Hillsborough report: why the Mirror refused to accept police spin

In October last year I wrote a blog item headlined The Sun's Hillsborough source has never been a secret - it was the police. So today's confirmation came as little surprise.

A couple of months later, I also wrote about the former Sun editor, Kelvin MacKenzie, having falsely claimed that the front page article he published in 1989, "The Truth", was filed by a Liverpool news agency (which he retracted within 24 hours).

That allegation prompted a former Daily Mirror reporter, Gordon Hay, to email me and give an interesting insight into what happened the night The Sun ran its controversial story. I am now able to tell it for the first time.
Three days after the tragedy, the Mirror had three reporters in Liverpool - the vastly experienced Syd Young (now retired), plus Christian Gysin (now with the Daily Mail) and Hay (now running a media consultancy in Scotland).

The London newsdesk called to alert them to copy that had been filed by Whites news agency in Sheffield that afternoon (here's a pdf copy of that). It made serious allegations against the Liverpool fans, claiming they had been drunk, had pick-pocketed victims and had urinated on policemen.

The trio were told by the newsdesk briefer that he had previously called the paper's two reporters in Sheffield - the late Ted Oliver and Frank Thorne (now freelancing in Australia) - with the same information. They had looked into it and rejected it as untrue.

They told the desk they could not stand up the allegations so they would not be filing. Oliver actually said that if such a story appeared under his byline he would resign.
So Young, Gysin and Hay made calls too and couldn't find any supporting evidence for the allegations. Indeed, all the indications they were getting suggested "the Yorkshire cops were trying to divert attention away from their own failings."

Hay told me: "We discussed it and, having agreed that we could not verify the claims, passed on [to the desk] our suspicions about the Yorkshire police spin."
He was full of praise for the response of the night news editor, the now-retired Mark Dowdney. Hay said: "Despite the pressures on him and the knowledge that others might run with the story, he sided with his men in the field and spiked the story."

Well, he didn't actually spike it. But the Mirror's extreme scepticism about the claims - properly reflecting the views of their five reporters in Sheffield and Liverpool - is clear from the angle the paper took, exemplified by the headline, "Fury as police claim victims were robbed." Very different, in other words, to "The truth".

Why Whites news agency filed its controversial story

One of the most revealing documents to emerge today is a memo from Whites to the London Evening Standard's news editor about its original copy. Clearly, the paper had raised queries about the authenticity of the allegations made in its copy sent on 18 April.

Dated 12 June, the memo mentions four unidentified senior police sources plus "a leading MP backing many of the police claims." It states:

"All the allegations in the stories we filed were made unsolicited by ranking officers in the South Yorkshire force to three different experienced senior journalists who are partners in this agency. All four ooficers involved had been on duty at Hillsborough.

The first claims of bad behaviour came on Saturday April 15th, a few hours after the tragedy, when one reporter met by chance a senior police officer he has known for many years.

Without prompting the officer told him he had been punched and urinated on as he tried to save a dying victim at Hillsborough. The following day there was another chance meeting with [a] second officer who again without prompting said he had seen some fans behaving badly, including attacking police and urinating on officers.

At this stage we felt it was not enough confirmation to send a story making such serious claims. However, on Monday 17th another reporter met a third officer who volunteered information and reiterated similar stories saying he had seen police attacked and had been told of fans urinating down the terraces as police pulled away the dead and injured.

At that stage we felt we should tell the story and sent it out the following morning... Later the same day a third reporter met a fourth officer he has known for many years who repeated the allegations and added that Liverpool supporters had been stealing from the dead.

Though he had not seen it personally he said despite fingertip searches of the terracing a lot of personal property belonging to the dead was missing and other officers had told him of pilfering.

We sent out the additional details plus a report by South Yorkshire's chief ambulance officer that one of his men was injured when attacked as he treated a an on the pitch.

Further quotes were sent in a later story after we spoke to the Tory MP for Sheffield Hallam Irvine Patnick. He said he had spoken to police officers on Saturday night who said they had been attacked and urinated on. He had not volunteered the information previously because he felt it would inflame a very sensitive situation.

We also added quotes from South Yorkshire's police federation secretary who said he had heard 'terrible' accounts of the behaviour of some fans. In some respects we 'watered down' the allegations...

We felt we did as much as we could to check the authenticity of the story in the time available and reported faithfully what we were told."