Pride of place in my breakfast room in my home is a large sculpture that I commissioned to celebrate The Sun’s controversial Gotcha headline which followed the news that we had sunk the Argentine navy’s cruiser the General Belgrano.
I have never understood what the issue was with the headline. But then again, I don’t spend my time with Guardian readers or BBC news producers. Frankly, I didn’t care if the Belgrano had nosed into the exclusion zone or not. We needed to kill them before they killed us.
Simplistic, but I imagine the Ukrainians feel pretty much the same today.
To understand where that headline came from, you would have to be sitting in The Sun’s newsroom, back in the spring of 1982. Compared with today it was not just a different world but a different universe.
The fog of cigarette smoke had impregnated the walls, turning them a ghastly yellow. There was the reassuring clatter of typewriters proving the reporters were working. Phones were ringing. (What’s a phone, grandad?) Every time a phone rang there was a chance a reader had stumbled on a story that would bring down a politician or prove Jimmy Savile was a paedo. Those calls were gold-dust. There were plenty of them.
There was alcohol. The reporters would go out for a drink — but for the executives there was plenty of the stuff hidden away from Rupert Murdoch’s prying eyes. Although on one occasion, Murdoch dropped in unexpectedly on editor Sir Larry Lamb (my predecessor) and was “shocked” to see the amount of alcohol being consumed. “They’re drinking out of plant pots up there,” he said.
I remember going to one of Sir Larry’s afternoon conferences where it was clear he had been over-refreshing himself at lunchtime with a bottle or two of his favourite red. Surrounded by his acolytes at his desk (including me) he would, under normal circumstances, pick the story of the day and then hand draw Page One, complete with headline, on a blank piece of paper. Having created his masterpiece, Sir Larry would then pass the paper to the Night Editor who would take it back to the art desk to make it look good.
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