Born of the age we live in

John Lanchester

• Stick it up your punter! The Rise and Fall of the ‘Sun’ by Peter Chippindale and Chris Horrie
  Heinemann, 372 pp, £14.99, November 1990, ISBN 0 434 12624 1
• All played out: The True Story of Italia ’90 by Pete Davies
  Heinemann, 471 pp, £14.99, October 1990, ISBN 0 434 17908 6
• Gazza! A Biography by Robin McGibbon
  Penguin, 204 pp, £3.99, October 1990, ISBN 0 14 014868 X

Rupert Murdoch bought the Sun in April 1969. The newspaper was an avatar of the Daily Herald, a Labour paper – the biggest-selling daily in Britain during the Thirties – that had fallen on hard times. In 1961 the International Publishing Corporation had bought the loss-making Herald as part of a deal involving the acquisition of several lucrative magazine titles. Hugh Cudlipp, chairman of IPC, had given the unions a guarantee to keep the paper going for seven years, and to keep it supporting the Labour movement; at the same time, the paper was not allowed to compete with the existing IPC title, the Daily Mirror. With these albatrosses tied around its neck, it’s not surprising that the paper’s circulation declined, notwithstanding its 1964 relaunch as the Sun, complete with the new Wilson-era slogan: ‘Born of the age we live in!’ When IPC finally decided to sell the Sun the circulation had fallen from 1.5m to 650,000 copies. After the print unions refused to discuss Robert Maxwell’s offer for the paper, Murdoch stepped in. ‘I am constantly amazed at the ease with which I entered British newspapers,’ he later said.