One Of The By-Products Of The Hillsborough Report, After 23 Years It Finally Managed To Ferret Out Boris Johnson And Kelvin MacKenzie

By AM Friday, September 21, 2012

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Mick Hall with a piece from his blog on the 1989 Hillsborough Stadium disaster.


Supporters of 'Justice for the 96'

One of the by-products of the excellent report into the Hillsborough football stadium disaster was that after 23 years it finally managed to ferret out from their rat holes two of the most contemptible rodents ever to work in the profession of journalism, Boris Johnson, former editor of the Spectator and Kelvin MacKenzie, the editor of the Sun at the time of the disaster.

Johnson, who is now Mayor of London was editor of the Spectator magazine who wrote an editorial which was part of the campaign by South Yorkshire police police to blame the Hillsborough victims for the disaster. The editorial blamed: 'Drunken fans at the back of the crowd who mindlessly tried to fight their way into the ground" for playing a part in the disaster.' The editorial added: 'The police became a convenient scapegoat, and the Sun newspaper a whipping boy for daring, albeit in a tasteless fashion, to hint at the wider causes of the incident.'

Boris Johnson has real questions to answer not least as a budding Tory politician back then, what, or who motivated him to publish this editorial? Did pressure come from the Thatcher Government which had a debt to pay to the South Yorkshire Force, after it did their dirty work at what became known as the ‘Battle of Orgreave' during the miners strike, when the police arrested Arthur Scargill and attempted to batter miners pickets into submission. As Michael McColgan wrote in a recent letter to the Guardian: 'The parallels with Hillsborough were obvious, even down to the denigration of the miners by Wright, (Chief Constable) Margaret Thatcher and much of the media.'

Kelvin MacKensie is a sad a pathetic individual always crying out to be accepted into the elites by whom he has always been regarded as rough trade, all right to beat up verbally trade unionists and working class folk like the victims of Hillsborough, but not good enough to sit at the top table.

After the Hillsborough report concluded that the evidence showed conclusively that the allegations against Liverpool fans on which the Sun front page was based were unfounded. Mackensie offered the people of Liverpool his "profuse apologies" for his front page story, headlined "The Truth", which falsely alleged that drunken fans had urinated on police and pick-pocketed the dead. The front page splash carried three sub-headlines that: "Some fans picked pockets of victims; Some fans urinated on the brave cops; Some fans beat up PC giving kiss of life"

Few people in Liverpool were buying his apology, not least because as late as 2006 when the true facts were in the public domain, MacKenzie was quoted as saying at a private business lunch with a Newcastle law firm:

  
Kelvin MacKenzie 

"All I did wrong was tell the truth ... I was not sorry then and I'm not sorry now because we told the truth."

As I wrote above Johnson and Mackensie are two of the most contemptible rodents to ever edit a British newspaper or magazine.