FORMER Sun editor Kelvin MacKenzie was threatened with legal action and branded “a liar” after claiming his infamous story about the Hillsborough disaster came from a Liverpool news agency.

Chris Johnson, editor of the Liverpool-based Mercury news agency, last night said the claim was “ludicrous.”

Speaking on the BBC’s Daily Politics yesterday about The Sun’s front page “The Truth” story, which included dreadful false accusations against Liverpool supporters, MacKenzie claimed: “That story came from a Liverpool news agency”.

Under questioning from Andrew Marr during the lunchtime show, MacKenzie also admitted he would handle how The Sun covered the disaster differently, given his time again.

He said: “If I could revisit Hillsborough, certainly I would do it in a different way.

“I would do it in the way that every other newspaper did it, which was basically that they ran the story and said ‘big fury over’, and I wish I had done that, yes”.

But Mr Johnson, who runs the Mercury Agency, was furious at MacKenzie’s latest outburst.

He told the Daily Post: “You put a rat in a corner and it bites at the first thing it can find.