MacKenzie admits regrets over Sun’s Hillsborough coverage

IT'S HARDLY the apology that the Hillsborough relatives have been demanding all these years, but former Sun editor Kelvin MacKenzie confessed today that he wishes that he had handled his paper's coverage of the tragedy differently.
 
He made the admission after a fiery exchange with Labour MP Chris Bryant on the BBC's Daily Politics show, during which he claimed that the infamous front page story about the behaviour of Liverpool fans in 1989, when 96 were killed in a crush at an FA cup semi-final against Nottingham Forest in Sheffield had been written by a journalist from Liverpool and was carried in other papers.
 
Bryant started the ball rolling by saying newspapers should report the truth, and do so within the law. He then mentioned the Sun's notorious Hillsborough splash, co-incidentally also headlined 'The Truth'. It claimed that Liverpool fans picked the pockets of the dead, attacked the emergency services and urinated on police.
 
MacKenzie was visibly angered by the remark and, jabbing his finger at Bryant, began defending his story. As the pair shouted at each other the host of the show, Andrew Neil, was forced to intervene, barking at them to "be quiet".
 
Neil than asked MacKenzie if he harboured any "regrets or remorse" over the things he did as a tabloid editor. MacKenzie, surprisingly, admitted: "If I could revisit Hillsborough, certainly, I would do it in a different way."
 
But he landed another jab, by claiming that the rest of Fleet Street had printed the allegations too - but with a subtle difference. While the Sun treated the stories of pick-pocketing and so on as fact, the other papers reported them as allegations, recording the the outrage expressed by by Liverpudlians at such claims. He wished the Sun had done the same. "I would do it in the way the other newspapers did it," he told Neil.
 
The Sun has since apologised for its coverage, but MacKenzie has never done so. MPs rounded on him earlier this year when the Hillsborough disaster was debated in Parliament, and Liverpool MP Steve Rotheram called him a "pariah".
 
The former Sun editor has crossed swords with Bryant before. The pair had a spectacular row about phone hacking on BBC News 24 in 2010.
 
MacKenzie has given short shrift to the current concerns about press standards. In October he described the Leveson Inquiry as "ludicrous". ·