WATCHING ITV’s drama Anne last week, I was glued to the TV.
It was harrowing to view and I welled up more than once.
The Hillsborough disaster occurred over 30 years ago but the quest for justice by survivors and families of victims never extinguished.
Hillsborough was a calamitous disaster - a human tragedy on a colossal scale.
Ninety-seven deaths and 766 injuries.
The last victim died in July last year, 32 years after suffering irreversible brain damage on that fateful day.
Seventy-nine of the 97 victims were under 30 years of age.
What made Hillsborough so sickeningly awful was not just the scale of the catastrophe but the attempts to cover up the failures of officialdom and in particular the police.
Lord Justice Taylor, who conducted the initial inquiry into Hillsborough, described senior police officers in the South Yorkshire Constabulary as "defensive and evasive witnesses”.
Of the 65 police officers who gave evidence at the inquiry, Lord Taylor lamented “for the most part the quality of their evidence was in inverse proportion to their rank”.
He also dismissed the outrageous police-induced claim that drunken fans ran amok on that day.
Despite the damning content of the Taylor report, the state in various forms continued to conspire to deny justice to the Hillsborough campaign groups until 2012.
But cover-ups rarely go well, as truth (however hard to eke out) is usually triumphant.
Accountability, well that’s another thing entirely.
The lack of accountability over Hillsborough remains nothing short of scandalous.
The establishment is hard to take on but the people of Liverpool did it and won.
One politician who deserves much credit throughout this pitiful saga is now the Greater Manchester mayor, Andy Burnham. He kept is word to the families and survivors of Hillsborough.
In contrast, The Spectator (whose then editor was none other than Boris Johnson) ran a piece worthy of the gutter press.
Although Johnson didn’t write the offending editorial, The Spectator said of Liverpool “it has an excessive predilection for welfarism" which has “created a peculiar, and deeply unattractive psyche among Liverpudlians. They see themselves as victims, and resent their victim status; yet at the same time wallow in it”.
The Sunday Times, in an opinion column by Edward Pearce, wrote “...come sweetly to a city which is the world capital of self-pity”. He went on unabated about Liverpool in the aftermath of the disaster: “Why us? Why are we treated like animals? To which the plain answer is that a good and sufficient minority of you behave like animals.”
The Sun and Daily Express, fed by unnamed police sources and fuelled by a local Tory MP, Irvine Patnick, claimed falsely that drunken fans urinated on police and pilfered the pockets of the victims as they lay on the ground.
And still against this backdrop of media, police and political collusion, the campaigners for Justice for the 96 persevered.
When finally there was a second coroner’s hearing which ran from 2014-16, the jurors declared “unlawful killings” in respect of all 96 victims. It took 25 years for truth to be proclaimed.
Reflecting on this drama, I was conscious last week was also the anniversaries of the unlawful and merciless killings of the Reavey brothers and the O’Dowds. As well as the anniversary of the unlawful massacre of those slaughtered at Kingsmill.
Collusion, conspiracy and cover-up run rampant through many episodes of tragedy from our own troubled past.
All survivors and families of victims who died unlawfully at the hands of paramilitaries or state forces are entitled to a minimum of the truth, however long it takes and whatever the cost.
Boris Johnson should look at victim campaigners Eugene Reavey and Alan Black straight in the eyes and tell them why their quest for unvarnished truth is any less worthy than those voices from Liverpool who sought justice for the 97.
