Just when we thought there was nothing more to glean about the dismal failings and vicious little lies of the senior police officers who covered their tracks after the scandal of Hillsborough, more of their bare-faced arrogance and rank complacency emerged on Tuesday, in the long-awaited findings of the watchdog which monitors our crime-fighting forces.
From the petty jealousies of the South Yorkshire Police top brass to the vile way subordinates were ordered to photograph rubbish bins and comb criminal records, looking to tarnish the names of the Liverpool dead, a nauseating stench emanates from the Independent Office for Police Conduct report into the disaster.
But there is a reason why Sir Norman Bettison QPM warrants an entire section of the 400-word summary report all to himself, because he really does give new meaning to the word ‘despicable.’
The one-time South Yorkshire Police chief inspector had his fingers all over the Hillsborough cover-up – giving an aggressively anti-Liverpool half-hour video presentation to the influential Tory MP Michael Shersby which was designed to be part of the ‘counter-attack.’ Then heading to Westminster, in November 1989, to disseminate the same narrative to more parliamentarians. By the end of that month, the lie was taking hold.
The IOPC, whose work has been exhaustive, secured the video that Bettison showed the MPs, complete with his own voiceover, and it is through this that the liar’s rank deceit is revealed. He claims Liverpool supporters forced open the gate that precipitated the crush, in April 1989. Lie. He claims the police managed the crowd well. Lie. And that wasn’t the worst of it.
It takes a special kind of b*****d to alcohol-test corpses, purely to bend the story in favour of the South Yorkshire police. Some of them were children. Bettison would have known of this. He also searched the police HOLMES database for statements from witnesses that included certain ‘buzz words’ related to supporter behaviour and alcohol consumption, though that proved a fruitless task.
All of this activity proved rather inconvenient when the job of Merseyside Chief Constable came up in 1998 and Bettison, gliding towards the top of greasy pole, coveted it. But he was the unanimous choice of the selection committee because of the recruiters’ rank fecklessness.
An external assessor instructed the Merseyside interview panel that Bettison had been a ‘member of a small inquiry team reporting to the Chief Constable on Hillsborough.’ He mentioned this because he ‘was conscious that anything relating to Hillsborough was an extremely sensitive issue in Merseyside.’ Most of the interview panel didn’t even read the HMIC report to get the hint, so no-one bothered asking Bettison about Hillsborough. He was hired. It would be laughable, if it were not a disgrace.
It was a few days later, when the Liverpool Daily Post splashed its front page on ‘Hillsborough and the new Chief Constable,’ that Bettison felt the heat of scrutiny and set off on a journey around the truth, obfuscating and concealing. The head of HMIC wanted an explanation, but Bettison assured him that his Hillsborough role was ‘peripheral.’ He used the same word when the Merseyside Police Authority demanded answers.
The IOPC takes a very dim view of this. ‘A reasonable misconduct panel could conclude that he deliberately downplayed his role in the aftermath of the Hillsborough disaster,’ its report says of Bettison.
When the coruscating Hillsborough Independent Review revealed the South Yorkshire force’s catastrophic failings in 2012, Bettison, by then the Chief Constable of West Yorkshire Police, was at it again – permitting a press release to be issued in his name which untruthfully asserted he had never ‘besmirched’ Liverpool fans’ reputations. The outcry led to his resignation. The Crown Prosecution Service announced he would stand trial on four counts of misconduct in public office for allegedly lying about his involvement in Hillsborough to further his own career, though the case was later dropped.
The IOPC says that if Bettison remained a serving officer today, he would face a gross misconduct case – though he left his lucrative job at a time when the law stated that retired officers could not face disciplinary proceedings and is immune.
Seemingly untouchable, too. He still holds the knighthood he received for ‘services to policing’ in 2006 – 17 years after Hillsborough – and his Queen’s Police Medal for ‘distinguished service.’ He retains his handsome police pension – £90,000 a year, or so. All that has gone is his Liverpool John Moores University fellowship, which he was stripped of in 2013. Local Liverpool MP Ian Byrne wrote to Cabinet Office minister Nick Thomas Symonds on Tuesday, demanding that Bettison’s knighthood be withdrawn. Merseyside will not be holding its breath.
On Tuesday night, the South Yorkshire Police Federation chairman Steve Kent issued a delusional, tone-deaf statement, claiming that this 400-page report by the police service’s own watchdog, which has taken 12 years to conclude, was ‘opinion dressed up as fact’ and upsetting for its officers. When that Federation’s own 1989 representative. Paul Middup, had admitted to the IOPC, that he spread the false stories about Liverpool fans with media, having ‘not checked whether the accounts were true.’
An air of blind, institutional denial which perhaps explains the absence of any apology or contrition from Bettison, the highly decorated, Oxford-educated, knight of the realm.
