Aside from these two chance meetings, the topic of Hillsborough, after my fiery baptism on Merseyside, was a relatively dormant issue. In August 2000, and in the wake of the collapse of the criminal trial of David Duckenfield, when the jury failed to reach a verdict on manslaughter charges, there was just one further salvo aimed in my direction.
Interviewed by local media in the aftermath of the Duckenfield trial, Trevor Hicks was asked what the next steps would be for the Hillsborough Family Support Group. Amongst the declared manifesto, Mr Hicks said that the group would be renewing their call for my resignation. That item became the headline in the Echo and the Daily Post on 12 August 2000.
I therefore wrote to Mr Hicks on 16 August as follows:
It is a matter of grave disappointment to me that the circumstances surrounding my involvement in the aftermath of the Hillsborough disaster are still clouded by misconception and misinterpretation … I believe it is imperative that a meeting, proposed by me back in 1998, be held so that you and the families’ representatives can put your concerns to me directly.
I had the letter hand-delivered by a police officer who had worked alongside the Family Support Group in making arrangements for their public events. I was delighted to receive a response, faxed to me at 10.19 p.m. the same day. It was from Mr Hicks and the header showed that it had been sent from his home. He told me that there would be a families meeting on Sunday 20 August 2000 and that my letter and request to meet would be on the agenda. He promised to ‘revert after the meeting to advise what, if anything, we are prepared to do in respect of a meeting etc.’
Whilst it was not an overly positive response, it was the first direct communication from the Family Support Group in two years and I seized upon it. I wrote, rather effusively in retrospect, to Mr Hicks on the morning of 17 August:
I was delighted to find your fax waiting for me this morning. I note the time that it was sent and thank you for burning the midnight oil to respond. This is the first time that you or the Families Support Group have communicated directly with me … I am really grateful. I look forward very much to hearing from you again after the families meeting on Sunday 20 August, I am sincere in my desire to meet.
I never did hear from Mr Hicks or the Family Support Group. I was, however, able to read their decision in the Liverpool Echo on Monday 21 August 2000 under the headline ‘Hillsborough Snub for Bettison’. ‘Members of the Hillsborough Families Support Group’, the article read, ‘unanimously rejected Mr Bettison’s call for face-to-face talks to end the controversy surrounding his role in the aftermath of the 1989 disaster.’
That was the last word from those who represent the Family Support Group. It was their unanimous decision. It was delivered via the media in spite of my personal correspondence. Their campaign against me would not be raised again for another twelve years.
I left Merseyside Police in November 2004, after six happy and successful years at the helm. My fixed-term contract had only twelve months to run and I was offered a job in the private sector as Chief Executive of an organisation delivering training to UK and international police forces.
It would be easy to misunderstand the relationship that I enjoyed with Merseyside if viewed only through a post-hoc, Hillsborough-centric, lens. Some people, and institutions, have striven to create a false picture that I was an unwelcome and insensitive interloper who fought, for six years whilst Chief of Merseyside, to cling on to his job in the face of fierce opposition.
The Liverpool Daily Post, sadly no longer with us, was the sister paper to the Liverpool Echo. They were published on the same presses with a great deal of common copy material; the Post with a broadsheet tone in the morning, the Echo, unashamedly tabloid, in the evening. In 2004, Alastair Machray was editor of the Daily Post. He is now the editor of the Liverpool Echo, which, since the Hillsborough Panel Report in 2012, has consistently denounced me. In 2004, when news of my appointment to Centrex was first announced, Mr Machray’s Daily Post carried the following editorial:
BETTISON A HARD ACT TO FOLLOW
The appointment of Merseyside Chief Constable Norman Bettison in 1998 was controversial in the extreme. He arrived from the South Yorkshire force held bitterly to account by so many in our region for its policing of the Hillsborough disaster nine years earlier; and there was a great deal of anger and protest around the decision to appoint him.
But it is a mark of the excellent contribution that he has made here that his departure will be marked with deep regret by many across the region.
He has forced through many changes within the Merseyside force, not all of them universally welcomed by his staff. He has never flinched from taking difficult decisions, particularly when it came to getting more officers on to the front line with initiatives like his community policing policy. A hands-on, assertive individual, he swiftly won over most of his critics with his dynamic and charismatic leadership style.
Neither was he to be found wanting when it came to fighting the corner of this region in the fight for greater funding. His leaked memo to government, setting out the unique problems Merseyside faced in tackling organised crime, pulled no punches in stating the special case for extra money for his force.
In his final months on Merseyside, he promises us a last big push in his war against anti-social behaviour. On his past form we can be confident that he will be as good as his word.
The Police Authority took a lot of criticism for choosing Norman Bettison and deserves a great deal of credit for having the courage of its convictions and being proved right in the long run. We hope and trust that it will prove just as astute and single minded in its choice of a successor to carry on the good work.
I love Liverpool. It is the world in one city and the friendliest, most sociable place I have ever lived. I thoroughly enjoyed my time both as a resident and as Merseyside’s Chief Constable. If my six years there, and my regular appearances in the media, caused occasional reminders of pain to those who had suffered the most since the terrible disaster at Hillsborough, I am genuinely sorry. I acknowledged that unintended consequence of my appointment in my valedictory interview with the Daily Post, which carried the above editorial.
I sought, during my time in Merseyside, to build a bridge. But I could never gain the permission of the people who held the title to the ground that it was to be built upon.
CHAPTER 7
AN INDEPENDENT VIEW
15 April 2009 – 12 September 2012
There has been a memorial service on every anniversary of the disaster. The commitment to this act of remembrance for the departed, and demonstration of support for the living, has never diminished. The crowds have grown each year. At the twentieth anniversary, on 15 April 2009, there were 37,000 people gathered at Anfield. Just reflect on that for a moment: twenty years after a tragic loss of life, over 30,000 people still turn out, on a working day, to remember those lives that were lost and to reinforce their unity in their memory.
It was another fine spring day on 15 April 2009. The crowd were addressed, and thanked, by Trevor Hicks, Chairman, and later President, of the Hillsborough Family Support Group. An ecumenical service of remembrance was led by the Bishop of Liverpool the Right Reverend James Jones. Then, on this occasion, there was a guest speaker.
Trevor Hicks invited Andy Burnham MP, then Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, to the platform. Born in Aintree, Liverpool, Mr Burnham retained family links in the city. He is an Evertonian, but that does not preclude attendance at the memorial service. Liverpool is a village and the blue and red distinctions only ever matter for two hours every Saturday. He hadn’t been invited because of his place of birth; he wasn’t there because Everton’s ground is next door; nor because he shared a football passion with many of the congregation. He was there because he was a minister of the government of the day. He was Secretary of State for Sport and all governments, since 1989, have been urged to understand the pain and the anguish felt amongst the community that gathers each year
to remember the ninety-six.
Andy Burnham had written a speech of standard content. It invoked the name, and the condolences, of the then Prime Minister Gordon Brown. It was a speech designed to connect with the football fan assumed to reside within everyone at Anfield that day. Ultimately, it was a speech that offered what the families had become used to, and tired of; tea and sympathy.
Mr Burnham was only fifty-three seconds into his speech when he mentioned the Prime Minister. ‘The Prime Minister has asked us to think at this time…’ Andy Burnham was born in Liverpool – he might have been expected to understand the likely response to political platitudes.
Roy Dixon, a grandfather from Childwall, a pleasant suburb of Liverpool, had heard enough after fifty-three seconds. Speaking afterwards, Mr Dixon said: ‘We were fobbed off for years and years and I didn’t want to just hear a politician going on. It was like a red rag to a bull to me.’ Roy Dixon shouted, at the top of his voice, the words ‘WHAT ABOUT JUSTICE?!’ Those words echoed around the amphitheatre like the cries of the bereaved families in the Hillsborough gymnasium.
As one, the 37,000-strong crowd rose to their feet and, spontaneously, began to sing, in the style of ‘Go West’ by the band Village People:
Jus-tice for the ninety-six
Jus-tice for the ninety-six
Jus-tice for the ninety-six
Jus-tice for the ninety-six
More than 30,000 people sang those five words repeatedly in a demonstration of solidarity for one minute and sixteen seconds. That must have seemed an awfully long time to Andy Burnham standing at the microphone, and for the Bishop of Liverpool sitting on the stage immediately to his right. An outpouring of common suffering that no condolences of the Prime Minister was likely to salve.
It is remarkable that Andy Burnham, who was visibly shaken, continued with his prepared speech. It was incongruous to pick up exactly at the point where he had been interrupted, but he did. ‘The Prime Minister has asked us to think at this time about the families with these words…’ He was shocked and didn’t know, at that moment, what he should do or say in the face of such suffering and anger. He later put aside his notes and spoke about his personal connections with the city and the people of Merseyside. That helped.
It is to Mr Burnham’s credit that he summoned the courage to go from Anfield to the town hall in Liverpool where there was a reception for the bereaved families after the service. He there began to ask about what a government, his government, might do to begin to address the accumulated and collective emotional reaction that he had just witnessed.
He was told. The shopping list had been available for years. Top of the list was a request for the disclosure of everything that might be known about the events of the day and, perhaps more importantly, about the legal and political procedures that had failed the families for twenty years. Next, a review of the material that might have supported or influenced those procedures and a scrutiny of the processes and oversight involved. Finally, because of the families’ mistrust of the state which is perceived to have failed them at every turn, the first two tasks should not be undertaken by a government department or the legal establishment.
As an aside, it is remarkable how, in the twenty-first century, ‘the establishment’ is a concept that has become expanded and demonised. The term now seems to imply not only the aristocracy and people with political power or controlling authority in the state, but any public servant and anyone who is bound, financially, to the state. As just one example, after several failed attempts to identify someone of sufficient eminence and skill to command the confidence of victims of historical abuse, the Home Secretary had to look to New Zealand to find someone to chair the ongoing child sex abuse inquiry. Literally the other side of the world. No one with the appropriate skill set in this country could seem to shake off the establishment tag. It is a worrying development if any public appointment struggles to enjoy public trust and confidence.
This trend will have two fundamental consequences. Firstly, an underlying cynicism about the determination of any issue on behalf of the state. This will lead to the holding of inquiries about inquiries. Secondly, there is a danger that any scrutiny in the name of the state becomes wedded to the popular narrative. Inquiries, where the starting point is to confirm what the public seem to think or fear, are themselves a frightening prospect. Senator McCarthy led just such an inquiry in 1950s America when the US population was terrified by the perceived threat and influence of Communism. I am not sure how this ground is going to be recovered, but there needs to be a public debate about the constitution of public inquiries outside of the frequent controversy of actually trying to establish one.
Andy Burnham, after leaving behind the 37,000 voices at Anfield, listened carefully at the town hall reception to proposals about how he should respond to them. I cannot know how formed were Mr Burnham’s ideas about what the government response should be by the time he left Liverpool on 15 April 2009. What followed, however, was precisely what had been called for by Professor Scraton in his book, No Last Rights: The Denial of Justice and the Promotion of Myth in the Aftermath of the Hillsborough Disaster – the second of three publications which document his research about the Hillsborough disaster.
In No Last Rights, published in 1995, Professor Scraton recommended that
Inquiries should be staffed and administered by representatives from a wide cross section of independent agencies, drawing on academic research.
There should be full disclosure to all interested parties/persons of all the evidence gathered in the course of investigations by the police or other agencies.
These two fundamental tenets, recommended fourteen years previously by Professor Scraton, underpin the creation of the Hillsborough Panel.
Mr Burnham attended a Cabinet meeting chaired by Gordon Brown on 16 April 2009. He recounted his experiences of the previous day at Anfield and Liverpool Town Hall and suggested getting parliamentary support for a further review of the Hillsborough disaster. The Prime Minister agreed and asked Cabinet to ‘get behind Andy’. Following a proposal put to the House, Home Secretary Alan Johnson met the Hillsborough Family Support Group later that year to consult with them about the creation and make-up of a panel to undertake the review.
Home Office officials contacted Med Hughes, the Chief Constable of South Yorkshire Police in 2009, about disclosure of the vast archive which had been carefully retained by the force for twenty years. Med Hughes welcomed the initiative; he considered that the force had nothing to hide and that public scrutiny, leading to a better understanding, would be beneficial. He also saw the practical advantage of handing over to a third party an archive which occupied warehouse-sized storage space on force premises. He was insistent that, after preserving the material for two decades, its new keepers should look after it in a responsible fashion. He was reassured by Christine Gifford, a member of the Advisory Council on National Records and Archives, and Sarah Tyacke, former Chief Executive of the Public Record Office of the United Kingdom, who guaranteed that the archive would be maintained in its complete and comprehensive state.
Med Hughes went further than just an undertaking to disclose the Hillsborough archive. His further initiative will have important consequences for all lawyers in the future. In the Stuart-Smith Scrutiny Report of Hillsborough, conducted in 1997, it was found that the emendation of police officers’ accounts appeared to have been initiated not by the police, but by those who were legally representing the force. Med Hughes therefore volunteered to waive legal privilege on all documents, including all communications between lawyers and his predecessors.
There was no obligation to do so. Legal privilege is a historic, and fundamental, right, enshrined in common law and statute to protect the private consultations between any client and their legal adviser. There are good public interest reasons for this, alongside other protected communications such as professional disclosures received by doctors or priests. Med Hughes sought to present South Yorkshire P
olice as being completely open and transparent in what was likely to be a significant public scrutiny. It meant that the present-day incarnation of the Hammond Suddards Law firm, which had also scrupulously maintained an archive of Hillsborough material, were obliged to disclose every last document.
If this aspect of the work of the Hillsborough Panel has not already been noted in every law firm across the country already, I suspect the penny will drop soon. This precedent means that any public inquiry into historic events, and I predict there will be more, will see pressure applied to follow the Hillsborough line with a demand for disclosure of otherwise legally privileged material. To withhold anything now on the basis of legal privilege, after the Hillsborough Panel have broken new ground, would be to look evasive. My prediction is that there will be less written down by lawyers in future.
Let me emphasise the point about the openness and transparency of South Yorkshire Police and Hammond Suddards LLP. These are the very institutions which have, according to popular myth, undertaken a criminal conspiracy to suppress the truth and replace it with a false version of events for twenty years. They had, in fact, retained every scrap of paper; every note and minute from every meeting; and every fax and record of telephone communications. Nothing had been shredded. No crucial document that was collated by the Wain team in 1989 was misplaced by anyone representing those organisations. The current keeper of these meticulous records was about to put them, voluntarily, into the public domain. The Hillsborough Panel, the government and the Independent Police Complaints Commission have all praised the contemporary management of South Yorkshire Police for their voluntary provision of this treasure trove of material. Quite rightly. But what about the previous managements that have stored it, catalogued it and protected it for twenty years?
Hillsborough Untold: Aftermath of a disaster Page 15
