Hillsborough: The apology still missing

After more than 25 years in journalism, much of it spent covering the political arena, there is little that surprises me any more about the lengths to which some people will go in order to preserve their power, position or reputation.

But in the week that the truth about the 1989 Hillsborough football disaster was finally and dramatically laid bare, even an ageing cynic like me has to confess to being shocked by the sheer scale of deception and disinformation involved.

Of course bad apples can crop up in any organisations, and sometimes, as in the case of the West Midlands Crime Squad in the 1970s or, dare I say it, News International in the past decade, this can extend into institutional corruption.

But the fact that so many pillars of the establishment, from the police, to the ambulance service, the coroners’ service, the judiciary, the government and, yes, the media could somehow collude to deny justice for so long almost – but not quite - beggars belief.

Looking back at that old footage of the disaster, it seems in many ways to have happened in another country, a Britain where football was still a working-class game and where the North-South divide was as much a cultural phenomenon as an economic one.

As Labour MP Andy Burnham put it: “There was an 'us and them' culture in the 1980s where people seen as being troublemakers could just be treated as second class citizens - football supporters, people taking industrial action. That was very evident in the North of England when I grew up."

Some believe it couldn’t happen again, that in the age of email, mobile phones and Twitter a cover-up on this scale would be impossible to carry out even if it were to be attempted.

Yet the battle to get at the truth of what happened in more recent tragedies such as the deaths of Dr David Kelly, Jean Charles de Menezes and Ian Tomlinson suggest that perhaps the country has not changed quite as much as might first appear.

If Hillsborough has been a saga that has showed the best and worst of humanity – and there are many heroes to stand alongside the obvious villains - then it has certainly also demonstrated the best and worst of British journalism.

South Yorkshire Police’s deliberate campaign of misinformation found a ready outlet in The Sun, whose then editor was this week forced, to use his own immortal phrase, to empty a bucket of something very nasty over his own head.

Not surprisingly, it was the regional press which demonstrated that journalism can be a potent force for good as well as harm.

It was The Journal’s sister title the Liverpool Echo which, as Labour leader Ed Miliband acknowledged on Wednesday, was primarily responsible for keeping the issue on the political agenda during the long 23-year fight.

But amid all the relief of the campaigners at having finally prevailed, there is, however, one aspect of the truth that is still to come out – the role of Margaret Thatcher.

The documents released this week by the independent inquiry panel make clear that the then Prime Minister was briefed by her aides over the level of deceit by South Yorkshire Police - yet she chose to do nothing.

Is it possible she may have felt she owed them one for helping her win the Battle of Orgreave in 1984 – a decisive encounter in the year-long conflict which ultimately led to the rout of Arthur Scargill’s miners?

She certainly cannot have been expected to show any instinctive sympathy for the victims, having previously been on record as linking football fans to the IRA and the miners as ‘the enemy within.’

In the midst of delivering his “profound apology” to the victims’ families this week on the nation’s behalf, the current Prime Minister David Cameron maintained that the Thatcher government had done nothing wrong.

Well, he had to say that, given the continued emotional hold that the Iron Lady retains over the party which he now rather precariously leads.

But it is nevertheless odd that in the week that has seen everyone from Kelvin Mackenzie to the Football Association to Boris Johnson forced to swallow a large slice of humble pie, there is still one apology missing.

From the woman who sat at the apogee of that complex, interwoven 1980s establishment, there remains an eerie silence.

Was reshuffle the beginning of the end for Cameron?

Much has changed for David Cameron over the course of his seven years in charge of the Conservative Party – but there are two aspects of his leadership that have remained pretty much constant throughout that period.

The first is that he has tried to avoid reshuffles as far as possible. The second is that in his efforts to detoxify the Tory brand he has, by and large, continued to lead the party from the political centre.

Well, it had to end sometime I guess. Two and a half years after taking up residence in Downing Street, he finally summoned the nerve to move some of his more middle-ranking Cabinet members around the political chessboard.

And in so doing, he tilted the balance of power within his government decisively rightwards – and away from that fabled centre ground he has spent so long trying to cultivate.

On the face of it, this looks like pretty poor judgement on the Prime Minister’s part. To win an outright majority at the next election, his party will have to win approximately 2m more votes than it won in May 2010.

Yet history shows that every time the Conservative Party has lurched to the right in recent years – most notably under William Hague in 1999 and Iain Duncan Smith in 2003 - its support has gone down, not up.

Mr Cameron's entire political success, such as it is, has been built on persuading people that he is not like those Tory leaders of old and that his style of politics, like Tony Blair's, is about reaching out to those who are not his natural supporters.

On no issue is the change in Mr Cameron clearer than that of the environment. The man who once rode a bicycle to work to show his party’s new-found commitment to the green cause has now appointed a virtual climate change denier as environment secretary.

Sure, the changes announced on Tuesday may well bring about some superficial advances in terms of both service delivery and presentation.

On the latter score in particular, new health secretary Jeremy Hunt will surely be an improvement on the hapless Andrew Lansley who, in the words of one commentator, “could not sell gin to an alcoholic.”

But these are trifling gains when set against the central strategic error of failing to recognise that parties struggling to hold onto their support rarely solve their problems by retreating into their ideological comfort zone.

Indeed, it is tempting to believe the entire exercise was less a considered piece of political strategizing than an act of petulance designed to put the Liberal Democrats in their place following the spat over Lords reform and the boundary review.

With the forces of the Tory right now ranged even more formidably against him, there is no doubt that Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg will now find it even more difficult to persuade voters that he and his party are actually making a difference in government.

Meanwhile Labour leader Ed Miliband continues to make mischief by teasingly holding out the prospect of a post-Clegg, post-election Lib-Lab deal with ‘continuity SDP’ leader Vince Cable in the deputy PM role.

But inept as it may have been to drive his Coalition partners further into the hands of the enemy, even more ham-fisted was the Prime Minister’s treatment of his erstwhile transport secretary, Justine Greening.

Mr Cameron’s decision to remove her, apparently for having reaffirmed the government’s policy to rule out a third runway at Heathrow, has handed his real enemy – Boris Johnson – both a key weapon and a key ally in his campaign to replace the Tory leader.

The long-simmering battle between the two men has now moreorless descended into open warfare, with the London Mayor angrily denouncing Ms Greening’s demotion and demanding a statement ruling out a third runway for good.

Ms Greening – a former Treasury minister, take note – must now be odds-on to become Boris’s first Chancellor if he ever makes it into Number Ten – a double case of Blond(e) Ambition.

Hence a reshuffle that was supposed to relaunch Mr Cameron’s premiership has simultaneously risked alienating floating voters, angered his Coalition partners, and handed his main internal rival a big stick with which to beat him over the head.

From that perspective, it is tempting to see it as not so much a new dawn for his government, but the beginning of the end.

Tony Blair: The once and and future king?

Anyone who has read this column more than once over the past 15 years or so will probably know by now that I have never exactly been the greatest fan of Tony Blair.

It was not just all the spin and smarm, it was the fact that having waited so long for a left-of-centre government, we ended up with one that behaved in much the same way as the Tory administrations that preceded it.

From the perspective of a political journalist on a North-East newspaper, what made it worse was the evident lack of regard in which the former Prime Minister appeared to hold his ‘home’ region.

Having got his big break unexpectedly at Sedgefield in 1983, he repaid the region’s loyalty by ignoring its needs at every turn and allowing its prosperity divide with the South to widen markedly during his time in office.

So why, then, am I secretly clucking with pleasure at the flurry of recent stories suggesting the great man may soon make a return to the political frontline?  Well, partly, I guess, because it would make politics more interesting.

But mainly it’s down to a feeling that, in Britain, we discard our political leaders far too early, that we should be making greater use of their accumulated wisdom in the interests of better and more enlightened government.

In this context, Mr Blair’s own estimation of why he would like the chance to be Prime Minister again makes interesting reading.

“I have learned an immense amount in the past five years. One of my regrets is that what I have learned in the last five years would have been so useful to me, because when you see how the world is developing you get a far clearer picture of some of the issues our country is grappling with,” he said recently.

Now it would be easy to dismiss this as another example of Mr Blair’s colossal self-regard, were it not for the fact that what he says actually rings true.

In the not-so-distant past, after all, people who had been Prime Minister once quite often went on to become Prime Minister again – and usually ended up making a better fist of it than they had the first time round.

If I'm honest, I think I probably have something of a romantic attachment to the politics of the 19th century, when political careers lasted 60 years and the likes of Palmerston and Gladstone could still become Prime Minister in their 80s.

It’s also probably down in part to an instinctive dislike of ageism, a dislike that is becoming stronger as I myself edge nearer and nearer towards the half-century mark.

Asked recently by London’s Evening Standard whether he would welcome a return as Prime Minister, Mr Blair was quoted as saying: "Yes, sure, but it's not likely to happen is it."

One of the biggest reasons it is so unlikely is that, as Mr Blair himself acknowledged on the day he left office, he is not, and never has been, a “House of Commons man.”

He made clear how he felt about the place by resigning as an MP on the very day he resigned as Prime Minister, and it is inconceivable to see him hanging around on the backbenches waiting for his chance to ‘do a de Gaulle.’

Could he, instead, become a House of Lords or a Senate man, one of the elected peers Nick Clegg hopes to see if he gets his way and forces the Tory backbenches to swallow Lords reform?  This, I think, is rather more likely.

But if Tony Blair really does want to be Prime Minister again – and if you are politician, I don’t think you ever quite lose that desire – he would have to do it by a very different route next time round.

He won’t come back as leader of the Labour Party.  They wouldn’t have him even if they lost the next election and the one after that too.

He would probably have to start his own party, join the Tories, or, more plausibly, put himself at the head of some sort of grand Coalition in a moment of national crisis.

And the other thing he would have to do differently, of course, would be to find somewhere to represent that was a long way away from the North-East.