Ten years after, the headline lives on

Kelvin MacKenzie stepped into the shower 24 hours after John Major called the 1992 election and emerged with one of the most powerful headlines of modern journalism. Three weeks later, on the day of the General Election - 10 years ago yesterday - The Sun's front page had this message for the electorate: "If Kinnock wins today will the last person to leave Britain please turn out the lights."

For MacKenzie, the then editor of The Sun, the headline - accompanied by the balding head of Kinnock squeezed inside a lampbulb - was a master-stroke, pandering to the worst fears of voters. The poster front-page contained only a few paragraphs of text, warning that under Labour taxes would go up, immigration would rise, strikes would increase and mortgages would be unaffordable. "He'll have a new home but you won't," was the punch-line written by MacKenzie's then deputy, Stuart Higgins.

"It was a piece of genius which Kelvin pulled out of his bottom drawer like some 'this is one I made earlier' Blue Peter model," says Higgins. "What made it so special is that it combined a political point of view with a wicked sense of humour, the sort of thing that is sadly lacking today."

"Gotcha!" The Sun's headline after the sinking of the Belgrano during the Falklands War was in the same league, along with "Swedes 2 Turnips 1" (with Graham Taylor's face transformed into a turnip) but these didn't have a political dimension to them - unlike "Up Yours Delors" and "Now we've all been screwed by the Cabinet", which ran after the EMU debacle and coincided with a spate of Tory sleaze stories.

The lightbulb headline came after a week of vitriol from The Sun under the banner, "Nighmare on Kinnock Street", which culminated in the declaration after the election that "It was The Sun wot won it". It is almost certainly overstating the case that that headline won it, but Kinnock himself is thought to believe that the drip-drip of unfavourable coverage over several years had a telling effect.

"A headline like that can't create a mood which isn't there already," says Neil Wallis, editor of the Sunday People, who helped to mastermind many of the Nightmare on Kinnock Street stories. "It has to say what people are really thinking but don't quite know how to express. Getting it wrong is far easier than getting it right, and on that occasion The Sun got it 100 per cent right. I don't think it won the Tories the election. They would have won it anyhow, but it gave the impression that it had helped Labour lose."