Stick It Up Your Punter!: The Uncut Story of the Sun Newspaper

by Chris Horrie

The SUN is more than a newspaper. It is, in its own words, a phenomenon - the biggest-selling daily paper in the English language, fascinating 12 million readers and making its owner, Rupert Murdoch, a profit of over 1 million a week. The SUN has unashamedly dragged journalistic standards into the gutter. This book takes you inside the machine to tell in graphic and often hilarious detail the story of how the paper has evolved from cashing in on the permissive society of the sixties, to helping Maggie win the election in 1979, to the world of foul-mouthed Kelvin MacKenzie to the present day.

Genres: Nonfiction, Politics, Journalism, History, Business

528 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1990

Reviews

[Manny]

With the News of the World dead and Sun journalists being arrested on a daily basis, it's easy to let one's schadenfreude get out of control and start predicting the newspaper's imminent demise. Except that we've (more or less) been here before. I read this book in 1991. The author's claims that the Currant Bun was in a passive vegetative state and would soon have its life support switched off turned out to be, alas, on the optimistic side.

So he didn't get it completely right, but the book is still a page-turner. Your fun Sun fact for today: in case you didn't know, Page 3 is produced entirely by women. The team that does it has every inch of office space covered with nude male pictures, an installation generally known to staff as "the Willie Wall".

For people who weren't around at the time of the Falklands War, the title is a reference to one of their most famous headlines,

STICK IT UP YOUR JUNTA

The book gives details, also on the notorious and much-parodied

GOTCHA

which appeared in connection with the sinking of the Belgrano.

[Bob Mcdermott]

An interesting book which tells the story of the Sun from its rebirth as a Murdoch newspaper and its early years with the editors Larry Lamb and Kelvin McKenzie. It reinforced my original conviction that The Sun (and its like) have been dragging the people of the country down into the gutter for years with great collateral cost and very little regard for the truth. McKenzie especially comes across as the kind of person that i wish would just get in the sea.

Also includes some side-learning about the key events of the period such as the Falklands, Hillsborough and of course the rise, fall and rise of Frank Bough!

For the avoidance of doubt: don't buy the sun. Buy this book instead (or Jim Felton's who has just released a similar one but more up to date)

[Tomas Bella]

Strašne vtipná kniha o mimoriadne odporných novinách. Žiadne veľké analýzy, ale stovky neuveriteľných historiek.

„Dvere do mojej kancelárie sú vždy otvorené. Zatvorené sú len preto, že mám klimatizáciu“. (šéfredaktor Lamb)

Najvtipnejšie kúsky z knihy: https://dennikn.sk/1859673/tldr-zabav...

[Patrick Powell]

This ‘biography’ of Britain’s Sun newspaper was first published in November 1990, some 36 years ago, and as far as I know it was revised only twice, first for a second edition published eight years later, then again in 2012 in the light of the 2011/12 Leveson Inquiry into widespread ‘phone-hacking’ by many newspapers and published again by Faber & Faber in 2014.

The edition I am here reviewing is the 1998 version and is thus incomplete, but had I bought the 2014 number, the account of the Sun’s history would in some ways still be fundamentally misleading: the ‘soaraway Sun’, the proud boast of its then editor Kelvin MacKenzie, which at one point sold more than four million copies daily has not soared in many a year And that is putting it mildly.

Neither have Britain’s other national newspapers, of course, and circulations all-round are well down the toilet, courtesy of the internet and its many functions.

As each newspaper’s circulation numbers are vital as leverage to screw as much out of advertisers as possible – ‘just look at how many people will see your ad!’ – it does not need a rocket scientist to realise that if a paper – take the Daily Express, for example, which once sold 1.5m copies daily but in December 2025 was selling just 102,884 each morning – advertisers will negotiate drive hard to pay bottom dollar for the ads they place.

As the easy money it once was, selling ‘news’ and whatever else ‘interests’ the reader is pretty much as dead as the dodo for national newspapers.

To understand how, frankly catastrophic, has been the collapse in print newspaper circulations, when I joined the Birmingham Evening Mail on January 7, 1980, as a trainee sub, it was selling just north of a quarter of a million every day.

Great, you’d think, but actually. the Mail was not all pleased – it had just been bested into second place by its local arch-rival the Express & Star, based in Wolverhampton, it had long looked down on.

That means that in 1980 more than half-a-million folk living in the West Midlands were buying an evening paper every night. But now? In 2024 the Express & Star had slumped to just 9,707 daily sales, and the most recent figure I can find for the Mail is pitiful 2,958! A total of just 12665! Catastrophic is exactly the word.

The Evening Mail is owned by Reach plc which in recent years has been hoovering up Britain’s regional evening and weekly newspapers and also owns several national newspaper, including the Daily Mirror, Daily Express, Sunday Express, Daily Star and Scotland’s Daily Record and Sunday Mail.

Publishers like Reach put on a brave face in view of the circulation collapse and point out that each of their papers has an ‘online presence’. Nice try, dear hearts, but really no cigar – advertisers don’t much care for placing ads in online newspaper websites. It’s all too vague as to how cost-effective doing so is and most of the online newspaper online presences are abysmally bad. ‘Clicks’ are hard to verify, are never as good as ‘sales.

Though there are notable exceptions: Mailonline – in industry and professional terms, I add, as I am not a fan – has an attractive website and has been turning a tidy sum for many years. The websites of the saintly Guardian and the doughty Daily Telegraph, owned since the end of June 2026 by Germany’s Axel Spring SE which also published Bild – founded in 1952 in direct imitation of Britain’s Daily Mirror, though it was and still is a broadsheet – are also half-decent.

Others, though, are cask: take a look at the Sun’s ‘online presence’ https://www.thesun.co.uk/ – it is an embarrassment, fucking awful (as are the websites of the Daily Mirror, the Daily Express and the Daily Star). They are not a patch on the Mailonline and although they invite readers to subscribe, I doubt many do and prefer to accept the few – ads that populate the sites.

In its day, the Sun was Britain’s best-selling ‘red-top’ – downmarket tabloid newspaper – hitting over four million daily sales and knocking the circulations of its arch-rival the Daily Mirror (at times officially known as just The Mirror) and its imitator the Daily Star into a cocked hat. But times have changed drastically.

For the past six years the Sun has refused to publish its circulation figures, ashamed of them no doubt, but they are estimated to be about 7oo,ooo sales daily.

Worse, where the Daily Mail always came a distinct second to the Sun, though it did appeal to slightly different market (once memorably and accurately described as the NCO’s wife) and now sells at least 150,000 more day.

There can’t be many reading this who have not heard the Sun’s owner and liberal hate figure, the ‘media mogul’ Rupert Murdoch. Now 95 years old and possibly kept alive these days on a daily regimen of lamb testosterone and stem cell injections, the lad is, according Forbes magazine, ‘the 31st-richest person in the United States and the 71st richest in the world’.

Worldwide he owns a string of newspapers, including the Wall Street Journal, The Times and The Sun, television stations, including Fox in the US, and the publisher Harper Collins, and it is accepted that he has the ear of every and any leading politician he cares to ring up.

As a student at Worcester College, Oxford, studying PPE, Rupe is reputed (according to American’s National Review in 2010 and to Vanity Fair in 2011 to have ‘kept a bust of Lenin in his rooms and came to be known as “Red Rupert” was a member of the Oxford University Labour Party and stood for secretary of the Labour Club’.

The relevant links to the articles are dead more than 16 years on, so I can’t provide them, but I have no reason to doubt that claim, though Rupe’s youthful idealism – which did not please his daddy Sir Keith, also a ‘newspaper magnate’ though on a far smaller scale – did not survive. Rupe has long been a byword of right-wing politics, though not in the mindless way so popular with rather too many others of the same political bent.

Like him or loathe him – and I’m agnostic on the matter as I find the conventional whooping and jeering, obligatory whatever your poison, terminally silly and pointless – we cannot deny that Rupe was – well, still is I suppose as a death notice has not yet appeared – a very sharp operator and ruthless.

Pertinently, the Sun, which is the subject of Stick It Up Your Punter, played a very significantly role in Rupe’s stellar rise to become one of the world’s better known oligarchs.

He was just 21 when his dad died and he eventually took over running the old man’s, comparatively mini, media ‘empire’ – two newspapers and a small TV station. But Rupe was ambitious and over the following decade and a half he bought up more newspapers in Australia and New Zealand, but even they did not quench his thirst for whatever he was thirsty for, and in 1996 he arrived in London. Perhaps he wanted to be a big fish in a bigger pond – speculate to your heart’s content, but I shan’t bother.

It was that move to Europe and, five years later to the United States, which allowed Rupe to build the Empire and gain the clout many either like or loathe.

It began with some nifty footwork. At the time, Britain’s Sunday newspaper, The News Of The World and 126 years old in 1969, was ailing financially and Rupe took his chance. By some kind of wheeling and dealing – I still haven’t quite got my head around the details – he played the white knight manoeuvred the paper’s owner, Sir William Carr, out of control and himself into control of the paper and, crucially, acquired the printing press in Bouverie Street, just off Fleet Street.

The original, pre-Murdoch Sun had been launched five years earlier by the International Publishing Corporation (IPC), which owned the Daily Mirror, and was revive another IPC property, the left-wing Daily Herald, another victim of the slow but steady decline in print newspapers.

Two other papers, the left-0f-centre Daily Sketch and the liberal News Chronicle, had already fallen by the wayside in the 1950s because sales were slumping and had both been taken over by the Daily Mail (and then killed off, soaking up the best of their staff and putting the rest out to pasture).

In my view that decline began with the advent of ‘commercial television’ in 1955 and the eventual launching of fifteen different regional TV stations which began to give the then monopoly BBC TV a real run for its money.

IPC’s chairman, Hugh Cudlipp, wanted to give the Herald a new lease of life somehow, but was worried that keeping it as another left-of-centre paper would hit sales of IPC’s star, the Daily Mirror.

With this concern in mind, he only to keenly allowed himself to be persuaded by a market researcher that there existed in increasingly prosperous Britain a newspaper-reading constituency of ‘social radicals’ crying out for an intelligent, middle-of-the-road paper, a supposed gap in the market left by the demise of the News Chronicle.

It became obvious this was complete bollocks, and by 1969 the ‘old Sun, selling 1.5m when it was launched, had lost half its circulation and was reported to be bleeding £2m a year, more than £31m in 2026 and IPC wanted it off its hands. (I use the phrase ‘bleeding’ because I can never spell ‘haemorrhaging’.)

Bernard Shrimsley, a deputy Sun editor under Murdoch’s ownership and later a News of the Screws editor, later observed that the market researcher’s claim of ‘an immense, sophisticated and superior middle-class, hitherto undetected and yearning for its own newspaper’ was ‘a delusion in the El Dorado class’.

Murdoch, looking for some way of utilising the his new printing press in Bouverie Street and wanted the old sun, but so did a chancer called Jan Hoch.

Hoch was born Jewish Czech and had served in the British Army in World War II after escaping Nazi-occupied Czechslovakia. In Britain he reinvented himself as Robert Maxwel, made fortune by buying a company publishing scientific journals and got himself elected to Parliament as a Labour MP. He also hoped to become a media mogul (which he eventually did, ironically, buying the Daily Mirror, though then stealing an estimated £400 million from the paper’s employees’ pension fund).

Rupe’s bid for the old Sun was preferred by IPC over Maxwell’s simply because Rupe – again ironically given the shenanigans of seventeen years later during the Wapping disput – promised to get rid of fewer printers than Maxwell said he would. (The Wapping dispute is chronicled in Linda Melvern’s excellent and entertaining account The End Of The Street.

IPC were worried that if too many printers jobs were axed, the print unions – this was when for almost 35 years Britain’s trade unions ruled the roost and were universally feared by the Conservatives, finances and business – would hit back at the Daily Mirror and stop production.

Quite apart from wanting to add another newspaper to his growing collection, Murdoch hated that the press he had acquired in Bouverie Street was worked just one night a week to print the News of The World on Saturday night and was lying idle for the other six nights a week. So the Sun as it became for the next fifty years was born.

It might be convenient to view the development of the Sun as outlined in Stick It Up Your Punter in two phases: the new paper in its first decade, then the second when Kelvin MacKenzie was editor. In that first ten years, the Sun did slightly raise eyebrows, but it wasn’t until MacKenzie took over in 1981 (until 1994) that the paper became increasingly notorious.

If Murdoch was the driving force behind the launch of his ‘red-top’, much credit must also go to one Albert Lamb, better known as Larry Lamb, who shaped the early Sun. He introduced the Page 3 girl showing her breasts and later came up with the line in an editorial, now a semi-cliché, The Winter Of Discontent. This was in the run-up to Britain’s 1979 election when striking unions were causing nationwide chaos (some might say with reason, some might not).

In many ways Lamb, the son of a Yorkshire colliery worker and proudly ‘working class’, and the Aussie Rupe were kindred spirits. Both felt like outsiders, and Murdoch, who came from a prominent, wealthy and socially respected Melbourne family, was irked that Britain’s Establishment viewed him with disdain and looked down their noses on him and his second wife Anna.

Lamb, then working as northern editor of the Daily Mail, also agreed on what kind of paper the new Sun should be: irreverent, fun, a more joyful alternative to the Daily Mirror, the red-top to beat, and a heavy emphasis on television: neither chose to regard television as a threat to print, but as a prime source of copy.

According to Punter’s two authors, Peter Chippindale and Chris Horrie, little by little the warm relationship between Murdoch and Lamb soured somewhat towards the end of the 1970s, but which time Murdoch had based himself in New York to oversee his growing US media empire.

Perhaps indicative of what might have gone wrong was that Lamb, simple ‘Larry’ to Sun reporters, writers and subs in the early days, developed airs and graces when he was knighted in 1980 and insisted that staff should ne address him as ‘Sir Larry’.

Murdoch, a the ‘owner’, always had the last word and he was more and more put when ‘Sir Larry’ began to argue the toss with him towards the end of his editorship. One story Punter recounts is that Murdoch increasingly liked to wind up Lamb – never a healthy sign – by repeating an Aussie joke:

‘Why did the sun never set on the British Empire? Because God never trusted the Poms in the dark’

This quip irked Lamb but the more it irked him, the more Murdoch repeated it. So soon it was time for ‘Sir Larry’ to move on and make way for fresh blood. And that fresh blood was Kelvin Calder Mackenzie. It might be appropriate to call him a force of nature, but I suspect that description has generally positive overtones. In many ways MacKenzie was a cunt.

Ruthless, charming, more than capable, almost fearless he might have been, but a great deal of what he got up to and the practices he encouraged in his staff were despicable. In the 1980s I was working as a sub in Birmingham then, after brief interlude of two terms at photography college (curtailed when I ran out of cash), followed by a year and a half of joyless unemployment, I spent four years as a sub in Cardiff and each subs’ desk had the range of morning papers every day.

We all made a beeline for the Sun, always good for a laugh and ‘the latest scandalous details’, but it wasn’t until a week or so ago when I got the full picture that it all came into focus. One jokey feature in the Sun newsroom – this is not in the book – was a MacKenzie’s ‘true story alert’: when a reporter was being reprimanded for a detail in one of his stories and pleaded ‘but Kelvin, it’s true!’, MacKenzie grabbed something or other from the news desk, shook it and dubbed it ‘true story alert!’

Ho, ho, ho, ho, ho, ho, and when I first heard that, I was as amused as everyone else.

But reading how the Sun concocted an ‘interview’ with the widow of a Falklands War veteran, much to her distress, how it stitched up Elton John over lies about ‘his frolics’ with rent boys, how the public were regularly almost persecuted until they agreed to be interviewed and photographed, how after a football stadium tragedy in which and all of if this simply in the interests of boosting sales. It left and still leaves a bad taste in mouth.

In his 13 years at the Sun helm, Kelvin gave Murdoch quite a few headaches and – as in explicably I wasn’t kept in the loop by Rupe or News International so I can only assume– eventually enough as enough and he was moved on.

Though, as Punter details, there were contributory factors and MacKenzie was not wholly to blame, he had Murdoch £1m (around £2.7m now) in an out-of-court settlement to end the libel suit, he and his star re-write man, John Kay who had once killed his wife in a fit of madness (not the strict medical term) and invented ‘an interview’ with the widow of a dead war hero, and despite reliable great sales, Kelvin was slowly but steadily pissing off much of Britain and making his paper look risible.

Perhaps worse, MacKenzie had alienated the whole city of Liverpool when, under a splash head proclaiming ‘The Truth’, he informed his readers that drunken Scouser had pissed all over the bodies of dead fans and stolen from them in the wake of the Hillsborough disaster and that were responsible for the deaths of 79 of their number because of they had tried to break into the ground to watch the match without paying.

Originally, MacKenzie wanted to head the splash ‘You scum’ but wiser heads dissuaded him. Sun circulation in Merseyside plummeted by between 40% and 80% and are believed to have cost Murdoch tens of millions in lost sales and ad revenue over the years. Many Merseyside news agents refused to sell the Sun but were informed by their wholesaler that they were contractually obliged to sell the papers given them.

By Chippindale and Horrie’s account, the once pleasant, collegiate atmosphere of the newsroom in ‘Sir Larry’s’ day was becoming sour as MacKenzie hired ever younger reporters and writers as gung-ho and unprincipled as he was. They were encouraged to come up with sensational stories by whatever means, and Kelvin made life hell for many older staff members who baulked at many of his methods

Mackenzie finally departed in January 1994, later claiming he had left because his deputies Rebekah Wade (another horror) and Dominic Mohan (of whom I know nothing and will leave it to you to google him) had not told him of the phone-hacking that was going on. Believe that if you like, but I find it implausible that Kelvin should suddenly have developed moral scruples.

His subsequent career is, on paper, respectable: media executive, TV and radio presenter and columnist, but none of this latest ventures lasted more than a few year. Essentially, editing the Sun had been the high-water mark of his life and then it slowly began to ebb away.

Mackenzie’s guidance of the Sun, choice of content and stule could be guauged from what, now dead journalist and satirist Auberon Waught wrote in a Spectator (‘Speccy’) piece:

‘One of the comforts of life for those who read only the Sun — and I dare say a fair proportion of its readers read nothing else — must be to live in a state of permanent doubt about what is going on in the world.

My 1998 edition is more than a little sparse on Sun life post-Kelvin, simply registering that his deputy Stuart Higgins took over as MacKenzie shuffled of. One of Higgins’ ‘strength’ was that as the papers West Country reporter one of his contacts was Camilla Parke-Bowles who fed him a

[North Landesman]

A history of the Sun from 1969-1998. This book was a true delight to read. It gave me a picture of what working for a place like that must have been. The Murdoch switch from Tory to Labor was especially fascinating, as were the various libel suits and the Elton John case. Anyone intersted in journalism shoud read this book.

[Richard]

Fascinating. A really good insight into tabloid journalism and its roots. As you would expect from this field, it is witty, well paced and well written.

[Adam Mollen]

About as debased as you’re imagining

[Filip Olšovský]

Perfect. If you have this many stories you don't need a stronger narrative. Don't remember a book with so many sentences highlighted and read to people around.

[Dan]

NOW INCLUDING REVIEWS OF THE 1999 and 2013 EDITIONS!!

A worthy companion to Paper of Wreckage: The Rogues, Renegades, Wiseguys, Wankers, and Relentless Reporters Who Redefined American Media, which chronicles several decades in another part of Rupert Murdoch's domain, the New York Post. Sadly, I didn't know the 1991 edition of "Stick It Up Your Punter" was updated in 1999, taking in the change of regime for both the Sun and the UK, and again in 2013 to include News International's near implosion around the time of the phone-hacking scandal and Leveson Committee hearings. I'll have to get around to those eventually.

Being published when it was, the first edition is for the most part, inevitably, the story of Sun editor Kelvin MacKenzie, a magnetic character in the sense of being both attractive and repulsive depending on where you stood in relation to him. He was a born tabloid editor -- funny, smart, endlessly energetic and creative as he remade the bottom of the UK newspaper market, reckless, crude, racist and wildly homophobic, a Thatcher fanboy and the boss from hell. Private Eye used to describe Mail editor Paul Dacre's management technique as "double-cunting," because calling someone a cunt just once couldn't fully express the depth of his rage at underlings deemed to have performed inadquately. Well, MacKenzie got there long before him.

All the famous moments are here -- "Gotcha," "Freddie Starr Ate My Hamster," the "monstering" of Elton John, and of course the front page that would have ended anyone else's career, his response to the Hillsborough stadium disaster in 1989. That last one is covered brilliantly, from the events in Hillsborough themselves to a nearly hour-by-hour acccount of what happened in the Sun newsroom the day before the infamous "The Truth" headline appeared, as MacKenzie weighed an alternative head ("You scum") and everyone else ran for cover from what they correctly guessed would be a calamity for the paper's reputation and circulation.

MacKenzie oozed to another part of the Murdoch empire in '94, so the 1991 edition lacks its natural conclusion, although it notes that things were headed downhill for the paper (and for the Tories) by the early '90s. A fascinating, entertaining and occasionally horrifying story.

UPDATE#1: Got hold of the 1999 edition, and re-read the tail end of the original plus the new material. Highlights include (1) that masterpiece of service journalism, STRAIGHT SEX CANNOT GIVE YOU AIDS -- OFFICIAL; (2) the relentless coverage of Conservative politicians' sex lives that gave us "Tory sleaze" and the Viz character Baxter Basics MP (while somehow not discovering John Major's affair with Edwina Currie, which Currie herself revealed in 2002); (3) Murdoch's clammy embrace of Tony Blair; and (4) the death of Diana in a car trying to outrace a pack of drooling paps. It cratered the tabs' reputation for a short time, but not their circulation. Amid all this, Murdoch, tiring of MacKenzie, moved him over to the newish Sky satellite TV operation, quietly ending a tenure at the Sun that had survived the Elton John libel fiasco and THE TRUTH about Hillsborough. Now tracking down the 2013 update, covering the era when things got really juicy.

UPDATE #2: Spent $14.93 on the third and presumably last edition, from 2013, which works out to about 60 cents per page of new material (the introduction and a few additional pages in the chronology at the end of the book). Maybe not my best spending decision, value-for-money-wise, but worth it to relive the humiliation and universal scorn heaped on Rupert and his merry band of mutants during the phone-hacking and police-bribing scandals.

[John Pollard]

I read this book 26 years after it was published because one of the authors, Chris Horrie, joined my 5-a-side football group in East Sheen! The book seems very well researched and is an interesting journey back through the Thatcher years. I am left with a bad taste in the mouth from the whole unsavoury spectacle of Rupert Murdoch's empire and small minded, right wing xenophobic, homophobic and immoral newspapers with the Sun leading the charge. The crossover between politics and the Murdoch press is nauseating, from Thatcher to Blair. How has Murdoch been allowed to dominate newpaper and TV - by having politicians in his pocket and working with parties who further his business political interests. The writing style was very balanced, not really embellishing the stories, more reporting them in a fairly flat way, if that is possible with this content. So it wasn't a page turner for me and although good (3 stars) it didn't quite make "very good" for me (4 stars).

[John B]

This is definitely no dry, boring boardroom bio! It tells the fascinating story of arguably Britain's most controversial newspaper, The Sun, from its beginnings in 1969 to the late 90s. The book is written in a style that reflects the sort of 'mockney' character assumed by Kelvin Mackenzie, and is a very entertaining and informative read.

The description of British newspapers in the 1960s is particularly interesting, and as the story unfolds, especially during the Mackenzie regime, you get a fabulous history lesson in 1980s pop culture. The book also goes into great depth about the huge furor surrounding the way The Sun covered the 1989 Hillsborough disaster.

Definitely well worth a punt, innit!

[steev]

this is a really amazing overview of THE SUN newspaper in the post-Rupert Murdoch era. tells the story of maniac editor Kelvin MacKenzie, THE SUN's coverageof the Falkland's War, Murdoch's anti-union activities, etc

depressing stuff, but also pretty damn amusing. you'll hopefully never touch a Murdoch-owned paper again after reading.

it's out-of-print and used copies are bizarrely expensive. gee, i sure hope there isn't a corporate media "conspiracy" to suppress this book.

[Mike]

An excellent and damning history of the Sun newspaper, and by extension the United Kingdom from the late 60s to mid-90s. It's difficult to overstate the influence the Sun has had on British politics, and this book does a great job of describing the Sun's internal culture and explaining the ways that it has used and misused its power. One of the best things about the book is its gleeful tone, which makes the stories of stupidity and greed and thuggish mean-spiritedness seem even more disturbing.

[John Levon]

By now we're all familiar with the scurrilous behaviour of the Murdoch organisation, but this old book is still a rollicking read, and a great way of cementing your natural hatred of Mr Kelvin Mackenzie.

[Sienna]

So far very interesting and entertaining.