No Such Thing As Society

by Andy McSmith

  The chairman of the Football Association, Bert Millichip, was in Mexico that day, discussing the impending World Cup and, because of the time difference, was asleep as the catastrophe unfolded. He was awoken by the British ambassador, who had received a message from Margaret Thatcher suggesting that he come back to London at once. He did and was called in to meet the prime minister. Mrs Thatcher then said at a press conference: ‘It isn’t that we’re numb, we’re worse than numb. We witnessed that agony and it’s even worse after nearly twenty-four hours than it was when we saw it, because the full enormity is coming home as we saw those scenes on television. Everything, but everything, must be done.’29 Two days later, the Football Association decided to pull all English teams out of all European competitions for a season, a decision that Margaret Thatcher applauded, but which did not go far enough for the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA), who banned all English clubs indefinitely. The ban lasted five years for all except Liverpool, for whom it lasted seven years.

  This ban did not extend to the England squad, though many British politicians thought it should. During the European Championship in June 1988, English hooligans rioted in Stuttgart, Düsseldorf, Frankfurt and Cologne. The damage ran to hundreds of thousands of pounds, there were 800 arrests and one man was drowned in the River Main in Frankfurt. The Germans called it ‘the new British disease’, and a Dutch newspaper called them ‘the scourge of Europe’. During a match in Frankfurt, all the English supporters stood for the national anthem and some directed Nazi salutes at the Germans and chanted ‘two world wars and one world cup’. The news so disgusted Margaret Thatcher that at the G8 summit of world leaders in Toronto, she took Helmut Kohl, the West German chancellor, aside to apologize.

  The worst football tragedy of the decade – indeed the worst in British football history – came ten months later, on 15 April 1989, at the Hillsborough stadium in Sheffield, the venue for the FA Cup semi-final between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest. Liverpool supporters were allocated the Leppings Lane end of the ground. They arrived in Sheffield in their thousands. About 12,000 were in the stands before the 3 p.m. kick-off, but most were reluctant to take their places in the stadium early because there was no entertainment inside. At 2.45 p.m., 5,000 supporters were outside trying to get through 12 turnstiles. The senior police officer on the spot grew alarmed and pleaded over the radio for the turnstiles to be opened before someone was crushed to death. It took three increasingly desperate appeals before Chief Superintendent David Duckenfield, who was supposedly running operations from the control room, arrived at a decision. It was the first major football match Duckenfield had handled; he had been transferred to his new job only a month earlier. Eventually, he gave the order to open the gates, but did not think to warn the officers inside the grounds to expect a sudden flood of 5,000 impatient supporters.

  The Leppings Lane end was divided into pens; in some there was ample room, but Pen 3 and Pen 4 were full to capacity. The fans did not know that; all they could see was the high walls of the terrace and a tunnel, above which was written the word ‘Standing’, and through which they could see the pitch. Undirected, they poured through the tunnel and into the two pens that were already full. The tunnel had a one-in-six gradient. Some people were lifted off their feet and carried forward by the crush. As it worsened, people shouted for help and begged for connecting gates to be opened so they could escape into other pens, but the teams were on the pitch by now and the police could not hear in the general din. Fans managed to push one gate open, but the police closed it and forced the desperate spectators to get back into the crush. A few climbed the fences. They were spotted from the control room, where it was assumed that they were hooligans out to disrupt the match; the dog handlers were summoned to keep them in place. A strong perimeter fence had been constructed to prevent a pitch invasion, and now those who had arrived early for the game were being squeezed to death against it. Police on the spot frantically signalled to those in the middle to move back, but they could not. The late arrivals at the back were watching the players, unaware of what was happening in front of them, and did not see the need to move. As people had their lives crushed out of them, the game began. At 3.04 p.m., Peter Beardsley, the forward whom Liverpool had bought two years earlier for £1.9m (then the highest transfer fee ever paid by an English club), struck the crossbar at the far end and the exultant Liverpool fans surged forward, causing a crash barrier in Pen 3 to snap, sending those it supported tumbling forward. At this point, Ground Commander Superintendent Greenwood ran on to the pitch and told the referee to stop the game. It was 3.05 p.m. and ninety-six people were being crushed to death.

  As the desperate fans tried to escape, many of the officers who could have helped seemed to stand by, paralysed. This was not entirely their fault. To quote the findings of the official inquiry: ‘They had been summoned in response to what was thought to be a threat to public order. What they found was a horrific scene of carnage and some young officers were shocked into impotence. It was truly gruesome. The victims were blue, cyanotic, incontinent; their mouths were open, vomiting; their eyes staring’.30 Shocking images filled that evening’s television bulletins. On Sunday morning, staff at the Liverpool Echo turned up to work voluntarily to produce a special edition of the paper with a graphic close-up picture on the front page of a man and woman crying in distress in the crush, under the headline ‘Our Day of Tears’.

  There was, inevitably, a hunt for someone to blame. The Liverpool fans on the spot had blamed the police; some had abused, spat and even assaulted the stunned officers. It was not long before the police were retaliating by blaming the fans, taking their cue from the top. Within ten minutes of the game being stopped, the chief executive of the Football Association, Graham Kelly, visited the control room and was told by Chief Superintendent Duckenfield that the problem had been caused by a gate being forced by the fans, when Duckenfield was the man who had given the order to open the gates only half-an-hour earlier. Interviewed on television, Kelly said, correctly, that there appeared to be two versions of what happened, that of the police and the fans.31 As the bodies arrived at Northern Hospital, the police collected evidence to prove a thesis that drunkenness was the cause of the tragedy. Corpses were meticulously tested for the alcohol level in their blood. Liverpool supporter Les Aspinall had gone to the match with his wife and two sons, but the parents were separated from the boys and afterwards spent several hours searching for their son Philip at the local hospital. At around 9.30 p.m., Les went back to the ground, and was shown his son’s body, but he was not immediately allowed to go and break the news to his wife and his other son, because the police insisted on questioning him about the route they had taken to the ground and whether or not they had stopped for a drink. ‘Eventually I thought they were trying to get something out of me. They were on at me for about half an hour when eventually the nurse came and said “This man’s wife’s waiting there and he’s in no fit state to talk to you”.’32

  The local Liverpool media managed the difficult feat of covering the event in its full horror without offending a city that was moving from shock and grief to anger. The disaster had added 500,000 to the sales figures of the Sunday newspapers, and Liverpool was teeming with national newspaper reporters hunting for grieving relatives or anyone else out of whom they could winkle information. The first to catch the backlash was the Daily Mirror, which on Monday morning carried horrific pictures of crushed, dying fans in full colour. Some could be seen to be going blue for lack of oxygen, and the Mirror was roundly and unanimously condemned by callers to a local radio phone-in programme. But the next day, Tuesday, all the pent-up anger in Liverpool found another target. For once, the Daily Mirror could thank Kelvin MacKenzie for coming to its rescue.

  Sun journalists had been hearing the unofficial police version of what happened. They were told that there had been a conspiracy by drunken Liverpool fans to arrive late, en masse, so that a large number of ticketless fans would be able to g
et through in the confusion. The stench of vomit and urine was taken as evidence of drunkenness, rather than a body’s natural tendency to empty itself when squeezed hard enough. The angry reaction of the traumatized fans immediately afterwards was thrown into the mix, with other yet more colourful tales, and the whole concoction filled the whole of Wednesday’s front page of the Sun, under a two-word headline written by MacKenzie in person: ‘The Truth’. The only story that was attributed to a named witness came from Irvine Patrick, a Tory MP from Sheffield, who had heard from a police officer that fans had molested the body of a dead girl. Sun journalists were not the only ones to have heard these tales; they also appeared in the Star, the Sheffield Star and in Murdoch’s other papers, but the Sun went further than the others in treating the story as authoritative. The reaction in the north-west that Wednesday was something the Sun had never before experienced. Newsagents either refused to sell the paper, or put it under the counter. In Kirkby, near Liverpool, there was a spontaneous public meeting in the shopping centre, and a television crew was invited in to see copies of the paper being set on fire. Everywhere around Liverpool, copies of the Sun were torn up or burnt; people seen reading it had it torn out of their hands. All attempts by local media to solicit a comment from anyone at the Sun were met with silence. The broadcaster Brian Hayes, who hosted a television show in front of a studio audience in Manchester, had a photograph of Kelvin MacKenzie, a red telephone and an egg timer on the table before him, and taunted the Sun’s editor by daring him to ring before the timer ran out. Sales of the Sun in the Liverpool area crashed. The management admitted that circulation in central Merseyside fell from 140,000 to 100,000; in the whole Merseyside region, it is estimated to have gone down from 320,000 to 204,000.33 The boycott endured for years, eventually forcing a begrudging apology from the Sun and, later still, from Boris Johnson after the Spectator magazine, which he then edited, accused Liverpool of ‘wallowing in grief’,

  In the immediate aftermath, the Hillsborough tragedy did nothing to shift the government’s firmly held belief that the sole problem with football was the hooligans who followed it. Five months afterwards, in September 1989, the England team travelled to Stockholm for a World Cup qualifier, followed by a press corps who were expected to file stories of English hooligans on the rampage. Unusually, they included a thirty-three-year-old Arsenal fan, Colin Ward, a former hooligan and serial chronicler of hooligan violence, who was hired by the Today newspaper to travel undercover with the fans. He returned convinced that the real story was not English hooligans looking for trouble but journalists looking for English hooligans, and reinterpreting minor incidents as riots.34 However, the government was soon armed with fresh statistics that the Swedish police had arrested 206 people and that 102 of them were English. In fact, 101 of those 102 people had been released for lack of evidence, but this provoked a protest from the British sports minister, Colin Moynihan, who thought that they had been let off too lightly and would ‘regard it as a battle honour to be kept overnight and kicked out of a country’.35 Home Secretary Douglas Hurd announced that he was setting a national police intelligence unit to combat the hooligans, a move that his Labour opposite number, Roy Hattersley, welcomed as long overdue.36 A friendly international against Holland, scheduled to take place in Rotterdam in December, was cancelled at Moynihan’s request; the Football Association refused to handle tickets for the next England match in Poland; and the Polish Tourist Board was asked by the British government to stop selling tickets to the English.37

  Meanwhile, as normal, the government had appointed a High Court judge to conduct an inquiry into the Hillsborough disaster. Their choice, Peter Taylor, had one of the finest minds in the British courts and went about the task with exemplary seriousness. His interim report, published four months after the catastrophe, came as a shock to the police. Lord Taylor did not accept that drunkenness had played any significant part in the tragedy, or that there had been an abnormally high number of fans arriving without tickets, or that the thousands who arrived at around 2.30 p.m. for a 3.00 p.m. kick-off, on a hot day, were unreasonably late. Of the fans’ behaviour after the catastrophe, he said that instances of police being abused, spat at or assaulted were ‘comparatively small’, adding that ‘in deploring them, one must recognise the uniquely horrifying experience which those responsible had just suffered’. He dismissed all the other salacious stories that had turned up in the Sun with the comment that ‘those who made them, and those who disseminated them, would have done better to hold their peace’.38

  By contrast, the judgement he passed on the senior police officers involved was scorching. The evidence he heard from the police, he said, was mostly ‘in inverse proportion to their rank’. Where young constables were ‘intelligent and open’, many of their superiors were ‘defensive and evasive’,39 as indeed they might well have been, because Taylor’s blunt conclusion was that the immediate cause of the catastrophe was the ‘blunder’ the police had made by opening the gates without making themselves ready for the inevitable rush of thousands of fans that followed. He was also unsparing in his criticism of the way football grounds were managed. He drew a picture of an industry in which annual ticket sales had fallen from 77m a year in the late 1950s to 20m, run in many cases by businessmen who did not appear to have the slightest care for the comfort or safety of their dwindling clientele. Perversely, the tax system encouraged the clubs to spend vast sums on players, and none at all on the comfort and safety of the fans, because transfer fees could be offset against tax, but improvements to a stadium could not. The result was filthy, unsafe grounds, filled with the stench of cheap food and urine because the toilets were so bad that it was, in effect, accepted that men would relieve themselves against a wall, if they could get to one, or into empty drink cups or any other convenient receptacle. The ways the pens were designed invited another disaster, and yet, he complained:

  Amazingly, complacency was still to be found after Hillsborough. It was chilling to hear the same refrain from directors at several clubs I visited: ‘Hillsborough was horrible – but, of course, it couldn’t have happened here.’ Couldn’t it? The Hillsborough ground was regarded by many as one of the best in the country.40

  One aspect of the industry that Taylor was not asked to investigate was the spreading corruption in football. The omission is understandable because not much was known in 1989 about the under-the-counter deals done when players were bought and sold. The public was given its first major insight after Terry Venables, the manager of Tottenham Hotspur, teamed up with Alan Sugar to buy the club from a property owner who had run it from his tax exile in Monaco. Their partnership came to grief after Venables bought Teddy Sheringham from Nottingham Forest, whose manager was Brian Clough. The deal included £50,000 in cash, allegedly handed over in a motorway cafe. Sugar, innocently assuming that this was a legitimate payment, added VAT, which was mysteriously returned. Venables cleared up the misunderstanding by saying, ‘Cloughie likes a bung’, whereupon a furious Sugar made the whole scandal public, only to find that the world of football was more interested in protecting its two most loved club managers than in the complaints of a rich outsider.41 To the end of his days, Clough denied that any part of that unexplained £50,000 was ever meant for him. This cowboy attitude to money had corroded Tottenham’s finances so much that the club had to sell an injured Paul Gascoigne to Lazio. Gascoigne was a much-flawed character, a child in a man’s body, but he was the nation’s favourite footballer. He had provided the most memorable moment of the 1990 World Cup, during the semi-final that England lost to Germany, when he burst into tears after receiving a yellow card. That England had come so close to reaching the final was a bright note to the end of what was not a good decade for British football.

  Because of the Taylor Report, there is no standing room at Premier League grounds any more. Taylor did not accept the protests of those who said that the experience of going to a football match – standing and swaying in a crowd – would never be the
same again. Taylor believed that fans could sit and watch, and still lose themselves in the shared excitement, and be safe. He seems to have been vindicated on the last point because in more than twenty years since Hillsborough there have been no other catastrophes on anything like that scale. Hooliganism and racism have also declined. But there are those who believe that Hillsborough and its aftermath allowed the money men to take over the game and hike up admission prices until, in the opinion of at least one fan, ‘football has ceased to be the people’s game, in any meaningful sense. It’s become a game defined by egoism, rapacity and greed, and by a grotesque mercantile, neo-liberal winner-takes-all ethos’.42

  CHAPTER 17

  STAND DOWN, MARGARET

  MARGARET THATCHER was in fine form when she delivered her annual speech to the Conservative Party conference in Bournemouth on 12 October 1990. She was the undisputed mistress of her party; her enthusiasm for the job was undimmed; she had weathered two political crises, one concerning relations with the EU, the other over the poll tax; and a week earlier, she had knocked the final day of the Labour Party conference off the top of the news by announcing that, after much deliberation, the UK had joined something called the Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM), a preliminary move towards the creation of a single European currency. Moreover, her scriptwriters had thought of a good joke. Her capacity to misunderstand jokes was legendary, but evidently this one had been patiently explained to her, and she delivered it with aplomb. It was a joke at the expense of the Liberal Democrats.