Unusually for an autocrat, Rupert Murdoch suffers from sackers’ regret. A year after he fired Sir Larry Lamb from the Sun, he made him editor of the Australian. Lamb soon made it clear to the local management that he was unhappy he didn’t have his own lavatory. The demand was passed upwards to Murdoch who sent the message back; ‘Tell him to piss out the window.’ I’m not sure Lamb, who came from the same bloody-minded school as Murdoch, enjoyed the response as not long after he headed back to London to edit the Daily Express.

Lamb was a genius at his game. Murdoch supplied the capital and Lamb the creativity. Together they took the old bankrupt Sun from a daily sale of 700,000 to 4,000,000 a day, making so much money it funded much of Rupert’s US ambitions. But lefty director Danny Boyle and the playwright James Graham know that it’s not old dry numbers that will make a movie a success at the box office. It needs sex. It needs drugs.

Take a play that was a critical success but made no money called Ink and insert an affair between Lamb and a married colleague at the Sun. Add a dollop of amphetamines and you might have hit on your hands

Unfortunately for Mr Boyle of Slumdog Millionaire and Trainspotting fame, neither of them were in Lamb’s life. So, what were they to do? The answer was simple: make it up.

Take a play that was a critical success but made no money called Ink and insert an affair between Lamb and a married colleague at the Sun. Add a dollop of amphetamines and you might have hit on your hands. Boyle and Graham could have got away with it but failed to take into account that bloody-mindedness hadn’t fallen far from the tree in the shape of Nick Lamb, Larry’s youngest son.

Nick, a businessman, took up the cudgels on behalf of his mother Joan, telling Boyle and Graham that the alleged affair left his mother’s memory, ‘subjected to a gratuitous and wholly undeserved invention.’ Nick said his mum was a ‘woman of considerable intelligence, strength, integrity and dignity who deserves to be remembered for who she was, not a fictional betrayal, invented for dramatic effect.’

I was a junior exec on the Sun during Larry’s latter days and did not know him well, but I do remember clearly he talked of his wife in the most glowing terms. My experience, you may know better, is that unless you’re a psycho you are unlikely to be kind about your wife in front of senior employees while conducting a hot and heavy in the office. Perhaps I’m naïve or I simply don’t know enough psychos.

Larry was no saint. He had a bottle of Burgundy at lunch at the Savoy Grill, followed by endless glasses of whisky after the paper was put to bed. On one occasion Larry and Murdoch went to lunch at the Savoy and the sommelier, seeing his most prized customer, rushed over to the table and suggested an obscure, but expensive bottle, of Burgundy to Larry. In his most dismissive Yorkshire accent emphasising every vowel, Larry said, ‘wouldn’t wash my car in that.’ At which point Murdoch interceded, ‘We’ll have the house red.’ That payoff is best said with an Australian drawl. Try it.

But drink was Larry’s only vice. There were no women. There was no affair. There were no drugs. There was simply work. Murdoch wouldn’t have it any other way. When this was put to Boyle and Graham by the Times, the expression ‘weasel words’ springs to mind. Boyle said ‘we did our research’ and ‘we have dramatised a version of this story which we believe is substantially truthful.’ i.e. I made it up.

In his statement to the Times, Graham said the film has ‘fictionalised elements’ but ‘overall the film is based on extensive research and conversations, and grounded in the wider stories and general details from the period.’ i.e. I made it up.

Unbelievably Roy Greenslade, an assistant editor in Larry’s day, a Guardian media editor and finally an admitted IRA sympathiser, was hired as a consultant on the film. I put it to him that the affair must have been his idea. Greenslade told me, ‘When I said it never happened, Boyle said the Claire Foy character (the mistress) was meant to be an “amalgam”.’ Greenslade says Larry loved Joan. Joan loved Larry. Nothing to see here.

I can hardly complain about making things up. I put up a sign on the Sun newsroom wall saying; ‘Make it up and make it early.’ I thought it funny, Murdoch thought otherwise. The sign came down.

The other image to emerge about Larry was he was a tyrant. Largely true. Tyrantisorearse is a condition that comes to all successful tabloid editors.