[3] Competing closely with other papers, in July 2011, on the second weekend after the closure of the News of the World, more than 2,000,000 copies sold, the highest level since January 2000.

Lord Rothermere – who owned the paper – introduced the Sunday Pictorial to the British public with the idea of striking a balance between socially responsible reporting of great issues of the day and sheer entertainment.

Ever since 1915, the paper has continually published the best and most revealing pictures of the famous and the infamous, and reported on major national and international events.

From day one the paper was a huge success and within six months of launch the Sunday Pictorial was selling more than one million copies.

The articles he then wrote for the Sunday Pictorial attracted such high levels of interest that sales lifted by 400,000 copies every time his stories appeared.

On resuming the editorship in 1946,[n 2] Cudlipp successfully developed the Sunday Pic to reflect the greater social awareness of the post-war years.

While frontbenchers involved in sleaze scandals exposed in the British press have often led to reshuffles, contemporary accounts and later research has credited the coverage, associating the involved young socialite to a Russian senior attaché, for triggering the replacement of the Conservative prime minister with another, Alec Douglas-Home.

In 2012 the Sunday Mirror broke the world exclusive that one of the two Moors murderers,[n 3] Ian Brady, had died but been resuscitated, brought back to life against his will.

[citation needed] A former Sunday Mirror investigations editor, Graham Johnson, pleaded guilty to intercepting voicemail messages in 2001.