Excellent interview with Paul O'Grady in yesterday's Independent. It really is worth a read in its entirety, he'so spot on about so many things in my view, and certainly pulls no punches.
Here he is in particularly angry mode on Kelvin McKenzie:
And then we come to Kelvin MacKenzie. It is scarcely surprising that for someone from Merseyside the man deemed responsible for the demonisation of Liverpool football fans following the Hillsborough disaster would raise O'Grady's blood pressure. But his condemnation is blistering. MacKenzie, who last month blamed the West Yorkshire Police for his infamous story in The Sun accusing Liverpool fans of stealing from the dead and urinating on the police, is a "skid mark on the face of journalism."
"When you say sorry, you don't say, 'But it wasn't my fault'. It was his fault. He was the editor of the paper, the captain of the ship. Liverpool will never forgive him."
It was also The Sun's depiction of gay people during the 1980s Aids crisis for which O'Grady despises MacKenzie. In his latest memoir, Still Standing, O'Grady's accounts of looking after loved ones until they died in emaciated agony are devastating. He describes begging God to save a close friend as he hugged the once "beautiful boy now degenerated into the wizened, incontinent, senile old man I held in my arms".
He blames MacKenzie's newspaper for striking "terror into young gay people's hearts, who thought that being gay meant you instantly caught a killer disease."
"The Sun always talked about 'homosexual haunts' as if we were all slithering, diseased, around back allies. I'd like to see him turn up in Liverpool during the gay and lesbian march, and say sorry. He hasn't got an ounce of remorse in his body."
linky:
www.independent.co.uk/news/people/profil...rigin=internalSearch
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