There are many documents, disclosed to me by those investigating alleged wrong doing, that have got my handwritten notes in the margins. There are documents that are uniquely mine, such as a report of a visit to the House of Commons in November 1989 to show a video to a small group of MPs assembled by one of their number. It is the only copy in existence and the only written reference to such meeting. Does anyone seriously suggest that if I had been misconducting myself on that visit that I would have committed the fact to writing? That, after my post-disaster work was over, I would have handed all my personally annotated documents into an archive; and that a deceitful police force would have catalogued and kept all those documents for two decades? As my own counsel was to suggest, sardonically, when I appeared before the recent inquest: ‘If you were a black propagandist, Sir Norman, you weren’t a very good one.’
With the positive support of the Chief Constable of South Yorkshire Police, the Home Secretary announced, in December 2009, the formal creation of an independent panel to review the Hillsborough disaster, whose remit would be to:
Oversee full public disclosure of relevant government and local information within the constraints of a disclosure protocol.
Consult with the Hillsborough families to ensure that the views of those most affected by the tragedy are taken into account.
Manage the process of public disclosure, ensuring that it takes place initially to the Hillsborough families and other involved parties, in an agreed manner and within a reasonable timescale, before information is made widely available.
Prepare options for establishing an archive of Hillsborough documentation.
Produce a report explaining the work of the panel. The panel’s report should also illustrate how the information disclosed adds to public understanding of the tragedy and its aftermath.
The independent panel were therefore expected to put the Hillsborough families at the centre of the process. Quite right, as it is they who have felt excluded from so many of the processes that have fallen out of the disaster. They have become used to having had things done to them rather than with them. They were treated shabbily by strangers in a foreign town in the hours after the tragedy; abused and defamed by a popular national newspaper; denied the opportunity at the initial inquest to learn all that they could about the last moments in the life of their loved ones; kept at arm’s length and, they felt, patronised by previous scrutinies, such as that of Lord Justice Stuart-Smith.
They would be at the very heart of this new review and it would be undertaken by some of the people who had supported them on their long and, thus far, fruitless journey. When the Home Secretary announced the constitution of the panel on 26 January 2010, its foremost member was Professor Phil Scraton. Professor Scraton would lead the group that would be responsible for research amongst the disclosed material and write the subsequent report. A key member of his sub group would be Katy Jones, who had been the principal researcher on the production team of Jimmy McGovern’s drama-documentary Hillsborough, which told the story of the tragedy through the eyes of three bereaved families. Mr McGovern’s powerful polemic had exposed the hurt and the injustice felt by the families. The public outcry that ensued led, directly, to the setting up of the Stuart-Smith review of Hillsborough in 1997.
Professor Scraton was very well known to the families because he had already written the seminal texts on the subject of the Hillsborough disaster, which, collectively, documented the families’ long struggle. Amongst countless academic journal articles and media features on the subject of the Hillsborough disaster, Professor Scraton had published the following major works: Hillsborough and After: The Liverpool Experience (1990), No Last Rights: The Denial of Justice and the Promotion of Myth in the Aftermath of the Hillsborough Disaster (1995) and Hillsborough: The Truth (1999).
This latter book has been described by the deputy editor of the Liverpool Echo as ‘widely accepted as the definitive account of the disaster and its aftermath’.
This prompts a question which I shall need to follow up immediately thereafter with my personal endorsement of this panel and praise for the product of its labours: the question is about how the panel might accurately be described as independent.
That the panel was independent of government is irrefutable. They were independent, too, of all of the institutions that had let the families down so badly over twenty years. They were therefore the most appropriate people to carry out this task. They did a fantastic job in raising precisely the concerns and questions that the Hillsborough families deserve an answer to. And I applaud the panel in that endeavour.
The principal members were not, though, independent of any prior judgement in relation to the issues under review. Before they began their reading and research they were not agnostic about the causes of the disaster and, more particularly, about events that followed in the aftermath. Professor Scraton had already written the ‘definitive account of the disaster and its aftermath’ and had reached the conclusion that there had been a conspiracy in South Yorkshire Police to suppress the truth.
Mr Burnham had spoken with Professor Scraton at Liverpool Town Hall on the day of the twentieth anniversary memorial service. The day that the minister was formulating his plan for an independent review of all that was known about Hillsborough, and he was keen to have Professor Scraton on board. Mr Burnham has recently recounted the conversation that took place that day to Kevin Sampson who has published a book called Hillsborough Voices:
Phil Scraton came up … and was asking, ‘what do you think disclosure could achieve?’ And I said, ‘Well if all we achieve is a report that has the Stationery Office’s official crest on it and it’s basically the facts as laid out in your book, with a government wrapper around it, that alone would be worth doing. Because those are the facts – we know those are the facts – but not many other people do.’
That conversation, if accurately recalled by the then Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, describes an unusual approach to independence.
There is a well-known and universal phenomenon, understood by psychologists, called the Einstellung effect. Roughly translated from German it means ‘single state of mind’. It is the idea that we humans, no matter how wise or professionally disciplined we may be, are likely to fall into the habit of viewing novel stimuli as fitting a model that we already have in our minds about the way the world is or the way that it operates. There are very good reasons why our prehistoric forefathers would be wired to quickly compute stimuli against an experiential context. It might save them from being attacked by predators or deter them from eating poisonous berries. It is a natural instinct that, in our contemporary affairs, we must guard against and be watchful for.
Judges and thoughtful police officers are always wary of one particular aspect of the Einstellung effect. It is called confirmatory bias. This describes the danger of going into any inquiry or investigation with a search for the evidence that confirms our initial hypothesis. If we do this, then we are in danger of overlooking evidence that may in fact count against that hypothesis. Senior Detectives talk of ‘following the evidence, not the suspect’ to remind themselves, and their subordinates, of the need for vigilance. Even then, cops can succumb to this human frailty, and some initial responses to the terrible disaster at Hillsborough may well be a poignant case in point. But so too can medics, judges and even academics.
One example might help to illustrate the ever-present danger of confirmatory bias. Professor Scraton’s long-held view is that the intention of Chief Superintendent Terry Wain was to obtain, from police officers, their comment and opinion about the behaviour of fans so that a case could be built against them. He expresses this view at page 191 of his 1999 publication Hillsborough: The Truth.
The panel’s report, which Professor Scraton also wrote, picks up the same theme and references a document which was found during their research. It is an account of a police officer, Sergeant Wright, whose report about the disaster follows a template that
includes a request to provide information about ‘the mood of the fans’. The conclusion drawn by Professor Scraton in his earlier book thus seems to be corroborated by this discovery in the work of the panel.
Whilst noting the significance of Sergeant Wright’s document in supporting this earlier hypothesis, the panel have, throughout their three years of research, overlooked another document in the name of PC Illingworth. PC Illingworth, in providing his account of the day, was working to a template too. Only this one does not ask about ‘the fans’ at all. This one asks instead for the officer’s comment and opinion about the management of the policing operation, and PC Illingworth gives a critical account.
How widely circulated these different templates were is not easy to tell. It is not hard to find some officers’ accounts that follow the ‘Wright’ template and some that follow the ‘Illingworth’ version. It may indeed be the case that there are more than these two templates yet to be found in the archive through painstaking and objective analysis.
I was asked at the Coroner’s Inquest if I had any idea how it came to be that Mr Wain had issued an open-ended and innocuous template to guide completion of self-prepared accounts and that it had been variously updated and revised by others. I said that I was sure that a police force was not the only organisation that was vulnerable to Chinese whispers. There was no email in 1989, no online cut-and-paste facility and no version controls on documents. It is likely, in the haste to get the job done, that various couriers have noted down differently what they might have heard Mr Wain ask for, or what they themselves thought was relevant.
It seems clear to me, on any fair and objective reading of the Illingworth document, that there wasn’t a well-orchestrated strategy to demand damning testimony about Liverpool fans. PC Illingworth was crucially placed at the fence of Pen 4 as the disaster unfolded and might have been a priority witness if this was the intention. It is a pity that the document with his name on was not afforded a similar prominence by the panel as that given to the one bearing Sergeant Wright’s name. It is a pity, too, that the IPCC seemed to have also overlooked it. I was served with Sergeant Wright’s document and asked searching questions about its genesis and purpose. I was not served with PC Illingworth’s, nor asked a single question about that.
The Panel Report quotes heavily from Lord Justice Taylor’s Report. Although it was produced within sixteen weeks of the disaster, the Taylor Report was seen, until the more recent inquest conducted by Lord Justice Goldring, as the most definitive account of the causes of the disaster.
Some of the quoted passages are not accurately transcribed by the panel, however, and could, inadvertently, give a mistaken impression. For instance, the panel (p. 43 of their report) quote Lord Justice Taylor as saying that ‘The police had initiated a vilification campaign’ in the immediate aftermath of the disaster. In fact, Lord Justice Taylor does not use those words at all. Taylor did express the view (para. 257 of his interim report) that he was appalled by the early press reports, such as those in the Sun newspaper, and condemned the press and those individual police officers that were present at the match who were said to have contributed to that false picture. But nowhere in his reports does he assert or imply that this was a ‘police campaign of vilification’.
Furthermore, Taylor specifically pointed out in that very same paragraph of his interim report that the Chief Constable, Peter Wright, had made an immediate, and dignified, statement disassociating himself and his force from those grave accounts in the press. In their direct quotation of the condemnatory paragraph from the Taylor Report, the panel have, inexplicably, omitted that crucial contextual sentence.
There may be other errors of transcription, examples of confirmatory bias and omission of contra evidence to be discovered in the Panel Report. But such detail takes nothing away from the achievements of the panel. They have done a remarkable job of reviewing 450,000 pages. The review has produced what had been missing for twenty-three years. A formally commissioned account written from the perspective of those who have been bereaved and injured by the disaster, and who have been insulted and fobbed off by a number of processes and institutions since. It poses questions that must now be addressed by those institutions and the reinstatement of new inquests was one of the long overdue outcomes. The members of the panel can be justifiably proud of their work and their legacy. It is because of them that Margaret Aspinall can now, finally, collect the death certificate for her son James, who was lost in the disaster. She swore that she would never collect it whilst ever it was said that he died as a result of an ‘accident’.
During my enforced sabbatical I have reread a wonderful little book, written by the Right Reverend Nicholas Frayling, retired Dean of Chichester. He was Rector of Liverpool Parish Church when I worked and lived in the city. He gave me a copy of Pardon and Peace, which he had written in 1996, two years before the Northern Ireland Peace Agreement was secured. The prophetic book sets out the conditions that he believed were necessary, in Ireland, in order to establish a basis for lasting peace. I turned to it again, more recently, with the thought that it might provide some inspiration about the basis for the reconciliation that is still necessary around the issue of Hillsborough. He could have been describing the justification for a Hillsborough Panel, thirteen years before its conception, in the following words.
Many people believe that history should be set aside – ‘there’s too much of it’ – and we should move on. I realise too that there is no such thing as history, there are only events which, in the fullness of time, become overlaid with myth and culturally determined interpretation.
But if we are to repay the wrong, or to heal the wounds, then it is absolutely essential that we revisit past events and, with as much objectivity as we can muster, interrogate the historical records. Only thus can we begin to understand, and to pray and work with intelligence rather than mere emotion.
The interrogation of the historical records by the Hillsborough Panel has influenced thinking and action in relation to the Hillsborough disaster. It has changed perceptions permanently. It was written to achieve that very purpose. There is no shame in that. Any author is like an offending player in the off-side rule. The late, great Bill Shankly once said: ‘If a player is not interfering with play then he shouldn’t be on the pitch.’ Similarly, if a writer doesn’t set out to influence the thoughts of others, then they’re wasting someone else’s ink.
The Hillsborough Panel Report makes no allegations of wrongdoing by any person. The Panel Chairman was explicit about its role in the press conference called to publish the report. ‘We are not an inquiry,’ Bishop James Jones said. ‘People have not given evidence or been questioned. Our job has simply been to oversee the maximum possible disclosure of all the documents and to write a report that adds to public understanding. Our terms of reference don’t allow us to make any recommendations.’
Those who receive the report, therefore, ought to be clear about its status, and open-minded about its content. Deborah Glass, Deputy Chair of the IPCC, described it publicly as definitive when criticising me for mentioning something which couldn’t be found in its pages. It may be authoritative, but it is not definitive. It covers the ground, without pretending to be complete. It raises concerns rather than seeking to provide remedies. It is not a papal bull, immune to any question or challenge by mere mortals. And what no report, or book, can ever lay claim to is a monopoly of the truth. Even if an author asserts it on their title page.
Politicians, campaigners and many in the press have, however, seized upon it as a gospel testifying to a criminal conspiracy that had suppressed the truth for a quarter of a century. I was the only person named in the report that remained alive and who was still serving as a police officer. The last man standing, so to speak. I had also been a public figure in Merseyside and had risen to the rank of Chief Constable. I immediately became the poster boy for conspiracy theorists … and the whipping boy for revenge.
David Aaronovitch wrote a thoug
htful opinion piece in The Times in April 2015, not about me, or Hillsborough, although it could have been. He was railing against the modern rise, particularly online, of a ‘we believe you’ movement which seeks to redress the perceived imbalance against victims by an automatic acceptance of any allegation made by, or on behalf of, the victim. It would be almost acceptable, he said, from a campaigner, but catastrophic if it comes from a journalist (or a regulator): ‘This is the politicisation of truth – in which partisans instrumentalise the lives of others to support their own view. And when we judge people to be guilty not for what they have actually done, but for what we think they represent, then we are all in big trouble.’
If David Aaronovitch is right about this recent trend in British society, then, not for the first or last time in the witch hunt that was to develop, I seem to have found myself to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
CHAPTER 8
THE HUE AND CRY
12–14 September 2012
Eight months after the hue and cry had begun, my mobile phone rang at 9.58 p.m. on Monday 20 May 2013. I am in the habit of resting the phone on the curved arm of the sofa whilst watching television in my sitting room at home. The vibration of the incoming call tipped the phone onto the floor and I scrambled to retrieve it.
I had just watched a BBC Panorama documentary and the credits were still rolling. The episode was called ‘Hillsborough: How They Buried the Truth’. I had declined several invitations to appear on the programme. After all, I was then living by the maxim, suggested to me by a wise counsellor when my troubles had first begun: ‘Always remember that a scapegoat is someone to be talked about, not listened to.’
My reluctance to take part had not stopped the researchers from finding and using 1989 archive footage of me walking into the Taylor Inquiry wearing a Columbo-style mac and a Tom Selleck moustache (in my defence I should say that both were fashionable back in the day). The producers had also included images of me briefing police officers in the Hillsborough gymnasium before a 1991 football match. This was an event that post-dated the disaster by two years but, never mind, the edited and undated film helped to create an impression of me as a key figure responsible for the policing of football at Hillsborough, and responsible, too, for the force response to the disaster. That implication was bolstered by the appearance in the programme of ex-Superintendent Clive Davis, who offered an account of a briefing, given by Chief Superintendent Wain, forty-four hours after the disaster, during which Mr Wain is alleged to have said that our job was to fit up the Liverpool fans.
Hillsborough Untold: Aftermath of a disaster Page 16
