“We had to find a way out, and thought of writing a book about it – about a paper that nobody had ever read, which had come and gone in about two weeks.”Disaster: The Rise and Fall of News on Sunday attracted excellent reviews, and Heinemann duly commissioned Stick It Up Your Punter They haven’t looked back. That paper was not a success: “It was a complete cock-up,” reflects Horrie. Film rights were sold to Hollywood, where Irwin Winkler used the material for The Paper.Horrie had already collaborated with co-author Peter Chippindale on a similar book about the Manchester-based News on Sunday, where Horrie edited the colour supplement and Chippindale was news editor. One reviewer described it as a cross between Waugh’s Scoop and Riot on Cell Block 10.For journalists everywhere, owning a copy was de rigueur.

“Kelvin’s main concern seems to be that anyone could make any money – even the pitiful sums that one earns as an author of this type of book – as a result of him. But that’s hypocritical, because his entire career has been based on other people, not least Diana [Princess of Wales].”MacKenzie prefers not to comment on having been “monstered” by Horrie, but others don’t mind defending themselves. Gary Bushell, one of the few key figures still working at The Sun since Punter was published, says: “Everything they wrote about me was wrong; every single reference to me had some big factual mistake.”That’s what he says. But on publication in 1990, Punter was hailed as a devastating expose of the tabloid newspaper that defined the previous decade – and also for providing great entertainment. But MacKenzie won’t be pleased with his portrait – not now he’s putting himself about as a respectable director at the publicly quoted Mirror Group, with overall responsibility for editorial.
MacKenzie declined to help with the books. “I have tried to meet him many times,” says Horrie, 41, who wrote each title with a different co- author. The Consumer Credit Act 1974 allows the Director General of Fair Trading to exempt the disclosure of certain information such as the name of credit referees..

You’d think this was some kind of vendetta. Chris Horrie, a scruffy teacher of journalism, first heaped ignominy on Kelvin MacKenzie in 1990, with his book Stick it Up Your Punter: the Rise and Fall of The Sun Now he’s updating it. And, what’s more, he’s dishing the dirt on the bizarre cable channel owned by Mirror Group, in an entirely new book, L?VE TV. Taken together, the two titles constitute a virtual biography of MacKenzie, former Sun editor and patron of the News Bunny.