Kelvin MacKenzie

Going to the theatre is a joy. When you are a character on the stage, less so. Over the past couple of months, I have been depicted in two plays. Having worked for Murdoch for years, I clearly enjoy pain and so, at my own expense, I went to see both. First up was a one-man show called Monstering the Rocketman at the Arcola in Dalston, which detailed how the Sun (me!) had accused Elton John of being involved in rent boy sessions. Our source, it turned out, had sold us a pack of lies, made more painful by the fact that the news editor, the reporter and I spent 90 minutes cross-questioning this stoat to satisfy ourselves he was telling the truth. It’s easy to be misled.

I was astonished when Rupert Murdoch announced he was stepping down as chairman of News Corp. He always told me he would be carried out of the building with his boots on. At 92, and after a 70-year career, he deserves a rest, but my experience of him was that he was at his most relaxed when working and quite anxious when having to be sociable. What surprised me most was that he has taken the title of 'chairman emeritus'. The expression that most sums up his attitude to life is: lower the lifeboat, I’m in I remember that when he hired me as editor of the Sun he had just announced that Frank Giles was moving from editor of the Sunday Times to the new role of editor emeritus of the Sunday Times.

As the size of Nelson Mandela’s cell on Robben Island still haunts me, I had always rejected the idea of visiting Auschwitz because I feared my tears would make the trip about me and not the victims. But thanks to persuasion from my longtime friend Richard Glynn, a former CEO of the bookies Ladbrokes, I spent most of Thursday at the camps an hour from Krakow in Poland. Nothing prepares you for Auschwitz. The stats are stark: 1.1 million victims, mainly Jewish, perhaps 230,000 of them children. If you didn’t die in the gas chamber, you would die in the field, because the SS gave prisoners so little food that they would lose weight and be gone in three months. My abiding memory was the shoes. The little shoes. The large shoes. The dust-covered shoes.

When Trevor Phillips stood down as chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, he had served nine years. His period remains the longest of any UK equality commissioner. So when the confected outrage started over my Sun column about Everton footballer Ross Barkley I was not surprised to see a text pop up from Mr Phillips. I feared he would join the Liverpool bandwagon claiming I was a racist because I had compared the look in the eyes of Barkley with a gorilla. Actually I and every football fan I had ever met believed Barkley to be white. Unluckily for me, but luckily for my enemies in the north-west, that was not entirely true. It emerged that although Barkley looked white, his grandfather was half-Nigerian.

In a few weeks’ time, a couple I have been friends with for the best part of 20 years will be holding a bat mitzvah for their daughter. Anyone who knows even a little about Judaism will know the importance of the event: a celebration for a girl reaching 12, and a great excuse for a great party for friends and families. I would love to have gone but I won’t be there. You see: it’s in Liverpool. And I knew from the emails over the past 23 years and from the anonymous keyboard warriors of Twitter that were I to be seen in the city I would literally be in mortal danger. I am not exaggerating.

Welcome to the world of journalism, Nick Davies. So the cops in Surrey told you the story was true — or so you claim. The cops at the Yard told you it was true — or so you claim. Every aching bone in your reporter’s anti-Murdoch body told you it was true. But there was a problem — as we all now know today. The Milly Dowler story that led The Guardian on that fateful day back in July was untrue: there is no evidence to show that the News of the World deleted Milly's voicemails. So what price has Nick Davies paid since he tried to slip his deliberately unintelligible apology into Page 10 of The Guardian on Saturday? None at all. Not suspended. Not sacked. What price has Alan Rusbridger, the paper’s ho-hum £500,000-a-year Editor paid?

Kelvin MacKenzie reveals in tomorrow's Spectator that he was interviewed as a potential victim of the News of the World phone hacking scandal. Here's his story: It was the kind of building George Smiley would have been happy to call home.Anonymous and bleak, it’s the home of Operation Weeting, where 60 officers flog themselves to death every day in the biggest Scotland Yard inquiry in anyone’s memory. I am here by appointment. A charming woman detective has called me a couple of times — when you are a former tabloid editor that’s worrying in itself  — and asked me to drop by ‘at my convenience’ to look at the fact that my name and mobile number had been found in the paperwork of the private investigator Glenn Mulcaire.

It was a strange place for the red mist to descend. A railway car park in the snooty Surrey town of Weybridge. I was putting my £3.50 into the ticket machine when I spotted a notice from Elmbridge Borough Council which told those of us who had the temerity to pay for our parking spot rather than leave our car for free in the street that there was to be an increase from 1 April. My bet was that a 10 per cent rise would be the top whack. In a climate where customers were lending money to banks to keep them solvent and where new-builds in Bury could be bought for the price of a pomegranate, anything else would be scandalous. I was quite wrong. As I worked my way down the notice I saw in 2pt type (this article is in 9pt) the number they had in mind.