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The adverse reaction, once the paper had hit the streets on the evening of 21 September, led to the headline being changed for the paper’s second edition to the more sympathetic “Sad Bruno in Mental Home”. Despite being a persistent critic of some of the government’s policies, the paper supported Labour in both subsequent elections the party won. In 2005, The Sun published photographs of Prince Harry sporting a Nazi costume to a fancy dress party. Blair, who had radically altered his party’s image and policies, noting the influence the paper could have over its readers’ political thinking, had courted it and Murdoch for some time by granting exclusive interviews and writing columns. The Sun switched support to the Labour party on 18 March 1997, six weeks before the general election victory which saw the New Labour leader Tony Blair become Prime Minister with a large parliamentary majority, despite the paper having attacked Blair and New Labour up to a month earlier. The Sun led with a headline “Now we’ve all been screwed by the cabinet” with a reference to Black Wednesday on 17 September 1992, and the exposure a few months earlier of an extra-marital affair in which Cabinet Minister David Mellor was involved.

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A Scottish edition of The Sun launched in 1987, known as The Scottish Sun, recognising the distinctiveness of the Scottish media market. The Sun on Sunday sold an average of 1.16 million copies a week, 111,000 fewer than the year before. Sustained decline from digital disruption began in 2004, in line with print journalism as a whole, and The Sun lost more than a million copies from its daily figures in the six-year period from 2012 to 2018.

John Shirley, a reporter for The Sunday Times, witnessed copies of this edition of The Sun being thrown overboard by sailors and marines on HMS Fearless. At MacKenzie’s insistence, and against the wishes of Murdoch (the mogul was present because almost all the journalists were on strike), the headline was changed for later editions after the extent of Argentinian casualties became known. The coverage “captured the zeitgeist” according to Roy Greenslade, assistant editor at the time (though privately an opponent of the war) but was also “xenophobic, bloody-minded, ruthless, often reckless, black-humoured and ultimately triumphalist”.

More than the news

• By the time of the 1997 UK general election both the Scottish and London editions were supportive of Labour, led by Tony Blair.
• Misjudging public response, The Sun’s editor David Yelland demanded to know in a front-page editorial whether Britain was governed by a “gay mafia” of a “closed world of men with a mutual self-interest”.
• The tabloid Sun was first published on 17 November 1969, with a front page headlined “HORSE DOPE SENSATION”, an ephemeral “exclusive”.
• The Sun dominated the circulation figures for daily newspapers in the United Kingdom from the late 1970s, at times easily outpacing its nearest rivals, the Daily Mirror and the Daily Mail.

The Sun defended Page 3 for more than 40 years, with (then) editor Dominic Mohan telling the Leveson Inquiry into press standards, in February 2012, that “Page 3” was an “innocuous British Institution, regarded with affection and tolerance”. The BBC reported that France was the first journalist to face trial 4rabet app login in india and be convicted under Operation Elveden since the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) had revised its guidance in April 2015 so that prosecutions would only be brought against journalists who had made payments to police officers over a period of time. The police officer had already pleaded guilty to misconduct in a public office and given a two-year jail sentence in 2014, but the jury in France’s trial was not informed of this. The trial related to illegal payments allegedly made to public officials, with prosecutors saying the men conspired to pay officials from 2002 to 2011, including police, prison officers and soldiers.

Karren Brady’s statement in full as Apprentice star quits West Ham

For a brief period in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the lead was more than one million copies per day. The article also claimed Wootton paid the pornographic actors by misappropriating funds for sources from News UK. In 2014, Wootton became editor of the paper’s Bizarre column and remained with the paper until January 2021. In July 2023, allegations were published by the Byline Times about the conduct of Dan Wootton while he worked at The Sun.

Later on the same day the article was published, it was also deleted, without comment from the paper or Newton Dunn. The “BeLeave in Britain” front-page headline was only present on copies distributed in England and Wales; editions for Scotland, Northern Ireland (and the Republic of Ireland) led on other topics. A few hours before the issue was published, the head of PR at the newspaper said the reputed end of Page 3 had been “speculation” only. The main newspaper was reported to have followed in 2015 with the edition of 16 January supposedly the last to carry such photographs after a report in The Times made such an assertion. Several days later the Independent reported The Sun’s failure to report its own YouGov poll result which said that “if people thought Mr Clegg’s party had a significant chance of winning the election” the Liberal Democrats would win 49% of the vote, and with it a landslide majority.

Its highest average sale was in the week ending 16 July 1994, when the daily figure was 4,305,957. The Sun remained loyal to Thatcher until her resignation in November 1990, despite the party’s fall in popularity over the previous year following the introduction of the poll tax (officially known as the Community Charge). The Mayor of Liverpool Joe Anderson described the article as “disgrace” and a “slur” on the city. 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”.

The value of the newspaper was written down by £84m, in effect to zero, with the company believing that The Sun and Sun on Sunday would not return to growth. The Sun’s long run at the top was finally broken in February 2018 when it was announced that the circulation of the free Metro newspaper had overtaken it for the first time. In response, a number of domestic abuse charities criticised the newspaper for its handling of the story. On 14 February 2020, a day before Caroline Flack was found dead in her Stoke Newington flat, The Sun published an article about a “brutal” Valentine’s Day card mocking Flack on its website.

Television personality Piers Morgan, a former editor of the Daily Mirror and of The Sun’s “Bizarre” pop column, has said that during the late 1980s, at Kelvin MacKenzie’s behest, he was ordered to speculate on the sexuality of male pop stars for a feature headlined “The Poofs of Pop”. The inaccurate story about his dogs, actually Alsatians, put pressure on The Sun, and John received £1 million in an out-of-court settlement, then the largest damages payment in British history. The singer-songwriter was abroad on the day indicated in the story, as former Sun journalist John Blake, recently poached by the Daily Mirror, soon discovered.