended his "Gotcha" headline, saying:

Gotcha' was mine, which I'm very proud about. The fact that the enemy were killed to my mind was a bloody good thing and I've never had a moment's loss of sleep over it.^[7]

Despite his self-professed pride at having printed the "Gotcha" headline, Roy Greenslade claims that MacKenzie had only chosen the headline prior to it becoming clear that there had been a large number of Argentine casualties resulting from the sinking of the Belgrano and that even he later became concerned that the headline may be seen as insensitive and distasteful.

Greenslade states that MacKenzie insisted on changing the headline to "Did 1,200 Argies Die?" for later editions because of these concerns, and that he did so against the wishes of Rupert Murdoch, who allegedly demanded that the "Gotcha" headline remain for later editions despite the large number of casualties and later said of the headline, "I rather liked it". This is reportedly the only occasion that MacKenzie ever disobeyed a specific order from Murdoch.

MacKenzie's coverage of the Falklands War was criticised by many commentators such for being a glorification of war (Greenslade was working with MacKenzie on The Sun at the time).^[8]

MacKenzie was responsible for the "Freddie Starr Ate My Hamster" front-page headline. The claims made in the accompanying article, that the comedian Freddie Starr had placed his girlfriend's hamster on a sandwich and proceeded to eat it, turned out to be entirely untrue and an invention of the publicist Max Clifford. The headline is often held up as the prime example of The Sun's supposedly celebrity-obsessed, sensationalist and often inaccurate journalism.^[9]

The Sun's politics

MacKenzie's Sun strongly supported the Conservative Party in all of the General Elections which were held during his time as editor, and all of their policies.

Although the coverage of the 1992 election remains the best remembered, there were many other vitriolic personal attacks on Labour leaders by MacKenzie's Sun during election campaigns, such as in 1983 when MacKenzie ran a front page featuring an unflattering photograph of Michael Foot alongside the headline "Do You Really Want This Old Fool To Run Britain?".^[10] A year later, the paper was staunch in its support for the re-election of Ronald Reagan as president in the USA.

MacKenzie's coverage of the British miners' strike, 1984–1985 supported the police and the Thatcher government against the striking NUM miners. The paper was accused of making misleading or even outright false claims about the miners, their unions and Arthur Scargill.^[5] MacKenzie at one point prepared a front page with the headline "Mine Führer" and a photograph of Scargill with his arm in the air, a pose which made him look as though he was giving a Nazi salute. The print workers at The Sun, regarding it as an attempt at a cheap smear, refused to print it.^[11]

At the time of the 1987 general election MacKenzie ran a mock-editorial entitled "Why I'm Backing Kinnock, by Joseph Stalin".^[12]

On the day of the 1992 election MacKenzie used the front-page headline "If Kinnock Wins Today, Will The Last Person To Leave Britain Please Turn Out The Lights", accompanied by a picture of Kinnock's head superimposed over a lightbulb.^[13] While the paper initially supported the government of John Major, because it appeared that Major himself shared the ideological hostility of Thatcher towards European integration, the two men were soon disabused of this illusion. Following Britain's forced exit from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism on Black Wednesday in September 1992, according to MacKenzie, Major telephoned him to ask about how the paper would report the story. While Major has denied the conversation ever took place,^[14] MacKenzie has claimed his response was: "Prime Minister, I have on my desk in front of me a very large bucket of shit which I am just about to pour all over you."^[15]

Invented stories

In January 1987, MacKenzie published a front-page story alleging that pop singer Elton John had had sex with underage rentboys. These claims were without any foundation and entirely false. Shortly after, MacKenzie published further allegations that the singer had had the voiceboxes of his guard dogs removed because their barking kept him awake at night. Not only were these additional claims also completely untrue, but MacKenzie confirmed their inaccuracy shortly after publication by sending a reporter to the singer's house, who quickly discovered that all of his guard dogs were quite capable of barking (MacKenzie later admitted that in retrospect he found it difficult to understand why he had believed, never mind published, the claims about the guard dogs which he later realised were self-evidently absurd). Elton John sued The Sun for libel over both these claims and was later awarded £1,000,000 in damages.^[16] MacKenzie later said of Elton John

I think The Sun should have its million quid back. It hasn't damaged him at all, has it? Libel can only have a value if there has been some kind of damage, right? Where is the damage? Where? There's nothing wrong with him. So no, I don't feel bad about him, not at all.

There were many other controversies during MacKenzie's time in charge of The Sun. MacKenzie at one point ran a story about a previously unknown member of the public who had just undergone a heart transplant operation, the story denouncing the man as a "love rat", Sun journalists having been told that he had left his wife fifteen years earlier. Aside from criticism about the story's highly questionable news value, the newspaper was furiously condemned as the story was run when the man's recovery was still in the balance.^[5]

Indeed, many commentators accused MacKenzie and his team of simply inventing many of the stories that appeared in the newspaper, as well as interviews, and in some instances this was proven to be the case, most notably when an entirely fabricated interview with the disfigured Falklands war hero Simon Weston was published, which was criticised for "inviting readers to feel revulsion at his disfigurement".^[6] Some other notable controversies that occurred under MacKenzie include a headline describing Australian Aborigines as "The Abo's: Brutal and Treacherous" (which was condemned as "inaccurate" and "unacceptably racist" by the Press Council)^[5] and MacKenzie's sending of photographers to break into a psychiatric hospital to ask actor Jeremy Brett, who was a patient in the hospital at the time and who was suffering from manic depression and dying of cardiomyopathy, whether he was "dying of AIDS". The newspaper apparently suspected Brett of being a homosexual and that his mystery illness might be AIDS, which it wasn't.^[17]

These incidents caused The Sun to be heavily criticised in some quarters, but the newspaper's profile increased dramatically during MacKenzie's time as editor although sales figures dipped. On the subject of the sensationalist and sometimes inaccurate reporting which appeared in The Sun during his time as editor, MacKenzie has said:

When I published those stories, they were not lies. They were great stories that later turned out to be untrue – and that is different. What am I supposed to feel ashamed about?^[3]

Coverage of the Hillsborough disaster

In April 1989, the single biggest controversy during MacKenzie's reign occurred, later described in a Sun editorial in 2004 as "the most terrible mistake in our history", during the aftermath of the Hillsborough disaster, a deadly crush which occurred during an FA Cup semi-final at Hillsborough football stadium in Sheffield claiming the lives of 96 Liverpool fans.

The Sun printed the front-page headline "The Truth", with three sub-headings, "Some Fans Picked Pockets of Victims", "Some Fans Urinated on the Brave Cops" and "Some Fans Beat Up PC Giving Kiss of Life". The accompanying article claimed that ticketless and drunken Liverpool F.C. fans were responsible for the disaster, having supposedly tried to fight their way into the stadium by rushing the turnstiles and attacking policemen outside the ground. Further specific allegations were made that during the disaster itself Liverpool fans inside the stadium had stolen wallets and other items from the dead, had urinated over policemen and the bodies of dead fans, that they had beaten policemen, ambulance men and rescue workers attempting to save the lives of other fans and had sexually abused the body of a dead girl after shouting "throw her up and we'll fuck her" to policemen moving her body.^[18]

The sources for these allegations were stated to be anonymous high-ranking police officers from Sheffield Police and Irvine Patnick, then a Conservative MP for a Sheffield constituency, who wasn't actually present at the match. (On 11 January 2007 on BBC TV's Question Time, MacKenzie additionally claimed that one of his sources was a Liverpool news agency.) The article was accompanied by graphic photographs showing Liverpool fans, including young children, choking and suffocating as they were being crushed against the perimeter fences surrounding the terraces – this was widely condemned as inappropriate.^[5]

The coverage and the allegations caused intense uproar on Merseyside (where The Sun was boycotted, with public burnings of the paper organised and many newsagents refusing to stock it at all) and widespread criticism and condemnation from many commentators. The Press Council described the allegations unequivocally as "lies". The official government enquiry into the disaster dismissed the allegation that drunken Liverpool fans had been responsible for the disaster and concluded that inadequate crowd control and errors by the police had been the primary cause of the tragedy.

Prior to the publication of The Sun's initial article, a number of local newspapers in Yorkshire published very similar allegations (such as The Sheffield Star and The Yorkshire Post).^[19] It has since emerged that many British national newspaper editors were offered the same story from the same sources the day before The Sun article was published but while many national newspapers printed allegations about Liverpool fans being responsible for the disaster, only MacKenzie and his counterpart at Daily Star were prepared to print the more outlandish allegations about theft and abuse of dead bodies, with many editors feeling that the claims sounded dubious. Furthermore, the other national papers which printed coverage claiming Liverpool fans to be responsible for the disaster, including The Daily Star, withdrew their allegations and apologised the day after publication, whereas The Sun did not.

In their book about the history of the Sun, Peter Chippindale and Chris Horrie wrote:

As MacKenzie's layout was seen by more and more people, a collective shudder ran through the office [but] MacKenzie's dominance was so total there was nobody left in the organisation who could rein him in except Murdoch. [Everyone] seemed paralysed, "looking like rabbits in the headlights", as one hack described them. The error staring them in the face was too glaring. It obviously wasn't a silly mistake; nor was it a simple oversight. Nobody really had any comment on it, they just took one look and went away shaking their heads in wonder at the enormity of it. It was a classic smear.^[6]

Murdoch for his part ordered MacKenzie to appear on BBC Radio 4's The World This Weekend in the aftermath of the controversy to apologise. MacKenzie was quoted on the programme as saying:

It was my decision and my decision alone to do that front page in that way and I made a rather serious error.

In 1993 he told a House of Commons National Heritage Select Committee that

I regret Hillsborough. It was a fundamental mistake. The mistake was I believed what an MP said. It was a Tory MP. If he had not said it and the chief superintendent (David Duckenfield) had not agreed with it, we would not have gone with it.

In 1996, MacKenzie again discussed the matter on Radio 4 but this time claimed:

The Sun did not accuse anybody of anything. We were the vehicle for others.

Sales of The Sun on Merseyside have never recovered, costing News International several million pounds a year,^[5] despite a belated full page apology by the newspaper in 2004. Many newsagents on Merseyside continue to refuse to keep the newspaper in stock.

After leaving The Sun

In January 1994, MacKenzie moved to BSkyB, another of Murdoch's News Corporation assets. MacKenzie left within a few months.

In 1995, MacKenzie joined Mirror Group Newspapers and was appointed joint boss of their fledgling L!VE TV British cable television channel. The station had previously been headed by Janet Street-Porter, who had set out to establish L!VE TV as an alternative, youth-orientated channel. She clashed with MacKenzie over program content and soon left, leaving him in sole charge.

MacKenzie later said that he would agree to indulge in a "night of passion" with Janet Street-Porter and that he would be "willing" but only if she paid him £4.7m, a figure he had arrived at after calculating how much money he would lose from "loss of reputation, the negative impact on future earnings etc."^[3]

MacKenzie took a radically different approach and was criticised for producing severely down market programming. MacKenzie introduced features such as nightly editions of 'Topless Darts' (featuring topless women playing darts on a beach), 'The Weather in Norwegian' (with a young, typically blonde and bikini-clad Scandinavian woman presenting weather forecasts in both English and Norwegian), other weather forecasts featuring dwarfs bouncing on trampolines and stock exchange reports presented by Tiffany, a young female presenter who would strip to her underwear as she read out the latest share prices. A large amount of airtime was given over to tarot card readers and astrologers. L!VE TV's best known character was the News Bunny, a man dressed as a giant rabbit who popped up during news broadcasts to give a thumbs up or a thumbs down to the various news stories to indicate whether or not he found them interesting or exciting.

The station had a budget of only £2,000 an hour and attracted very little in the way of an audience, never being watched by more than an average of 200,000 viewers, but the channel was well-known because of the controversy and criticism surrounding its programming, which led to the station being labelled "Tabloid TV" and even "Sun TV" (in reference to the newspaper, some critics accusing MacKenzie of doing nothing more than creating a television version of his old newspaper). MacKenzie has been accused of taking a "shamelessly tacky approach". He eventually left the station in 1997. He later said on LIVE TV:

Bouncing weather dwarfs were a major milestone in British TV. Their weather forecasts will be five years old now. We used to shoot them in batches ... and it was just luck if the forecast actually coincided with the weather. We were really ahead of our time. If Channel 5 put on Topless Darts at 10 pm they would double their ratings.^[20]

The station failed and closed down.

In November 1998, MacKenzie headed a consortium (TalkCo Holdings) which purchased Talk Radio from CLT for £24.7 million. One of the financial backers was News International, News Corporation's UK subsidiary.^[21] In 1999 TalkCo was renamed The Wireless Group and in January 2000 Talk Radio was rebranded as TalkSport. The Wireless Group acquired The Radio Partnership in 1999, gaining control of its nine local commercial stations. In May 2005, it was announced that the Northern Irish media company, UTV plc, had made an agreed offer to buy the company, subject to shareholder and regulatory approval. In June 2005, the takeover proceeded, with MacKenzie being replaced by UTV executive Scott Taunton. The station lost listeners during Mackenzie's tenure.

In September 2005, MacKenzie took over Highbury House Communications, a magazine publishing company based in Bournemouth and Orpington. HHC held a number of titles mainly in the Leisure and Computing (Games) market with a 'ladette' title sitting uncomfortably in their portfolio. HHC was already suffering from massive debts when MacKenzie took the reins and despite efforts on his part to broker a life-line to save the ailing company, he had inherited a poisoned legacy. This venture also failed; Highbury and closed its doors in December 2005.

MacKenzie then spent a year as chairman of one of the UK's largest marketing and communications groups, Media Square plc. This was unsuccessful and MacKenzie left in March 2007.^[22]

MacKenzie has appeared on the BBC's Grumpy Old Men TV series, discussing his pet hates. In one edition he accused the BBC of having a left-wing bias and of producing out-dated and poor quality programmes and news. MacKenzie said that the reason for this was that that BBC Television Centre is populated almost exclusively by "left-wing turds".

Despite the aforementioned criticism of the corporation, in March 2006 MacKenzie joined BBC Radio Five Live as a presenter. He made his debut on the station over the summer, presenting a series of programmes telling the story of various scandals which have occurred at FIFA World Cup tournaments over the years. He then presented a retrospective look at the year gone by on Christmas Day.^[23]

In May 2006, MacKenzie returned to The Sun, this time as a columnist, where he was accused using one of his columns to launch an attack on the people of Scotland (see below).^[24] On the subject of the columns themselves, he has said "I want to get the Lonsdale Belt for vile and be personally rude to as many people as possible."

In August 2010, he appeared as a panellist on the ITV show 3@Three.^[25]

In April 2013, The Guardian reported that The Daily Mail was being sued for libel for £200,000 over a column by MacKenzie. The claim was brought by an NHS doctor, Antonio Serrano, whom MacKenzie had criticised in the paper.^[26]

Political ambitions

MacKenzie commitment to Conservative, Thatcherite politics has led him to argue that Margaret Thatcher is Britain's greatest post-war Prime Minister.^[27] In 2003, he presented a documentary, Kelvin Saves the Tories, in which he proposed a low-tax, anti-BBC and cautiously pro-capital punishment manifesto for the party.^[28] However, in February 2008, in a Sun newspaper article, MacKenzie claimed that he is now against the return of the death penalty.

In May 2008, MacKenzie stood for election as a local councillor in Elmbridge.^[29] He lost the election, gaining 227 votes whereas the Conservative seat holder Glenn Dearlove won 679.^[30]

That same year, after Conservative Member of Parliament David Davis announced that he would resign his seat in the House of Commons in order to fight a by-election as a protest against the Labour government's plans for 42-day detention without charge for terrorist suspects, MacKenzie announced that he was likely to contest the election on a pro-42-day detention platform,^[1] stating: "I have been associated with The Sun for 30 years. The Sun is very, very hostile to David Davis because of his 28 day stance and The Sun has always been very up for 42 days and perhaps even 420 days".^[31] Off-camera, before a BBC interview, MacKenzie referred to Hull, which the Haltemprice and Howden constituency borders, as "an absolute shocker." Asked to clarify those comments, he said it was "a joke" and that he has "never actually been to Hull".^[31]

MacKenzie subsequently decided not to run for the Haltemprice and Howden seat, stating: "The clincher for me was the money. Clearly the Sun couldn't put up the cash – so I was going to have to rustle up a maximum of £100,000 to conduct my campaign."^[32]

Hillsborough controversy reignited

During an after-dinner speech to Mincoffs Solicitors LLP (a Newcastle-based law firm) on 30 November 2006, MacKenzie is reported to have said of his coverage of the Hillsborough disaster:

All I did wrong there was tell the truth. There was a surge of Liverpool fans who had been drinking and that is what caused the disaster. The only thing different we did was put it under the headline "The Truth". I went on The World at One the next day and apologised. I only did that because Rupert Murdoch told me to. I wasn't sorry then and I'm not sorry now because we told the truth.

MacKenzie went on to compare Merseysiders with animal rights activists. MacKenzie is also said to have remarked:

If this got out, it would blow up all over again.

The remarks were met with widespread incredulity and condemnation, particularly on Merseyside, where Liverpool F.C., the local Liverpool Echo and numerous local MPs condemned MacKenzie, with Walton MP Peter Kilfoyle arguing that the quotes confirmed that MacKenzie was "never fit to edit a national newspaper". The Liverpool Echo called for The Sun to sack MacKenzie as a columnist. The Sun issued a statement saying that they had "already apologised for what happened and we stand by that apology." However despite reports of consternation at The Sun over MacKenzie's statements, the newspaper chose to retain him as a columnist. MacKenzie refused to comment publicly on the controversy and pulled out of a scheduled appearance on BBC TV's Question Time later that week.^[33][34]

Earlier that autumn MacKenzie had already provoked controversy in Liverpool by stating in a Press Gazette interview that he had never knowingly printed any lies in The Sun and that even stories which later turned out to be untrue were still "good stories". In relation to the publishing of false or misleading reports in The Sun, MacKenzie asked "What am I supposed to feel ashamed about?" MacKenzie was not specifically referring to the coverage of the Hillsborough disaster and made no mention of the tragedy during the interview, but the Liverpool Echo published a piece reporting MacKenzie's statements and criticising the apparent lack of shame or regret over the Hillsborough coverage implied by them (and the fact that MacKenzie may still regard the misleading coverage as a "good story").

Although there was actually little reaction to the quotes on Merseyside at the time, they did draw comment from Phil Hammond, chairman of the Hillsborough Family Support Group, who said: "I can't believe that even after all these years, there is no remorse or regret for the hurt he caused".^[35] It was still thought at this point however that, although MacKenzie appeared not to regret the coverage, he no longer regarded it as having any factual basis after his apparent admissions in the past that the allegations made were lies fed to him by police officers and a Tory MP.

On 6 January 2007 a protest took place at Anfield Stadium, the home of Liverpool F.C., during the FA Cup Third Round match against Arsenal F.C.. The protest was organised by fan group Reclaim The Kop, with the support of Liverpool F.C., and was directed towards MacKenzie personally and his continuing allegations about Hillsborough, and also towards the BBC (who were present at the stadium, broadcasting the game live on TV) for employing MacKenzie as a radio presenter and paying him with TV licence payers' (and therefore public) money. Almost 12,000 people in the Kop stand held up a mosaic which spelled out the words 'The Truth' whilst Liverpool supporters chanted "Justice for the 96" for six minutes, signifying the length of time that the Hillsborough game played on for before being abandoned. MacKenzie did not respond to the protest publicly.

On 11 January 2007 MacKenzie appeared on BBC TV's Question Time programme, held in Kent. Towards the end of the program, MacKenzie was asked by presenter David Dimbleby about The Sun's claims about the Hillsborough disaster. MacKenzie stated that he stands by his allegation that ticketless fans were the cause of the disaster but that he does not know whether the other allegations about theft from the dead and fans urinating over victims and policemen were true. Clare Short MP suggested MacKenzie should apologise to the bereaved families and survivors who say that his claims cause them distress and hurt but he refused, claiming that it would make no difference anyway due to the bad blood between himself and Liverpool F.C. MacKenzie suggested that those who feel angry at him should instead direct their anger towards "someone who caused the disaster". MacKenzie was heckled by some members of the audience while Short was applauded when she repeated her suggestion that he should retract his claims and apologise, but MacKenzie remained adamant that he had nothing to apologise for.

In February 2007, Independent journalist Matthew Norman claimed that MacKenzie was considering issuing a public apology for his coverage of the Hillsborough disaster, although at the time he was "still unsure" as to whether to do so.^[36] His former colleague at The Sun Roy Greenslade has suggested that the real reason why MacKenzie may be so hesitant to apologise and admit the inaccuracy of the coverage may be his "anti-Scouse" bias, which Greenslade suspects makes it difficult for MacKenzie to "bring himself to say sorry to the city's people".^[37]

On 12 September 2012, following the publication of the official report into the disaster using previously withheld Government papers which has exonerated the Liverpool fans present, MacKenzie issued the following statement:

Today I offer my profuse apologies to the people of Liverpool for that headline. I too was totally misled. Twenty three years ago I was handed a piece of copy from a reputable news agency in Sheffield [White's] in which a senior police officer and a senior local MP [Sheffield Hallam MP Irvine Patnick] were making serious allegations against fans in the stadium. I had absolutely no reason to believe that these authority figures would lie and deceive over such a disaster. As the Prime Minister has made clear these allegations were wholly untrue and were part of a concerted plot by police officers to discredit the supporters thereby shifting the blame for the tragedy from themselves. It has taken more than two decades, 400,000 documents and a two-year inquiry to discover to my horror that it would have been far more accurate had I written the headline 'The Lies' rather than 'The Truth'. I published in good faith and I am sorry that it was so wrong.

Trevor Hicks, chairman of the Hillsborough Family Support Group, rejected Mr MacKenzie's apology as "too little, too late", calling him "lowlife, clever lowlife, but lowlife".^[38] The copy from White's news agency was available to other newspapers, who reported the story as allegations – The Sun reported the allegations, on McKenzie's say-so, as 'the truth'.^[39]

Attacks on Scotland

MacKenzie made a series of attacks on the people of Scotland in 2007, although he is partly of Scottish descent – his grandfather was from Stirling.^[40] In addition, his three names are all Scottish in origin. Kelvin is the name of one of the rivers that runs through Glasgow, Calder is the name of a river in the Highlands and the surname MacKenzie derives from the Scottish Gaelic "Mac Coinnich" meaning son of Coinneach, a Highland clan.

In July 2006, MacKenzie wrote a column for the Sun newspaper referring to Scots as 'Tartan Tosspots' and apparently rejoicing in the fact that Scotland has a lower life expectancy than the rest of the United Kingdom. MacKenzie's column provoked a storm of protest, and was heavily condemned by numerous commentators including Scottish MPs and MSPs.^[24]

Question Time

On 11 October 2007, MacKenzie appeared on the BBC's Question Time TV programme and launched another attack on Scotland. During a debate about tax, MacKenzie claimed that:

Scotland believes not in entrepreneurialism like London and the south east... Scots enjoy spending [money] but they don't enjoy creating it, which is the opposite to down south.^[41]

The comments came as part of an attack on Prime Minister Gordon Brown who MacKenzie said could not be trusted to manage the British economy because he was "a socialist Scot",^[42] and insisting that this was relevant to the debate. Fellow panellist Chuka Umunna from the think tank Compass called his comments "absolutely disgraceful", and booing and jeering were heard from the Cheltenham studio audience. The BBC received around 200 complaints^[43] and MacKenzie's comments drew widespread criticism – notably from the high-profile Scottish entrepreneur Duncan Bannatyne who responded on BBC Radio 5 Live:

It is plainly wrong for MacKenzie to assert that Scottish people do not understand business and enterprise. There are some phenomenal Scottish entrepreneurs, I could name so many. I think Kelvin MacKenzie is a raving lunatic, I think he's a complete idiot and a racist idiot at that.^[44]

On 13 January 2012, MacKenzie once again appeared on the BBC's Question Time TV programme^[45] and remarked on the move for Scottish independence:

My sense about England right now is that they wish Scotland to be independent. They want them, they want them to go out there and make their way in the world and see if they are as clever as they believe they are.

Personal life

MacKenzie married Jacqueline Holland in 1968 in Camberwell. They have a daughter (born 1969) and two sons (born 1972 and 1974). His elder son and his daughter (who left in January 1999) worked at Talk Radio. In 2006 they divorced on the grounds of adultery on the part of MacKenzie. On 25 July 2008, he married Sarah McLean in Sunningdale, Berkshire. She works for McGraw-Hill. In the late 1990s, MacKenzie was in the news when he was caught by The Mail on Sunday holidaying in what the paper described as a "love nest" in Barbados with News International secretary Joanna Duckworth.^[46] MacKenzie was a supporter of Charlton Athletic F.C. for 12 years but switched allegiance to Queens Park Rangers after Charlton's relegation from the Championship in 2009.^[47] He lives in Weybridge, Surrey.

External links

• Sport Relief Does The Apprentice – Official Website
• His Scottish family tree

Notes

Media offices
Preceded by Larry Lamb	Editor of The Sun 1981–1994	Succeeded by Stuart Higgins

v t e Editors of The Sun, the Daily Herald and the News of the World The Sun 1964: Sydney Jacobson 1965: Dick Dinsdale 1969: Larry Lamb 1972: Bernard Shrimsley 1975: Larry Lamb 1981: Kelvin MacKenzie 1994: Stuart Higgins 1998: David Yelland 2003: Rebekah Wade 2009: Dominic Mohan 2013: David Dinsmore Daily Herald 1912: William H. Seed 1912: Roland Kenney 1913: Charles Lapworth 1913: George Lansbury 1922: W. P. Ryan 1922: Hamilton Fyfe 1926: William Mellor 1931: W. H. Stevenson 1936: Francis Williams 1940: Percy Cudlipp 1953: Sydney Elliott 1957: Douglas Machray 1960: John Beaven 1962: Sydney Jacobson News of the World 1843: Henry Drake Breun 1891: Emsley Carr 1941: David Percy Davies 1946: Robert Skelton 1947: Arthur Waters 1953: Reg Cudlipp 1960: Stafford Somerfield 1970: Cyril Lear 1974: Peter Stephens 1975: Bernard Shrimsley 1980: Kenneth Donlan 1981: Barry Askew 1981: Derek Jameson 1984: Nicholas Lloyd 1985: David Montgomery 1987: Wendy Henry 1988: Patsy Chapman 1993: Stuart Higgins 1994: Piers Morgan 1995: Phil Hall 2000: Rebekah Wade 2003: Andy Coulson 2007: Colin Myler

Authority control VIAF: 48756292

Persondata
Name	Mackenzie, Kelvin
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	22 October 1946
Place of birth	London, United Kingdom
Date of death
Place of death