THE CABLE GUY

The ungracious and shameful manner in which Charles Kennedy’s alcoholism was handled by his party – the same party, lest we forget, for which he had grabbed the largest number of seats since its previous incarnation eighty years previously – was a sober lesson in Westminster morals at their most ruthless. Stabbed in the back by colleagues with unrealisable ambitions to better what Kennedy had achieved, he was replaced by Sir Menzies (AKA ‘Ming the Merciless’) Campbell, whose leadership was such a roaring success it lasted barely a year. And then came Clegg. Alas, poor Nick, we knew him well. Gordon Brown agreed with him, and so did David Cameron.

It was only when the Con-Dem Coalition was ripped apart by cynically effective Tory electioneering in 2015 that the shackles the Lib Dems placed on the most damaging Conservative policies became apparent; not that the electorate recognised this, taking out their frustrations with austerity politics on the junior partners and decimating their numbers, forcing Nick Clegg to fall on his leadership sword as a consequence. A party reduced to single figures had little in the way of choice when it came to a successor and in stepped Tim Farron. Yes, Tim Farron; remember him?

Tim Farron was the fish finger party leader whose General Election campaign barely a month ago was dogged by persistent questions over his faith and its official position on gay sex (presumably not a missionary one). When he quit a couple of weeks ago, Farron cited his God-bothering as one of the main reasons for resigning; he apparently regarded it as an impossibility to lead his party and ‘live as a committed Christian, to hold faithfully to the Bible’s teaching’. Why run in the first place then, vicar?

Yes, some of the grillings he received on account of his religious beliefs were unfair; as I said at the time, would he have been similarly pursued on this one question had he been a Muslim MP rather than a Christian one? But Farron had presented the media with such an open goal that it merely highlighted his evident unsuitability for leading a political party; in recent years, his efforts at leadership have only been matched by some of the clowns in the UKIP hot-seat.

Why on earth Farron chose to compete in the last General Election campaign when he’d obviously decided to quit at the soonest available moment says everything about the diminished aspirations of the Lib Dems. That his resignation was announced on a day when the country was still coming to terms with the Grenfell Tower disaster underlines the unfortunate and inopportune timing where his party is concerned of late. Not to worry, though; the Lib Dems have their very own Jezza! Yes, Old Mother Cable is back, and it looks as if the man who sold the Royal Mail down the river during his stint as Coalition Business Secretary is poised to step into the breach as saviour!

The 74-year-old Westminster veteran was missing in action for two years, but returned to Parliament three weeks ago and now stands to lead his party out of the wilderness. Even with an improved showing at this year’s General Election, the Lib Dems still have a paucity of talent to draw upon when it comes to leadership, and another Lib Dem who has returned to Parliament after two years’ absence, Ed Davey, has ruled himself out of standing by citing the tried and trusted ‘I want to spend more time with my family’ excuse; why become an MP again if that’s such a prominent concern? Other potential contenders – Norman Lamb and Jo Swinson (another returnee) – have also pulled out, which leaves Cable with a virtually unchallenged path to the crown of thorns that is being Lib Dem leader.

Sir Vince has already stated his intention to push for a second EU Referendum, which may win him a few votes with Remainers in permanent denial, though I suspect the rest of the country will see it as precisely what it is – a desperate clutch at desperate straws by a desperate party. It’s not as though the Lib Dems have anything else to clutch at now, yet their approach to the Brexit conundrum didn’t exactly set the electorate alight during the General Election, anyway; they only won 12 seats, after all. And the fact they’re poised to place their future in the hands of a man who someone once compared to Mr Barrowclough from ‘Porridge’ just about sums up their utter irrelevance to the changed political landscape of 2017.

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28 YEARS LATER

The news that six people – three of them former coppers – will be charged with offences relating to the Hillsborough tragedy of 1989 flies in the face of the usual routine where ex-police officers have bent the rules to cover their own backs. Early retirement is the standard reward as the offenders are pensioned off and stick to their stories. Yes, it may be a belated announcement that the Crown Prosecution Service have charged six involved on the day, but it’s about bloody time. One of the six is Sir Norman Bettison, a Chief Inspector with the South Yorkshire Police in 1989, and a man who competed with Kelvin McKenzie to propagate the most despicable myths re the behaviour of the fans that day. He is being charged with four offences of misconduct in public office.

Another senior officer at the time, David Duckenfield, is a former Chief Superintendent who was match commander on the fatal day in question; he was the man who gave the order for the exit gate to be opened and therefore allowed the rush of Liverpool fans into the central pens of the terraces behind the goals that provoked the crush that resulted in 95 deaths; he is being charged with manslaughter by gross negligence.

As happened at Orgreave during the Miners’ Strike five years earlier, South Yorkshire Police looked after their own at the expense of those who suffered as a consequence of their actions at Hillsborough; it is only due to the remarkable resilience and tenacity of the bereaved families that today’s announcement by the CPS has come to pass. Showing the same dogged determination as those who hunted down Nazi War Criminals in the 50s and 60s, their tireless efforts not only led to the Operation Resolve investigation, but they may now finally see someone held accountable in a court of law. This is long overdue, and we can only hope justice will eventually be done. If elderly ‘sex offenders’ can be pursued by the police for offences committed half-a-century ago, why can’t elderly policemen be pursued likewise?

© The Editor

TIME HEALS NO WOUNDS

Timing counts for a lot, even if timing takes time. On the day a verdict was finally reached in the Hillsborough Inquest and the pitiful reputation of the South Yorkshire Police Force was dragged even deeper into the dirt, another law enforcement outfit with a similarly tarnished record, the Metropolitan Police Force, announced it was poised to wind down the investigation into the disappearance of Madeleine McCann. It was as far back as April 1989 when 96 football fans lost their lives at Sheffield Wednesday’s ground; it was in 2007 when the four-year-old vanished without a trace from her family’s holiday hotel in Portugal. Neither case shares much other than the amount of headlines they have generated and the fact that both have threatened to challenge ‘The Mousetrap’ for longevity – nine years for Madeleine McCann and a staggering 27 for Hillsborough.

The Taylor Report into Hillsborough appeared as early as January 1990, just nine months after the tragedy. However, whilst instigated to establish the causes of the 96 deaths, it also had a wider remit for English football in general, covering such areas as terracing, the sale of alcohol within grounds, and crush barriers. The Taylor Report’s influence was far-reaching for football in this country, leading to all-seater stadia and the end of fans being fenced in to prevent pitch invasions and contain hooliganism. Its conclusion regarding the deaths was that the prime cause of the disaster was inadequate policing. The actual inquest into the lives lost recorded a verdict of accidental death in 1991 rather than unlawful killing and didn’t recommend charges of manslaughter be brought against the police officers who were pivotal to events, much to the dismay of the families involved.

When 20 years had passed, the dissatisfaction of bereaved families with nobody being held to account for events that day, as well as their awareness that vital documentary evidence had not been released to Lord Justice Taylor in 1989, led to the formation of the Hillsborough Independent Panel; backed by government support, the panel accessed previously-unavailable information and in 2012 concluded that Liverpool supporters were not responsible for the tragedy, contrary to the Sun’s accusations at the time.

Despite the conclusions of the panel eliciting public apologies from the relevant parties, those regarded as guilty remained unpunished and fresh demands for prosecutions of police officers on a variety of charges surfaced in the wake of the 2012 inquiry. Shortly after, the High Court quashed the verdict of the original inquest and obtained permission for a fresh inquest that began two years ago last month; when the jury reached its verdict today, all 96 deaths were found to be unlawful killings. Revelations of doctored statements by the South Yorkshire Police that have emerged in recent years had cast considerable doubt upon the original verdict, though the new verdict isn’t the end of a story that has spanned two-and-a half decades. The next stage surely has to constitute prosecutions against individual officers or even a charge of corporate manslaughter against South Yorkshire Police itself.

As for the sad saga of Madeleine McCann, the future seems less conclusive. If she is still alive, Madeleine will turn 13 in just over a couple of weeks from now; but there remains a large section of the media, both professional and social, convinced she is dead and that her blood is on the hands of her parents, Gerry and Kate. Inconclusive investigations by both Portuguese and British police, as well as private detectives, have thrown up endless speculation and false leads that have failed to establish any truth in what has become one of the twenty-first century’s great mysteries. The absence of evidence as to whether Madeleine is dead or alive, let alone any plausible murder suspects being put forward, is bound to keep the rumour mill in business when even Hillsborough has finally been put to bed.

The McCann case seems to be more a story of our times than Hillsborough, which is essentially a lingering legacy of another era altogether, as was the equally drawn-out Bloody Sunday Inquiry before it. The patent lies that were pedalled by both certain tabloid papers and the South Yorkshire Police in 1989 seem mild in comparison to the hysterical obsession of Fleet Street and Twitter with Madeleine McCann. Again, timing played its part. Following the high-profile kidnapping and murder of eight-year-old Sarah Payne by a convicted child sex-offender in 2000, child abduction with the prospect of a paedophilic element was big news both for an industry desperate to combat plummeting sales and for the newest kid on the media block. Once Jimmy Savile became the Great British Bogeyman in 2012, the dead DJ could be linked to every child abduction or murder case of the past half-century, connecting individual and utterly unrelated stories to a bigger and far more salacious fantasy of institutionalised abuse allegedly stretching back decades.

The fake abduction of nine-year-old Shannon Matthews, staged less than a year after Madeleine McCann’s disappearance by her publicity-desperate mother, was symptomatic of an age in which the narcotic of fifteen-minute fame had polluted the thought processes of even the thickest people in the country and that this craving could encompass any beyond-the-pale stunt. Whereas Kate McCann was endlessly pilloried for not displaying her private grief in public – as has been compulsory ever since weeping Diana groupies besieged the gates of Kensington Palace in 1997– Karen Matthews shed the requisite tears; that hers were of the crocodile variety didn’t appear to alter the consensus that grief is no longer the province of those with a first-hand claim to it but is now something that has to be shared across the entire vicarious spectrum of contemporary communication.

The widespread belief that the public are being lied to by the powerful, whether police or politicians, can be attributed in part to the corruption and ineptitude of those institutions themselves, but it has become more entrenched in the national consciousness courtesy of social media, turning every cock-up or wilful deception into another conspiracy theory to occupy empty lives. Hillsborough may be on the brink of resolution at last, but Madeleine McCann is set to run and run, regardless of the damage done to those whose actual concern it still is.

© The Editor