The level of protection is remarkable and produces a culture of immunity and impunity.
Many non-Sun readers previously unfamiliar with the work of John Kay must now be, if not exactly regretting their subscription oversight, aware of countless triumphs missed.
This “brilliant Sun chief reporter famed for his scoops, exposés and effortless mastery of tabloid-speak” (as the Daily Telegraph titled its obituary) was someone, we have learned since his death on 7 May, above the common run of hacks, “an elegant, dapper ex-public schoolboy renowned for his kindness and generosity to rivals and reporters, whom he mentored and encouraged…”
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In this more sensitive era, there are presumably good reasons why anyone new to Kay will have finished the prominent Sun and Evening Standard pieces unaware of the existence of Kay’s first wife, Harue, whom he killed in 1977.
Without wishing to distort his story, the relevant editors must have considered it superfluous that, prior to being tragically victimised by Starmer, Kay was convicted of Harue’s manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility. He was depressed, a court heard, due to professional anxieties. According to a contemporaneous Guardian report (“‘Torment’ of reporter who killed wife”): “He, thinking it would be better to end it all, pushed her head under the water. Naturally she struggled, but by tightening the hold he held her down by the throat.”
With the Sun paying for an eminent barrister and promising to take Kay back, the sentence was psychiatric treatment. Once restored, the greatest wife-drowning journalist of his generation did not shrink from exposing imperfections in others. Peter Chippindale and Chris Horrie recorded the reaction of a TV producer whose privacy Kay invaded: “All he’d done was leave his wife, yet the story had been written by a man who had killed his.” That killing, they write in Stick it up your Punter!, “officially became a taboo subject”.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/may/16/lovely-eulogies-to-fleet-streets-john-kay-but-they-overlook-one-important-fact