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“The British public believe it is time for a new newspaper, born of the age we live in. That is why the Sun rises brightly today.”
So declared the front page of the Sun on September 15 1964. Sixty years ago, this headline tried to tempt readers to buy what was the first new popular daily to launch in over 30 years.
Carving out an audience for a newspaper in a crowded market isn’t easy. The Sun sought to differentiate itself by channelling the positivity and aspirationalism of an increasingly affluent 1960s society. The paper welcomed the “age of automation, electronics, computers” and called for the “rapid modernisation of Britain”. This was a message very much aligned with Harold Wilson’s Labour party, which swept to power a month later after 13 years of Conservative rule.
But readers weren’t convinced. The paper could not sustain its promise of up-to-the-minute sophistication, and it declined into banal and bland offering that failed to meet its sales targets.
The Sun’s publisher, IPC, already owned the Daily Mirror, by far the nation’s most popular title. In 1969, the publisher thought there was little risk in selling it to the young Australian entrepreneur Rupert Murdoch. They predicted that the Sun would set, and that would be the end of the story.
They couldn’t have been more wrong. Indeed, handing over the Sun proved to be one of the worst decisions in publishing history. Relaunched in November 1969 under the editorship of Larry Lamb, the paper became a runaway success.
Within a year, circulation doubled to over 1.5 million copies a day. Sales continued to climb, until in 1978 it surpassed the circulation of the Mirror to become the nation’s bestselling daily paper, a status it continued to enjoy until recent years. The Sun reinvented the tabloid model and became the most influential expression of British popular print culture.
Why did Murdoch’s Sun shine so much more brightly than IPC’s version? Essentially because it was, for better or worse, much more authentically “born of the age we live in”.
At the end of its first week of publishing in 1969, an editorial declared its sympathy with the social changes of the 1960s: “The permissive society is not an opinion. It is a fact. People who pretend that yesterday’s standards are today’s, let alone tomorrow’s, are living a lie.”
By including raunchy pin-ups, and serialising both Jacqueline Susann’s bonkbuster novel The Love Machine and Terry Garrity’s sex guide, The Sensuous Woman, the Sun identified itself as a (hetero)sexually permissive, hedonistic paper, in tune with the era. Dismissing feminist criticism as “prudery”, the paper institutionalised the topless Page 3 girl as the central symbol of the new, sexualised tabloid style.
During the 1980s, Labour MP Clare Short called for Page 3 to be banned for encouraging the objectification and denigration of women (only to be met with sexist and personal attacks). But despite support from many women, there was little prospect of parliament encroaching on the freedom of the press. Sustained campaigning continued for years, yet the Sun continued to publish topless models in print until 2015, and online until 2017.
The Sun was thoroughly modern in its attitude to television, embracing it far more energetically than other papers, and recognising it as an important source of celebrity stories and gossip. The inclusion of a detailed weekend television guide helped to make the Sun’s Saturday edition its bestselling one of the week.
From the late 1970s, the paper’s political content reflected and reinforced the rise of Thatcherism. The Sun declared its support for the Conservative agenda to “slash taxes, curb union power, combat crime and reform schools”.
Five months after Margaret Thatcher came to power in the 1979 election, the Sun asked the prime minister for a letter of congratulations to celebrate the paper’s tenth birthday. Overriding the objection of her team, Thatcher wrote: “The Sun is a friend! Will do.”
In office, Thatcher’s chief press secretary, Bernard Ingham, usually started his summaries with the Sun and encouraged the view that the paper represented the views of the average person in the street. The Sun remained “Maggie’s” cheerleader throughout the 1980s, celebrating her economic policies and backing her position on the Falklands War and the Miners’ Strike.
Lasting legacy
To its critics, the Sun, especially under the editorship of Kelvin MacKenzie (1981-1994), coarsened British popular culture with its flag-waving jingoism, casual sexism and racism, harsh treatment of marginalised groups (including immigrants, LGBTQ people and those supported by the welfare state), and its pitiless intrusion into the private lives of public figures.
Read more: Nasty piece of work: The Sun’s nationalism is doing England great harm
It stigmatised Aids victims, was found to have printed numerous false claims about celebrities (leading to a £1 million settlement with Elton John in 1988). Its misleading coverage of Hillsborough in 1989, which accused Liverpool fans of responsibility for the stadium disaster, led to a long-term boycott of the paper in Liverpool.
Whatever one’s views, it is hard to deny the paper’s influence and significance on British culture and politics.
As it moves towards pensionable age, however, the Sun, like the rest of the press, has lost most of its power. It no longer publishes official sales figures, but they are likely to be around 750,000, a far cry from the 4 million circulation of the 1980s.
Its readership is ageing, and although it has established a niche online, it has fallen far behind the social media giants in the provision of news and entertainment. It is telling that the paper that boasted after the 1992 general election “It’s the Sun Wot Won It” was so late and lacklustre in declaring its support in the campaign of 2024.
However hard it tries, the Sun can no longer plausibly pretend it represents “the age we live in”.
Adrian Bingham does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
