documents discovered by West Yorkshire Police raise significant concerns over the role of Sir Norman Bettison at the time he was Assistant Chief Constable of West Yorkshire Police in 1998 … [These] may suggest an attempt to intervene in the course of a public inquiry and influence the manner in which the testimony of a witness was received.
This press statement was made, yet again, before any investigative stone had been turned. It enabled the newspapers to have a field day. They probably couldn’t believe their luck in having one individual linked to two causes célèbre. The Daily Mirror of 4 July 2013 was a particularly brash example. An unflattering photograph of me on its front page alongside a photo of Stephen Lawrence and the all-upper-case headline ‘Hillsborough Cop in Lawrence Smear Probe – Shamed Chief faces new claims over murdered Stephen’s family’.
Notice how ‘Shamed Chief’ and, elsewhere, ‘Disgraced Chief’ were beginning to become terms of common currency wherever newspapers referred to me. All part of the branding exercise in advance of any test of the allegations from the ‘main event’.
Following the direction of the Home Secretary for forces to search 1990s records for any evidence of undercover policing around the Stephen Lawrence family, there were at least three referrals to the IPCC. Greater Manchester and South Yorkshire as well as West Yorkshire each referred documentation around Special Branch work in advance of public meetings in their force areas. The IPCC acknowledged all three, handed two back to the forces concerned for local investigation, but kept one for independent investigation by the commission itself. There was therefore more newspaper coverage about their decision to elevate only the investigation about me.
It was nine months later, following a thorough investigation, that the IPCC reported no connection between the West Yorkshire documents and the Stephen Lawrence family, or campaign group. The investigation also found that there was no case to answer by anyone involved in the making or the receiving of the intelligence reports. There was no attendant press statement from the West Yorkshire Police and Crime Commissioner. There was little in the way of any report that this apparently sensational connection between Hillsborough and Stephen Lawrence had, in fact, been a bit of a damp squib.
Along the way, during my four years in purgatory, numerous allegations have been raised that I may have conspired with others to pervert the course of justice in all manner of proceedings. There was a particularly nasty historical aspersion cast about the integrity of my father. My dad, the most honest man I have known, sold a small amount of platinum swarf in 1987, which he had cleared out of my deceased grandfather’s workshop. Grandad had collected the filings in an old snuff tin and I was with my father when he sold it for about £100 at a reputable precious metal dealer. The precious metal dealer had a protocol with the local police to report all sales from private individuals. My father’s possession was enquired into and the inquiry was immediately closed. End of story.
A vindictive former police officer, himself sacked for dishonesty and sent to prison, recalled the incident from 1987, and when my face and name began to appear in the media more recently, he shared the story, perhaps in an embellished way, with his local MP, John Mann. Mr Mann is often to be seen on television expressing outrage about this, that or the other issue. In December 2014, it was he who presented to Scotland Yard, in the full glare of publicity, a list of twenty-two names, thirteen of them former government ministers, who were accused of being child abusers.
On this particular occasion, Mr Mann was outraged by the suggestion of a cover-up by South Yorkshire Police in 1987 following an investigation into the father of the man now accused of covering up the blame for the Hillsborough disaster. He followed up his television interview with a letter to South Yorkshire Police and the IPCC demanding that they re-investigate the thirty-year-old matter. My father, by the way, had been dead for twenty years.
Even the IPCC, on this occasion, could not see any merit in taking this further. South Yorkshire Police, on the other hand, found themselves in a tricky bind. Mr Mann’s accusations were of a historic South Yorkshire Police cover-up and so, in the current climate, they did not want to be seen to ignore the complaint, however farfetched. Particularly as it came from an MP.
South Yorkshire Police asked Derbyshire Police to investigate the matter, which they did with scrupulous attention, diverting valuable resources from the protection of the people of Derbyshire. The investigators, over a number of months, traced and interviewed fifty-one witnesses. They recommended that there were no offences disclosed from their investigation.
South Yorkshire Police, fearful of any backlash, still felt unable to accept that recommendation and close down the investigation on their own authority. They sent all the papers to the CPS asking that they instead make the final decision on the matter. The head of CPS for South and West Yorkshire was an acquaintance of mine after our years of working in partnership to reform the criminal justice system locally. He therefore sent the file to another CPS region for independent review.
Eventually, seventeen months after John Mann’s misplaced allegation, and lots of newspaper reports linking me with ‘another man’ accused of the theft of a ‘large quantity of high value platinum wire’, the CPS disclosed that no further action would be taken. They added, for the purpose of clarity, that ‘[a]n essential legal element of the offences alleged is that the prosecution must be able to show that the goods in question were in fact stolen. There is insufficient evidence to establish this.’
The Yorkshire Post reported the outcome fairly but added a footnote to their report: ‘The former Chief Constable is still under investigation by the IPCC over Hillsborough and also the public inquiry into the murder of Stephen Lawrence.’ I was not to be let off the hook.
Perhaps the most bizarre additional indictment that I have gathered along the way is a recorded allegation that I conspired to cover up a historical murder. It has sometimes felt over the last four years, that Salem, like Blake’s Jerusalem, is being built in England’s green and pleasant land.
The bare bones of this particular charge are as follows. A man died at Airedale Hospital in West Yorkshire in the early 2000s. In 2004, a nurse from that same hospital was charged with the murders of a number of patients by the method of opiate overdose. Airedale Hospital Trust paid out significant sums in compensation to affected families. Thereafter, the son of the man who had previously died asked West Yorkshire Police to examine his father’s death in case of foul play. They did and concluded that the death could not be connected to the other murders. The son complained about the competence and integrity of the West Yorkshire Police investigation and challenged its conclusion. West Yorkshire Police asked Greater Manchester Police to review their investigation. Greater Manchester came to the same conclusion, that the death of the complainant’s father was not linked to the other murders.
Now, all of that activity took place whilst I was Chief Constable in Merseyside, and I had no knowledge of, let alone involvement in, any of the decisions. I returned to West Yorkshire Police in 2007 and the complainant continued to be dissatisfied about the outcome of all the actions recounted above. I was unaware of his dissatisfaction and had no personal knowledge of his letters, which he continued to write to the force and the Police Authority.
After the hue and cry over the Hillsborough matters, and my subsequent departure from my post, the said complainant wrote again to the West Yorkshire Police and Crime Commissioner. He set out a simple logic in his letter: ‘as Bettison lied about Hillsborough, well its more probable than not that he lied regarding my father’s murder at Airedale Trust’.
The West Yorkshire Police and Crime Commissioner couldn’t accept that simple leap of logic and his office wrote back to assure the complainant that I wasn’t even in the force at the time of the alleged actions to deny his father’s murder. They told him, therefore, that they would not be recording or investigating his complaint. Said complainant wrote to the IPCC appealing the West Yorkshire Police and Crime
Commissioner’s decision to not record or investigate his complaint.
The IPCC accepted the Police and Crime Commissioner’s conclusion about my not being present in the force at the relevant times and therefore it was unlikely that the complaint could be upheld. They did not agree, however, with the decision not to record the complaint. There was nothing on the face of the complaint that made the alleged behaviour impossible. They instructed the Police and Crime Commissioner to accept the complaint as being true, record the matter as a formal complaint and only then decide what level of investigation it warranted.
The office of the West Yorkshire Police and Crime Commissioner wrote to tell me of the recording of this matter, which will stand out in my ‘complaints file’ that is maintained, even in retirement. A complaint that I was part of a criminal conspiracy to cover up the cause of death of a gentleman who passed away at Airedale Hospital. The Police and Crime Commissioner told me in the same letter that he had taken the pragmatic decision not to investigate the matter further.
In this same period, a man complained to the Police and Crime Commissioner that, some years previously, I had colluded with junior officers to cover up an allegation of racial discrimination. Another tried to convince the Commissioner that I and my successor Chief had jointly failed to properly investigate his complaint of torture, thereby failing to meet our obligations under the Articles of the European Court of Human Rights. In all fairness, the Commissioner’s office did reject these and other similar overtures.
In Merseyside, an Inspector who had been disciplined by me a decade earlier also saw the opportunity in raising an allegation that I had engaged in a criminal conspiracy. She alleged that I might have conspired with a member of the judiciary to ensure that her disciplinary sanction was upheld at a subsequent Appeal Court hearing. The judge who chaired that appeal was the Lord Chief Justice, Igor Judge. The Merseyside Police and Crime Commissioner’s Office did not inform me of the allegation but asked the Chief Constable of Lincolnshire Police to conduct an investigation. The former Lord Chief Justice remembered the case and was able quickly to dispel any suspicion that I had ever sought to influence his decision-making.
Having had little experience of being complained of over forty years, I was suddenly attracting public complaints in great number and exotic scope. I have heard celebrities involved in historical allegations of sexual crimes complain about the use of ‘fly paper’ tactics by investigators; i.e. if one creates enough publicity and notoriety around an individual it will attract more complaints. I can confirm that the ‘fly paper’ phenomenon does exist.
The internet provides a great platform for generating and marshalling apparent public outrage. The appearance of the depth and breadth of outrage intimidates politicians and public institutions. A recent example is the move to have Rhodes’s statue removed from Oriel College, Oxford. An e-petition is relatively easy to garner. It can be done from a back bedroom without a great deal of effort on anyone’s part. The so-called protestors don’t have to leave their house and only have to click one button. Rod Liddle had a humorous tilt at this contemporary craze in the Sunday Times:
It’s not the signing of e-petitions that matters. It’s the response to them. It’s the sight of authorities trembling in their corduroys and deciding that the mob – a very small mob, all things considered – should rule.
It is not democracy to let these click-happy clowns decide policy, or even provoke a response. When a petition garners ten million signatories, maybe the government or public authority should think again. But even that is less than a sixth of our population. Better to ignore them altogether.
Rod Liddle’s amusing slant does, however, raise a serious question. Have we developed, as a society, a sufficiently mature response to a relatively new trend? An immediate reaction may not be the most appropriate way to respond to a cluster click in the longer term. The cluster click, like most of the content of social media, may represent an ephemeral and transient blip. A response, such as removing a 105-year-old statue, is permanent.
During my four years in the wilderness, there have been all manner of e-petitions raised to have summary things done to me: to have me dismissed in the early days; to have my public sector pension withheld; to have my several honours revoked; and to have my honorary links to various universities withdrawn. Only one has, thus far, been successful and I am disappointed – not for the loss of an Honorary Fellowship, which my school teacher step-daughter describes as a pretend qualification – but for the fact that universities can be so easily swayed these days. The traditional bastions of liberal free thought and expression seem actually to be terrified, in the twenty-first century, of doing anything that might lead to controversy or a loss of revenue. Mine is not the only case recently where vice chancellors and provosts have quaked at the sight of an e-petition.
The elected Mayor of Liverpool put his name to a call to have me stripped of my Honorary Fellowship that I was proud to have been granted by Liverpool John Moores University. The citation, that was read out to a packed graduation ceremony in 2004, highlighted my contributions to the City of Liverpool during my time there as Chief.
But now Mayor Joe Anderson wanted it taken away. It was a populist position for him to adopt. The Liverpool Echo got behind the putsch and so too did Liverpool FC fanzines and the JMU Union. Professor John Ashton, a medic who had been at Hillsborough and tended to the dead and dying, and who was also an Honorary Fellow, said that he would burn his cap and gown on the steps of JMU unless mine was taken away. His Twitter petition received 753 clicks. Not quite Rod Liddle’s ten million threshold, and not necessarily all unique individuals, but who’s counting?
Liverpool John Moores University, and the new Vice Chancellor, faced with such local pressure, had no choice, did they? Well, yes, they might have said that we should all await the outcome of the formal investigation about the serious allegations that I faced. Keep calm and carry on. They might even have asked for my response to the proposal to withdraw my honorary position and consider that response alongside what the Echo was reporting to be a ‘guerrilla internet campaign’. They did neither. The Vice Chancellor’s secretary sent me an unexpected email at 7.18 p.m. on 8 April 2013 to notify me that there would be a public announcement at noon the following day that my honour had been stripped.
That duly occurred. The announcement even included a placatory line, in case of any doubt, that the university supports the families’ campaign for justice.
The University of Teesside were smarter, but no more courageous. On hearing of the JMU decision, they wrote to me to say that they had invoked a policy to regularly review their honorary connections and that, going forward and seeing as I was no longer a serving Chief, they would no longer need me as a Visiting Fellow on their Policing and Criminal Justice programme. As they had failed to use my services since granting me the honour, that was no loss for either of us.
The University of Huddersfield was more pragmatic. The avuncular and very successful Vice Chancellor Bob Cryan told me that there had been rumblings about my Honorary Doctorate, as a sizeable proportion of their student base hail from Merseyside. He had headed it off at the pass by a decision to invite me, for the time being, only to private events at the university.
The e-petition about my knighthood removal reached a sufficient threshold that the Forfeiture Committee at the Cabinet Office was obliged to convene to consider the question. They have strict criteria about these things since their earlier experience in the handling of the Fred Goodwin affair. They are, it seems to me, more mature in their dealings with e-petitions. Universities and other public institutions might take a leaf out of their book. Anyhow, the formal convention of the appropriate committee led to a decision that no action was required, at this time. The last three words are important, and also often absent in so many knee-jerk reactions to public outrage.
If the internet provides the technological platform for outraged individuals in the modern world, then the smartphone pro
vides the technological means to populate it. I have been photographed in all manner of different situations and mentioned on Facebook and other social media, usually with a ‘Disgraced Chief’ tag or expletive-laden hashtag.
The most ridiculous brouhaha was created by a photograph of me attending a football match. I was a guest of the board of directors of a club unconnected with Merseyside or South Yorkshire.
I hadn’t realised that my photograph had been taken whilst enjoying the game. The photographer later sent it to all manner of newspapers and media outlets highlighting my links to Hillsborough. A few carried it but most ignored it. What’s the story? ‘Man Goes to Football Match’ – so what?
It was picked up by one provincial newspaper which used it to attack not me but the football club board, with whom the paper was at loggerheads. Their football correspondent expressed the rather haughty view that, whatever the bonds of friendship, ‘someone like [me] should never be invited to a football match. It brings shame on the good name of the football club. It’s like inviting Abu Hamza or Stuart Hall to corresponding events.’ He didn’t specify what kinds of exclusions might be relevant to those other two men, each convicted of serious criminal offences, but I presume his list might include church fêtes and children’s parties.
I haven’t accepted an invitation to be a guest at any football club since. Why share such a grotesque and hateful spotlight with friends?
We fancy ourselves to be a modern, liberal and tolerant society. My experience of the last four years is that we are a long way from achieving that ambition.
We channel the Dark Ages in our visceral responses to untested allegations about people and events. The smartphone has simply replaced the pitchfork and the internet has replaced the gallows. The medieval clamour is alive and well, particularly online.
Hillsborough Untold: Aftermath of a disaster Page 24