Tom Petrie, The Sun news editor who led the desk through the paper’s 1980s heyday, has died aged 84 following a long illness.
Petrie was behind two of the paper’s most famous front pages: the 1990 “Up yours Delors” spread aimed at French European Commission president Jacques Delors and its 1986 splash “Freddie Starr ate my hamster”. Along with editor Kelvin MacKenzie, he helped steer the paper to a peak of four million sales.
The latter page was voted the tabloid’s best front page by its readers in 2019 (despite being false). In its obituary for Petrie, The Sun said the Delors headline came about when Petrie suggested to colleagues: “Why don’t we urge the nation to turn towards Paris and shout, ‘UP YOURS DELORS!’”
Born in Newcastle in December 1938, Thomas French Petrie grew up in Leeds and carried out his national service largely in Gibraltar. The Sun records that a rifle accident there made him deaf in his left ear: “Colleagues sitting to his left in the noisy newsroom would often hand him notes, as he could not hear what they were saying.”
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Petrie worked at the Newcastle Journal and Hertfordshire Evening Post-Echo before joining The Sun in 1972, where he remained for two decades.
During the Wapping dispute, Petrie was behind the decision to bring page three girl Sam Fox to the picketed News International offices in a tank “to cheer up the troops”.
Former Daily Mirror editor Piers Morgan said Petrie was “one of the all-time great newsmen and a wonderful character. He was the first Fleet Street news editor I ever pitched stories to as a local paper reporter and couldn’t have been more helpful or encouraging.”
The Sun’s current chief reporter Tom Wells said Petrie was “so generous with his time, no ego and so unassuming for a man of such reputation and talent”.
And Sun editor-in-chief Victoria Newton called Petrie “one of the greatest Sun journalists of all time. He was brilliant with young reporters like me at the start of their careers and a lovely person to work with. I’ll never forget his pipe-smoking in the office.”
Petrie died on Friday night at a care home in Hemel Hempstead.
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