Sir Albert "Larry" Lamb, who died on May 18th aged 70, was a classic example of that tradition in which the editors of very popular newspapers are expected, even encouraged, to be very unpopular. He worked to that rule: he was overbearing, over-critical and, often, over the top.
As justification for his domineering style, he could point to his undoubted success. He was appointed editor of the Sun at the time of its rebirth under Rupert Murdoch in 1969, and was responsible for transforming what had been a declining paper, selling 650,000 copies, into one that sold more than four million in nine years.
In so doing, it became Britain's highest circulation daily, providing Larry Lamb with especial pleasure by surpassing his former paper, the Daily Mirror. Indeed, his approach to running the Sun drew on his experiences as a sub-editor at the Daily Mirror, where the exercise of autocratic power by Hugh Cudlipp and Jack Nener - themselves influenced by the grumpy style of a famous former editor, H.G. Bartholomew - was considered synonymous with success.
Proving people wrong was the making and the breaking of him. He was born Albert Lamb, in the Yorkshire mining village of Fitzwilliam, but thought he had been given the wrong name, and soon adopted "Larry", after a character in Toytown, on BBC Radio's Children's Hour. After leaving grammar school, he used a position on the Nalgo union paper to obtain a cub reporter's job on the weekly Brighouse Echo, swiftly moving on to daily papers in the north-east. Brief periods on the subs desks of the London Evening Standard and the Daily Mail followed before he joined the Daily Mirror in 1958. So frustrated was he that he took the risk of becoming northern editor of the Daily Mail in 1968, a job regarded as a backwater.
His teaching methods were regarded by some as brutal. Colleagues were struck by his half-suppressed anger. His reputation brought him to Murdoch's attention when he bought the Sun. Both set out to prove the cynics wrong by stealing the Mirror's clothes - its anti-establishment irreverence - and many of its best journalists.
He soon troubled the Mirror, reworking their formula with a fresh panache. Within six months, he more than doubled the Sun's circulation, with editorial content that was saucy rather than salty, reflecting the permissiveness of the early 1970s. He serialised sex manuals and, eventually, introduced the nation to the page three girl.
Politically, he kept the paper proLabour, at least until Murdoch's internal fights with the print unions, and Margaret Thatcher's accession to the Tory leadership, convinced him, and a significant proportion of the working class, to vote Conservative. For this, he was knighted in 1980 - within a year of the Tory election triumph.
By the early 1980s, his misplaced confidence that his success stemmed entirely from his own defiant character led him to think everyone else, even including Murdoch, was wrong. Circulation at the Sun began to slide when he failed to respond properly to the Daily Star, another tabloid even further downmarket than his own. In 1981, Murdoch decided it was time for his once-prized asset to go.
Two years later, he gave Larry Lamb a second chance by making him editor-in-chief of the Australian, but that lasted barely nine months. "Larry just couldn't help himself," a News Corporation executive said. "He had megalomaniac tendencies and kept clashing with Rupert." By then, his authoritarian personality had clouded his once-sure journalistic touch and he failed to stem the decline of the Daily Express during his three years as editor (19831986).
He later tried to distance himself from Kelvin Mackenzie's bonk-busting Sun, even reflecting in his book, Sun]rise (1989), that his introduction of page three might have been a mistake. Ironically, it may be his chief claim to fame, apart from a grateful line or two in Mrs Thatcher's eventual memoirs.
He is survived by his wife Joan, two sons and a daughter.
Sir Albert "Larry" Lamb: born 1929; died, May 2000