Police in pub meeting were told of ‘pride’ at Hillsborough slurs

The atmosphere amongst the men must have been grim.

Just four days earlier, many of those present had borne witness to what the Prime Minister this week described as “one of the greatest peacetime tragedies” of the last century”

Ninety-five Liverpool fans had been crushed to death in an horrific accident on the Leppings Lane terrace at Hillsborough, just six miles away to the south. A 96th, Tony Bland, was lying in a coma from which he would never wake.

As last week’s Hillsborough Independent Panel report made abundantly clear, they and their fellow supporters had been let down very badly by the authorities.

The ground was unsafe, the policing shambolic, the emergency response fatally flawed. As David Cameron said: “The report is black and white – the Liverpool fans were not the cause.”

Yet the nation awoke on that Wednesday morning in April 1989 to find a very different picture was being painted in several newspapers – a picture in which the victims were far from blameless.

The Sun newspaper’s front page was taken out with a now-infamous – and utterly discredited – story headlined “The Truth”, which made despicable claims that drunken Liverpool fans had attacked and urinated upon policemen as the disaster unfolded, and had later picked the pockets of the dead. The outrage on Merseyside was immediate. But in the national mindset, a picture of drunken, out-of-control fans was already taking shape.

It was against this backdrop that a number of rank-and-file officers were gathering at The Pickwick, in High Green, Sheffield, to discuss their response.

As secretary of the South Yorkshire Police Federation, Pc Paul Middup had helped arrange the branch meeting.

It was the same Pc Middup whose name had appeared in several of those media reports that morning. For it was he, as spokesman for the force’s rank-and-file, who had briefed White’s News Agency in Sheffield the previous day that the fans were partly to blame.

“I am sick of hearing how good the crowd were,” Mr Middup told reporters. “Some arrived tanked up and the situation faced by officers trying to control them was terrifying.”

The minutes from that federation meeting, released for the first time, show Mr Middup told the officers he was “proud” of his media briefings.

“Mr Middup read the lengthy list of the reporters, radio and TV people who contacted us and interviewed him,” the minutes record.

“He stated he had been proud to put the members’ case forward. However, the people of Merseyside were now complaining at some of the secretary’s comments.”

Mr Middup told the meeting he had been relating stories from other officers, and his priority was “putting our side of the trauma over”. He revealed how Chief Constable Peter Wright had stated privately that “the truth could not come from him” – but that Mr Wright had given the Police Federation a “free hand” and his support.

The attitude among the rank-and-file that day was defensive, defiant. Several officers repeated the allegations in the Sun, one complaining that “the sympathy is always with the crowd, never with the police”.

At that point, unusually for a branch union meeting, the Chief Constable arrived. Mr Wright told the officers that with a judicial inquiry soon to get underway, a “defence” had to be prepared and a “rock solid story” presented.

He believed the force would be “exonerated” by the Taylor Inquiry and considered that “blame” should be directed towards “drunken ticketless individuals”.

On the inquiry’s outcome, he was badly mistaken. Lord Justice Taylor found unequivocally that the police had been to blame for the crush, and exonerated Liverpool supporters. Yet the slurs spread by Pc Middup and other, unnamed senior police sources, had already taken hold in people’s minds.

It would be 23 long years before the victims were finally able to clear their names.