Hillsborough Untold: Aftermath of a disaster

by Norman Bettison

  I had visited Liverpool only twice in my life before 1998. Once to a game at Anfield and on the second occasion to visit a prisoner in Walton Jail. I needed to interview him about similar offences to those which had led to his conviction and sentence. Visiting a football stadium and a prison doesn’t really give a proper feel for a city as a whole. I had no connection to the place and no latent desire to live or work there.

  I had been an Assistant Chief Constable in West Yorkshire Police for five years when, in April 1998, a new Chief Constable was appointed. It was Graham Moore, who was one of my friends in the service. We had been on a national development programme together in the early ’80s and had kept in touch since. I was delighted when he got the job as I knew he would make a first-class Chief.

  It became obvious within a couple of months, however, that friendships on a command team create more tension than harmony. By the summer of 1998 it was clear that I needed to move on. Graham had a long contract and it would be better for our relationship, and the force as a whole, if we went our separate professional ways.

  I wanted to remain living in the north of England and, preferably, work in a metropolitan area. All my experience had been in inner-city policing.

  An early advert appeared on the situations vacant pages of the Police Review – the professional organ for the police service – inviting applications for the post of Chief Constable at Merseyside. I thought about it but quickly rejected the idea.

  I rejected the idea of submitting an application for one reason only. There was a Deputy Chief Constable in one of the Welsh forces who had previously worked in Merseyside and was considered a clear favourite for the vacancy back in his old force.

  There was no other reason that I dismissed the idea of an application to Merseyside. It was, in many ways, an ideal fit for my domestic and professional circumstances. I didn’t have in mind my Hillsborough tasking nine years previously. Those who now say that it should have been predominant do so with the benefit of hindsight and are influenced by the current and powerful narrative that surrounds Hillsborough. That didn’t exist in 1998.

  I had spent three months, as a Chief Inspector, working on a task group almost a decade previously. I had done nothing that I considered to be notable or particularly career-defining during those three months. I had done nothing meritworthy nor anything to suggest controversy. I certainly hadn’t done anything to my cost or shame. Furthermore, my professional experience had, in the interim, been further developed in two different forces; three different ranks; and seven different roles.

  During that nine-year interval no one had even hinted at any criticism of the post-disaster role that I had performed. I knew that Lord Justice Stuart-Smith had examined allegations about the process of statement emendation, but that had nothing to do with me. There was no obvious impediment, that I knew of, to my living and working in Merseyside if I chose to. Anyhow, this was irrelevant. I had decided not to apply for the post because it was a job, I thought, with someone else’s name on it.

  At the final interviews, however, my predictions about Chief Officer appointments proved to be more fallible than I had imagined. The Merseyside Police Authority had interviewed six candidates and had chosen not to appoint any of them. The job was still open and the favourite, along with other competitors, was no longer in the running.

  When the job was advertised again I sent for an application form and communicated with the Chief Executive of the Merseyside Police Authority, David Henshaw, to let him know that I was interested. The Chief Executive, and the application form rubric, could not have been more clear. Candidates were to use only the forms provided with no additional papers appended. Candidates were to stick rigidly to a limited word count and address only the nine competencies required of a Chief Constable. Candidates were instructed to draw on recent experiences to evidence the competency assessment which would be the first stage of the selection process.

  I completed my application form in accordance with the instructions. I addressed the competencies that had been established by the Home Office as the core requirement for a Chief Constable. I drew on evidence exclusively from my recent experience as an Assistant Chief Constable and from no other part of my career. I complied with the word count guillotine. I submitted the form and copied it to Her Majesty’s Inspector of Constabulary (HMIC), who would be required to submit an assessment of all candidates and who would be present as a professional adviser to the Police Authority at both shortlisting and final interview.

  My application form, critics have pointed out after the fact, contains no mention of Hillsborough. That is true. It also contains no mention of my supervising the Independence Elections in Zimbabwe; or the exchange programme I undertook with the Metropolitan Police, working on the Vice Squad in Soho. It has nothing in it about setting up a new department to develop talent in an organisation; or about commanding football match operations; or about leading a team to take down the shebeens in north Sheffield, the illegal drinking dens and crack houses that blighted the city before our operation. The critics are right, the application form had no mention of Hillsborough … but the HMIC assessment very clearly did.

  The police senior appointments process was a highly regulated process. The Home Office set the rules in those days. A local Police Authority may appoint whomever they wished so long as a) the candidate had successfully completed the Strategic Command Course at the Bramshill Police Staff College, for which there was a competitive entry process, and b) they were approved by the Home Secretary as suitable for the post. Her Majesty’s Inspector of Constabulary was the person who advised both the Home Secretary and the local Police Authority in their respective decisions.

  The HMIC provided the Police Authority with his own assessment of all candidates and a brief history of their career to date. The third paragraph of mine read as follows:

  After university and promotion to Chief Inspector he was appointed to create a Career Development Department within the force and then had a part in a small team reporting to the Chief Constable in relation to the Hillsborough incident. Promoted Superintendent in 1989 he was posted to Traffic Department and then Sheffield City sub-division. He attended the Junior and Intermediate Command Courses where his performance was impressive.

  That single paragraph dealt, succinctly, with about five years of my professional career. The HMIC’s ten-paragraph report accompanied my application form and was available to everyone involved in the appointments process.

  At shortlisting, the HMIC responsible for the north of England police region, Mr Dan Crompton, provided the Appointments Committee of the Police Authority with an even more compendious account: a single page for each candidate containing twelve bullet points. Bullet point number three on my page read: ‘Member of a small enquiry team reporting to the Chief Constable on the Hillsborough Incident.’

  The bullet point sheets were handed out to the shortlisting committee as each candidate was discussed. The Chief Executive and the majority of the nine members of the Appointments Committee agree that this was done, that they had read the documents as each candidate was considered, and that they had seen and noted the Hillsborough reference. Two local councillors would later say that they had no knowledge of any documents being supplied by the HMIC and, if there were, they hadn’t read them. They were embarrassed by the fallout that followed my appointment.

  My own assumption that my work, post-disaster, was no impediment to an application to work in Merseyside seemed to be endorsed by the Appointments Committee, for I was duly shortlisted along with six other colleagues. No member asked the HMIC for any further information about my post-disaster tasking.

  The seven candidates gathered in Liverpool on the evening of Sunday 11 October 1998. There was to be, what we called in the trade, an ‘ordeal by meal’ or ‘trial by trifle’. It was the practice in the ’90s to begin every selection process for Chief Officer posts with an ‘informal’ meal where the candidates rotated after every course to sit between tw
o different members of the committee so that the appointing members could chat about anything they wished. All the official guff around this arrangement was that it was not a part of the selection process and that it was simply a means of breaking the ice. Anecdotal evidence indicated, however, that judgements were made about candidates during this informal process. Equal opportunities was an immature concept in the ’90s.

  The nine members of the Police Authority, two executive officers and the HMIC had, by the end of the evening, broken bread and engaged in small talk with each of the seven candidates. No one had asked me anything about Hillsborough, despite my connection having been brought to their attention.

  There followed a two-day process during which every question asked of one candidate was asked of all. That may appear a rigid nod to fairness, but it was simply a Home Office guideline to prevent local appointers, inexperienced in HR matters, going off-piste in an embarrassing way. As the two days unfolded, I felt an increasingly positive reaction from the committee.

  The final stage was a presentation on a professional topic, of the Authority’s choosing, delivered in the Police Authority Chamber in full uniform. This was an exercise which enabled an assessment of the ‘cut of the jib’ of each candidate. An opportunity to see the candidates, who were still in contention, in the environment which was most familiar to the Authority.

  We all then waited in an adjoining room for the white smoke to rise. After an hour had passed, David Henshaw, the Chief Executive, and Councillor Carol Gustafson, the Chair of the Police Authority, came into the room and invited me to rejoin the Appointments Committee next door. Mr Henshaw stayed behind to explain to the other applicants, collectively, that the Committee would be offering me the job.

  I was thrilled. The more research that I had undertaken in preparation for the interview, the more I believed Merseyside Police to be a perfect fit for my experiences and my aspirations. After a little back-slapping with the Appointments Panel, I was taken off to have a medical, and then a photo shoot and, finally, a short private meeting with the Chair to agree press lines about the appointment and to discuss a start date.

  It was about 5.30 p.m. on Tuesday 13 October that I got into my car at the Liverpool Hotel, where the candidates had spent the previous three days, and set off for home, which was on the other side of the Pennines. Forty-five minutes later, in driving rain and at the highest point of the M62 motorway, crossing the bleak Saddleworth Moor where Brady and Hindley had buried the bodies of their victims, the car phone rang. It was a brick-sized affair with a coiled lead that sat, imposingly, in the centre console. There was no hands-free facility, nor any legislation to preclude the phone being picked up.

  It was a Merseyside Superintendent on the line. He courteously confirmed that we were not yet acquainted but that he needed to impart some news. ‘First of all,’ he said, ‘may I offer you my congratulations and I look forward to working with you.’ Nice start.

  But then: ‘Your appointment has caused a bit of a kerfuffle over here. Maria Eagle, a local MP, is on the warpath claiming that you have connections with the Hillsborough disaster. She’s all over the media with it.’

  A ‘kerfuffle’ was, I soon learned, a bit of an understatement. Maria Eagle had spoken in a debate in the House of Commons on 8 May 1998, when the House had received the Stuart-Smith Inquiry report. I was unaware of it. It was in that speech that she first made her accusation that South Yorkshire Police had appointed a team to orchestrate a black propaganda campaign and that the team had been so engaged in propaganda and historical revisionism for a number of years. Ms Eagle had noted a number of names on historic documents that she had read in the Commons Library which had been deposited there by Lord Justice Stuart-Smith. Bettison is not a common name and so news of my appointment in Merseyside had triggered an angry response from Ms Eagle and, thereafter, from others representing families’ groups and justice campaigns.

  The local interest in these allegations became intense. My name was mentioned in the Liverpool Echo in the majority of the daily editions over the weeks that followed my appointment. There was rarely anything new to say about Maria Eagle’s general accusation made under parliamentary privilege. She did not repeat any of the invective outside of that privileged situation. Others, however, who weren’t so concerned about avoiding defamatory comment, let rip. The thing that really kept the story running was an almost daily accretion of some fact or other from the Appointments Committee. Who knew what? Who asked what question?

  Three members of the Police Authority resigned their positions – the two councillors who claimed not to have received the HMI’s assessment and summary and, later, another, very honourable, councillor from Wirral, who wasn’t even on the Appointments Committee. He resigned when it became clear that the Police Authority were going to confirm my appointment in spite of the controversy. This piecemeal fallout from the selection process helped fuel the running story.

  There were some wild and wonderful headlines during this period, when more heat than light was being generated in Merseyside about my appointment. Amongst the cleverest, carried by the Echo, was: ‘It’s Time to Jettison Bettison’. A headline that could have graced any tabloid.

  It may be difficult to imagine, in the aftermath of the national controversy created by the Hillsborough Panel Report in 2012, that this 1998 precursor firestorm was contained locally. It was predominantly a story in Merseyside and the north-west, but it never caught fire nationally because there weren’t any specific accusations that could be held up to the light. The dreadful irony is that the Hillsborough Panel Report unleashed a very similar non-specific whirlwind which, this time, went viral. And has stuck.

  In the forty-eight hours that followed my appointment, I had two broad concerns. How should I respond to the misplaced accusations which were running in Merseyside so that I was able to do the job I was appointed to undertake? Secondly, how should I respond to the bereaved families, particularly those based in Merseyside, who would have been influenced and, understandably, distressed by the news reports? They were the most important constituents in my consideration. The first, broader, issue could only be addressed when I started my new job in Merseyside. I was a West Yorkshire Assistant Chief Constable, ninety miles away from Liverpool, with limited access to the local media there.

  I had done nothing wrong and surely people would come to see that in the fullness of time. To have retreated from the flames would have been a mistake. It would have allowed the ‘no smoke without fire’ theory to be established. This was an unanticipated and unsubstantiated allegation that now had to be faced head-on. And faced down.

  The bereaved families were another consideration altogether. I needed to speak with them directly at the earliest opportunity. They were owed an explanation.

  I made the first of many overtures to the families’ representatives, within forty-eight hours of my appointment, in a letter delivered to Maria Eagle. After a couple of paragraphs, in which I refute the idea of any impediment to my appointment and speak about my ambition for policing in Merseyside, I offered the following request:

  I am nevertheless aware of the depth of grief and anger felt by those bereaved in the Hillsborough disaster, and I know how much is focused upon South Yorkshire Police in general, and two or three senior officers in particular. I am prepared to answer questions in detail about my actions on 15 April 1989, and in the weeks and months that followed that fateful day. I would like the opportunity to meet with you and representatives of the families, privately, as soon as this can be arranged. I know that I shall be called upon to deal with questions in the media but, in the long term, I think the people who deserve answers are your constituents rather than the world at large. I am prepared to clear any time in my diary, including evenings and weekends. I do hope we can meet.

  I closed the letter by quoting the Liverpool Daily Post editorial from that day, 15 October 1998. Sensing that Maria Eagle’s non-specific accusation was unlikely to derail the appointment
process, the editor had helpfully offered this conciliatory proposition: ‘Mr Bettison’s … experience of the Hillsborough disaster should reinforce his empathy with Merseyside and its people not weaken it.’ I told Ms Eagle that I wanted to be given the chance to demonstrate that potential in a meeting with the bereaved families.

  Ms Eagle did not respond straight away, as it emerged, about the time she received my letter, that the Merseyside Police Authority announced that they would be meeting the Hillsborough Family Support Group and the Hillsborough Justice Campaign group on 2 November. The Police Authority would then immediately follow that up by holding a ‘confirmation hearing’ with me.

  Both the Family Support Group and the Justice Campaign group, in the meantime, issued press statements, on different days, each calling upon the Authority to rescind the appointment. One might see how all of these announcements kept the local media pot boiling for weeks.

  On Sunday 1 November, the day before the crunch meetings, I received a telephone call at my home from Councillor Carol Gustafson, the Police Authority Chair, to discuss the arrangements for Monday’s meetings. Councillor Gustafson had, since the day of the appointment, been courteous and sympathetic. She was in a place where no politician ever wants to be, the target of negative public opinion, but she was made of strong stuff and had survived other personal and political crises in her life.

  Councillor Gustafson and I would go on to have a hot and cold relationship professionally, but a fond respect for each other at a personal level until the day that she died, prematurely.