Revealed: David Sullivan’s Sunday Sport sold sexualised images of 15-year-old girls

I n 1987, the tabloid press in Britain was at the peak of its powers. The Sun newspaper, with its brash celebrity scoops and strident support for Margaret Thatcher – who won her third general election that year – was selling almost 4m copies a day. Competition for stories and readers was relentless, resulting in ever more salacious and lurid editorial devices to win a slice of the readership from rivals on the newsstand. The Sun stood atop the tabloid market, its topless Page 3 girls credited with a share of its popularity. It was against this backdrop that the Sunday Sport, a red-top publication occupying the seediest corner of Fleet Street, launched a feature that even by its own standards appeared to plumb the depths of journalistic ethics. On 6 September 1987, the newspaper began counting down to the 16th birthday of schoolgirl Natalie Banus – when she could legally be pictured topless. Owned by the pornography baron David Sullivan , who announced his resignation as a joint-chair and director of West Ham this weekend, the Sunday Sport had launched in the previous year in a blaze of controversy. The first issue of the Sunday Sport, published in September 1986. …