In the build up to the 1992 election the Sun’s attacks on the Labour leader, Neil Kinnock, who had been expected to win, were relentless. On polling day, its front page featured a mock up of Kinnock as a lightbulb with the headline: “If Kinnock wins today will the last person to leave Britain please turn out the lights.”
When he lost, its front-page headline declared: “It’s the Sun wot won it.” Later, the Sun’s owner, Rupert Murdoch, told the Leveson inquiry the headline was “tasteless and wrong”, and that he had given the editor at the time, Kelvin Mackenzie, “a hell of a bollocking”. He added: “We don’t have that sort of power.”
