...Mr MacKenzie issued a statement explaining the paper's actions and apologising that the story was "so wrong".
But the famously abrasive journalist stopped short of taking personal responsibility for publishing false claims, saying he was "totally misled" by a "concerted plot" by police to deflect blame on to Liverpool fans.
Trevor Hicks, a campaigner who lost two daughters in the disaster, dismissed the former editor's words, saying they were "too little, too late" and describing him as "low life, clever low life, but low life".

Admirable restraint on the part of Mr. Hicks. After all he could have called our home-grown Julius Streicher "Right wing, racist scum, in bed with bent coppers; a complete stranger to the truth who got rich publishing mendacious hatchet jobs on the enemies of Rupert Murdoch and the Conservative Party."

We now know that Thatcher was made aware of the South Yorkshire Police Force's wholesale perversion of the course of justice, but the police were her stormtroopers. She had turned them loose on the miners and they had helped her to destroy whole communities, smash the unions, and wipe out an industry. They were well rewarded, and given free rein. Let's not forget the Police Federation official standing up at that organisation's annual conference and declaring that the police would never again cooperate with a Labour government.