Kelvin MacKenzie

Kelvin MacKenzie
Born	Kelvin Calder MacKenzie
Occupation	newspaper editor

Kelvin Calder MacKenzie (born October 22, 1946) is an English media executive and former newspaper editor. He is best remembered for being editor of The Sun newspaper between 1981 and 1993, an era in which the paper was firmly established as Britain's best selling tabloid. His period as Sun editor was also highly controversial - MacKenzie is remembered as the man responsible for the paper's "Gotcha" headline after the sinking of the Argentinian battleship General Belgrano during the Falklands War, as well its highly controversial coverage of the Hillsborough disaster, which caused widespread outrage and was dismissed as "entirely inaccurate" by both the Press Council and the official government inquiry into the tragedy. Throughout much of his career, MacKenzie has been an associate of international media magnate Rupert Murdoch.

MacKenzie has recently been involved in a number of high-profile controversies. In November 2006, he reignited the Hillsborough controversy by publicly claiming that the Sun's coverage of the disaster had been accurate and that drunken Liverpool football supporters were to blame for the tragedy, claims that are at odds with the findings of official government inquiries. These statements caused considerable public outrage and criticism in the media, particularly from Hillsborough survivors and the families of victims. He has also made a series of attacks on the people of Scotland, firstly in June 2006 in a Sun newspaper column, and then again in October 2007 during an appearance on BBC TV's Question Time programme which drew 350 complaints and led to MacKenzie being accused of prejudice and of racism.

He has been described by Piers Morgan as a man possessing a "particular form of dangerous genius".

Biography

MacKenzie was educated at Alleyn's School but little else is known about his background or early journalistic career. MacKenzie himself has said 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. By 1978, at the age of just 31, he was Managing Editor of the New York Post, two years after it was purchased by Rupert Murdoch, who already owned The Sun. Murdoch appointed him Sun editor in 1981. Murdoch is said to have described MacKenzie as his all-time "favourite editor".

MacKenzie was married for 38 years but in 2006 was divorced by his wife Jacqueline on the grounds of adultery. In the late 1990s, MacKenzie was in the news when he was caught by the The Mail on Sunday holidaying in what the paper described as a "love nest" in Barbados with News International secretary Joanna Duckworth.

MacKenzie is a right-wing Conservative and a committed Thatcherite. He is a great admirer of Margaret Thatcher personally and argues that she is Britain's greatest post-war Prime Minister.

Outlook

While it was in 1978 that The Sun initially overtook the Daily Mirror in terms of circulation, it was during MacKenzie's spell as editor that The Sun firmly established itself as the biggest selling newspaper in Britain. It was also under MacKenzie that the newspaper became renowned for what is felt by many commentators to be its populist and the sensationalist approach to journalism, although others argue that this approach had already been established to a lesser extent under previous editors during the 1970s and strongly mirrored the style Rupert Murdoch had already adopted for some of his Australian newspapers prior to his purchase of the Sun (then called the Daily Herald) in the late 1960s.

It should be noted that MacKenzie was not responsible for ending the Sun's traditional left-wing political stance and support for the British Labour Party - the paper's switch to right-wing populism and support for Margaret Thatcher's Conservatives at the 1979 general election occurred under the previous editor Larry Lamb shortly before MacKenzie took over, at the behest of Rupert Murdoch (this being despite Murdoch's earlier assurances to the Sun's previous owners that he would continue to support the trade union movement and the Labour Party if they agreed to sell him the newspaper). The papers political line was Murdoch's decision MacKenzie was doing his masters bidding. Murdoch has a reputation for bullying his editors Mackenzie is reported to have been on the receiving end more than most. Mackenzie was a willing puppet, for political and financial reasons. Neither was MacKenzie responsible for the introduction of the controversial page 3 girls in the Sun - this had occurred shortly after Murdoch had bought the paper over ten years before MacKenzie was appointed editor. It was MacKenzie however who cemented the paper's image as a loudly right-wing, populist tabloid, not only greatly increasing its circulation and dramatically heightening its profile, but also making it infamous in the eyes of the British public but for its scathing attacks on left-wing political figures and movements, its cheeky humour (the best examples of which were often its headlines, many thought up by MacKenzie himself) and its sensationalist front-page celebrity "exposes", which frequently turned out to be misleading or outright false, with MacKenzie presiding over many of the biggest controversies in the paper's history. Critics accused the paper of exaggerating or even inventing news stories under MacKenzie (on some occasions this was proven to be the case ) and of severely dumbing down public discourse. The paper was frequently accused (often but not exclusively by left-wing and liberal critics) of promoting jingoism, racism, homophobia and intolerance.

During MacKenzie's tenure as editor, the stereotype of the typical "Sun reader" entered the national consciousness, supposedly a working-class conservative, frequently from the south of England, always of very low intelligence and more interested in looking at page 3 girls and reading sensationalist and implausible reports of celebrity scandals (that he is likely to unquestioningly believe) than serious news, and in any case too unintelligent to read the more 'serious' conservative newspapers such as The Times, the The Daily Telegraph or even the Daily Mail. Frequently it was implied that the typical Sun reader would often, though not invariably, also hold bigoted, sexist, racist and homophobic views, and would probably believe and approve of any attack on a left-wing political figure or minority group printed in the paper, no matter how outrageous and factually dubious. By the mid-1980s, British comedians would frequently bring up the subject of the stereotypical Sun reader, feeling it was guaranteed to get laughs from any audience. Like most stereotypes, the image of the "average Sun reader" may be somewhat unfair and misleading to at least some extent - polls have consistently shown that a majority of Sun readers claim not to take what they read in the paper seriously and approximately the same number of Sun readers voted Labour in 1992 as voted Conservative - but the concept of the Sun reader stereotype is perhaps just as prevalent in British culture and society as it was when it first emerged under MacKenzie.

During MacKenzie's reign the paper actually lost readers.

MacKenzie himself is quoted as saying in the early 1980s (on the subject of how he perceived his target audience and how he approached journalism):

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).

MacKenzie has also stated, perhaps only half-seriously, that he feels that his own spell as editor of The Sun had a "positively downhill impact on journalism". Numerous observers, such as ex-Sun deputy editor Roy Greenslade, left-wing journalist John Pilger and playwright Dennis Potter, have commented more seriously on the alleged 'Murdoch effect' - and more specifically about the effect of the Sun during the MacKenzie era, supposedly by far the most significant example of this effect - on British journalism, media, political climate and intellectual culture, as well as on British culture and society at large. These commentators argue that Murdoch's media enterprise, and in particular MacKenzie's Sun, not only helped to keep Thatcher in power and enable the successful continuation of the "Thatcher revolution" while successfully smearing her left-wing opponents, but also had such a profound effect on all areas of the British media as to be perhaps the most significant contributor to the perceived "dumbing-down" of British news, popular entertainment and culture across the board. Murdoch has responded to some of these arguments by saying his critics are "snobs" who want to "impose their tastes on everyone else" while MacKenzie claims the same critics are people who, if they ever had a "popular idea", would have to "go and lie down in a dark room for half an hour". Both have pointed to the huge commercial success of the Sun in the 1980s and its establishment as Britain's top-selling newspaper, claiming that they are "giving the public what they want". This conclusion is heavily disputed by the critics, with Pilger pointing out that a late-1970s edition of the Daily Mirror which replaced the usual celebrity and domestic political news items with an entire issue devoted to his own front-line reporting of the genocide in Pol Pot's Cambodia not only outsold the Sun on the day it was issued but became the only edition of the Daily Mirror to ever sell every single copy issued throughout the country, something never achieved by the Sun.

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 how I treated some people.

Notorious headlines

Freddie Starr Ate My Hamster, The Sun, 13 March, 1986

MacKenzie was responsible for the "Freddie Starr Ate My Hamster" front-page headline, probably the most famous in The Sun's history. 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, not surprisingly turned out to be entirely untrue and an invention of the publicist Max Clifford. The headline is remembered mainly for its humour value and is also often held up as the prime example of the Sun's supposedly celebrity obsessed, sensationalist and often inaccurate journalism.

File:The Sun Gotcha.jpg

The sinking of the Belgrano was celebrated on the front page of the British tabloid newspaper The Sun

More controversially, MacKenzie was responsible for the May 4 "Gotcha" front-page headline, which reported the controversial sinking of the Argentinian battleship General Belgrano by a British submarine during the Falklands War. MacKenzie was heavily condemned by some commentators who felt he was glorifying slaughter 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.

MacKenzie's coverage of the Falklands War was criticised by many commentators such as The Guardian journalist and ex-Daily Mirror editor Roy Greenslade for being jingoistic and a glorification of war (Greenslade was actually working with MacKenzie on The Sun at the time). On one occasion during the conflict, The Sun published a photograph of a missile which had a large Sun logo printed on its side. The paper claimed they had "sponsored" the missile and that it would shortly be used to "kill Argies". The photograph also featured a topless teenage page 3 girl caressing the missile, which was perceived to be phallic imagery and resulted in criticism that The Sun was attempting to use sex to promote and glorify war. While The Sun was heavily criticised and even mocked for its coverage of the war in The Daily Mirror and The Guardian, The Sun responded by accusing these newspapers of treason. The satirical magazine Private Eye mocked and lampooned what they regarded as the paper's jingoistic coverage, most notably with the mock-Sun headline "KILL AN ARGIE, WIN A METRO!", to which MacKenzie is said to have jokingly responded "Why didn't I think of that?".

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 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.

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 the newspaper became well known for its scathing attacks on the Labour Party and its leaders. Most memorably, 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. The following day, after the Conservatives confounded the polls and won a narrow majority, The Sun claimed that they had won the election for the Tories by proclaiming "It Woz The Sun Wot Won It!" on their front page. Neil Kinnock himself stated that he believed that the main reason that Labour had lost the election was the campaign waged against the party and against him personally by right-wing, Conservative supporting newspapers, in particular The Sun, although a subsequent investigation by the Labour Party's research department questioned this conclusion, arguing that Sun readers were divided roughly 50-50 between voting Conservative and Labour, and that there were not enough Conservative-voting Sun readers in crucial seats to have swung the election. The newspaper subsequently denied any responsibility for the Conservative victory when it came in for criticism, despite its early headlines. Nonetheless, Tony Blair would later make winning over Rupert Murdoch and The Sun newspaper a major priority before the 1997 General Election, by which time MacKenzie was no longer editor.

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 a unflattering photograph of Michael Foot alongside the headline "Do You Really Want This Old Fool To Run Britain?", and in 1987 when MacKenzie ran an extraordinary mock-editorial entitled "Why I'm Backing Kinnock, by Joseph Stalin. MacKenzie's Sun also made frequent scathing attacks on what the paper called the "looney left" element within the Labour Party and on institutions supposedly controlled by it, such as the left-wing Greater London Council and Liverpool City Council.

MacKenzie also ran a story extensively quoting a respected American psychiatrist claiming that British left-wing politician Tony Benn was "insane", with the psychiatrist discussing various aspects of Benn's supposed pathology. The story was discredited when the psychiatrist in question publicly denounced the article and described the false quotes attributed to him as "absurd", The Sun having apparently fabricated the entire piece.

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. 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. Some Sun staff reportedly threatened to resign over the coverage, although none actually did so.

MacKenzie's Sun supported the introduction of the controversial and highly unpopular Poll Tax by Margaret Thatcher and consistently stuck by Thatcher and her government on the issue despite widespread opposition which culminated in huge public protests, riots and eventually mass non-payment, all of which is seen as having contributed to Thatcher's own downfall before the tax was quickly repealed by her successor John Major. The Sun labelled those attending public protests opposing the tax as "thugs".

Invented stories

In 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 himself 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. 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.

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". 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) 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..

These incidents caused The Sun to become a laughing stock in some quarters and to be heavily condemned in others, 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?

MacKenzie's denial that he ever knowingly published lies or fabrications would appear to be false bearing in mind the aforementioned Simon Weston and Tony Benn stories, which were both proven to be based on fabricated interviews invented by The Sun themselves, as well as the allegations by Sun staff that MacKenzie printed deliberate misinformation about Scargill and the miners.

Coverage of the Hillsborough disaster

MacKenzie's Sun frontpage on the Wednesday following 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.

The sources for these allegations were stated to be anonymous high-ranking police officers from Sheffield Police and Irvine Patnick, a Conservative MP from Sheffield who wasn't actually present at the game. (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.

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). 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 (including Andrew Neil at Murdoch's The Times) but while many national newspapers printed allegations about Liverpool fans being responsible for the disaster, only MacKenzie and his counterpart at The 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.

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, despite a belated full page apology by the newspaper in 2004.

MacKenzie re-ignited the controversy in November 2006 when he claimed that his allegations about the Hillsborough tragedy had been true after all (see below).

After leaving The Sun

In 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.

He later said that he would agree to indulge in a "night of passion" with Janet Street-Porter and that she 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."

MacKenzie took a radically different approach and was criticised for producing severely downmarket 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 naked 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 £2000 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 has later said of L!VE 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 10pm they would double their ratings".

The station failed and had to close 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 main UK subsidiary. 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 Ireland 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 didn't survive, 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. Things did not work out and he left in March 2007.

MacKenzie has appeared on the BBC's Grumpy Old Men TV series, discussing his pet hates. Ironically, considering the programme is made by the BBC, on 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.

In May 2006 MacKenzie unable to make a lasting success in the business world returned to his old master Rupert Murdoch to replace the "right wing columnist" Richard Littlejohn at the The Sun where he has again courted controversy, this time by using one of his columns to launch an extraordinary attack on the people of Scotland (see below). MacKenzie has stated that he has never regarded himself as a good writer and that it takes him a day and a half to finish each column. 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."

Political ambitions

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

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 Government's plans for 42-day detention without charge for terrorist suspects, MacKenzie announced that he is likely to contest the election on a pro-42-day detention platform, 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".

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. Ironically, 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 himself refused to comment publicly on the controversy and pulled out of a scheduled appearance on BBC TV's Question Time later that week.

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?" 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 his home county of 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. MacKenzie also claimed that an unnamed Liverpool news agency was one of the sources for the Sun story, something that he has never claimed before. 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 has nothing to apologise for.

In February 2007, Independent journalist Matthew Norman claimed that MacKenzie is considering issuing a public apology for his coverage of the Hillsborough disaster, although he is "still unsure" as to whether to do so. 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". In the 80's, MacKenzie's Sun (along with other Murdoch-owned newspapers) published a number of attacks on the city of Liverpool, criticising the city's Trotskyist Militant-led council and its strong opposition to the Thatcher government, and the supposed radical left-wing tendencies of the city's inhabitants, as well as promoting many negative stereotypes of Liverpudlians. The Sun at one point under MacKenzie would regularly refer to the city as the 'Socialist Republic of Liverpool'.

Attacks on Scotland

MacKenzie has courted further controversy recently by making a series of attacks on the people of Scotland despite the fact that he himself has some Scottish ancestry - his grandfather was from Stirling.

Sun Newspaper

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.

Question Time

On October 11 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 it [money] but they don't enjoy creating it, which is the opposite to down south.

The comments came as part of an attack on Prime Minister Gordon Brown whom MacKenzie said could not be trusted to manage the British economy because he was "a Scot" and a "socialist", 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 350 complaints 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.

In a number of further interviews, MacKenzie went on to say that without England's financial support Scotland would most probably be a third world country.

Charitable activity

Kelvin MacKenzie participated in a celebrity edition of The Apprentice in order to raise money for charity. Sport Relief Does The Apprentice is part of the BBC's annual charity initiative and aired on March 12 and 14. He was one the Celebrity Apprentices not to be 'fired'!!

External links

• Sport Relief Does The Apprentice - Official Website