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UK: Spin and spliffs, or why a czar abdicated
Andrew Billen The Times
Tuesday 05 Nov 2002 If the government's drugs policy ever works, it will be down to an unrepentant former substances supremo - and no thanks to ministers or "daring" initiatives, he says THE MYSTERY of who did in Britain's first 'drugs czar' recalls the plot of Murder on the Orient Express. The solution is, they all did. It was the system, which gave him no budget of his own and few staff. It was the civil servants, who hated answering to an extra boss. It was the spindoctors, who liked to announce new initiatives on the hour, every hour. And it was a whole carriage of squabbling new Labour ministers and their excess baggage of ego. The absurdity of politicians scrabbling to snatch the poisoned chalice of drugs policy is well caught by their victim, Keith Hellawell, in his autobiography, The Outsider. the book has equal value as an account of how policing has changed in his 40 years as a copper - the police gained in professionalism and ethics even as they lost control of the streets - but the final chapters take off. they betray sheer disbelief at the things he witnessed after he resigned as West Yorkshire's Chief Constable in 1997 to became the UK's anti-drugs co-ordinator. Even now, it takes a certain imaginative effort to visualise dull Alan Milburn 'squaring up' to and 'pushing' Hellawell for daring to criticise 'his' officials. But the abortive punch-up was the least of it. Labour briefed against him, ignored his advice over cannabis and finally, when he quit, called him a liar. The irony is that, given a little humility, they could all have claimed his and their strategy a modest success. 'The things that I was responsible for introducing are working now right across the piece,' Hellawell says. 'They are there, in place. This is truly the frustration - not bitterness - but the frustration: the perception that nothing was happening and it's all been a waste of time.' Hellawell lost his czardom after the 2001 election, but as a result of the ten-year plan he announced in April 1998, the Department for Education, Ofsted, the Home Office, the NHS, Customs and the security services all now have performance indicators related to drugs. Children are taught about drugs methodically from the age of six. Drug use in prisons is down and treatment up. The European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction estimates that the UK has the best chance of any country of meeting UN targets to reduce drugs use. So why, if, as he insists, it is not a matter of injured pride, is he so unhappy? 'Because they are denying it. They are denying that anything is happening. The reason I resigned is that I had just had enough of it.' His spectacular public resignation this summer from his consolation prize, advising the Government on international drug policy, looked like a well-timed act of revenge - or a ploy to sell books - but he insists that it was not calculated. He wrote a private letter of resignation on June 23, saying he would serve out his notice. On July 9 he agreed to be interviewed on Today about David Blunkett's plan to reclassify cannabis from a Class B drug to a Class C drug, like Valium and anabolic steroids. On air, he said he opposed it. Jim Naughtie asked how he could then stay in the job. After a pause, he said that he wasn't going to. 'He went, 'err . . .' Twice. And he never goes 'err'. He was thinking, 'I have to tell the truth here . . .'' The commentary, intended to absolve him of malice aforethought, is provided by Brenda Hellawell, Keith's wife, who has been supplying us with endless coffee, biscuits, tea and sandwiches over a long interview in their splendid converted farmhouse near Wakefield (if his wife had not been a highly successful businesswoman, suspicions about how he achieved its opulence on a copper's salary would be understandably aroused). She is right about her 60-year-old husband's fluency. Over four hours he hardly pauses, although his conversational tangents make me think that one reason for the Westminster spin-meisters to have hated him is that he never uses a soundbite when a sound-mouthful will do. After the Today interview, Blunkett erroneously told the press that while he had changed his mind on cannabis once, Hellawell had done so three times. Based on this, The Sun called Hellawell 'a liar'. He ends his book in anger: 'What an ending, after more than 40 years of dedicated service to law and order in this country! The final act of a 'caring' Government was to brand me a liar. What a reward!'. When extracts appeared in The Mail on Sunday last month, he was called a liar again. Milburn (whom the book does not name) denied pushing him, and Mo Mowlam, his boss in the Cabinet Office, said it was a 'complete fabrication' that she had told him that people came round to her house and smoked cannabis. 'I think you could anticipate that they would deny it. The fronting-up incident: in the great scheme of things, there is not much to it. The petulance and attitude of an individual is not much to do with the story.' And he won't sue Mowlam for calling him a fabricator? 'Oh, the number of times when I was drugs czar when my reputation was questioned and my intellectual ability was questioned! Certainly, after the first 12 months there was a constant stream of it.' As well as the liar epitaph, the other anti-monument to his years in government is the cannabis reclassification. Although I have never smoked anything in my life, to me it seems a move in the right direction. For Hellawell, however, it is not only a distraction but also a gamble, and this is the opinion of a man who is progressive on other matters, such as legalising brothels, and, more vitally, who has studied the evidence. But wasn't his deputy, Mike Trace, in favour of legalisation? 'Well, he never said that. But Mike was very close to Mo and, of course, they both used cannabis, although Mo admitted it only after someone broke the story. So I had a deputy and a boss who both admitted using substances.' And Mowlam was keen to legalise? 'Mo felt that she'd failed and I was the stumbling block. There is no doubt about that. Mo's personal mission, I think, was to do something, have something she could stick her teeth into.' The book describes her increasingly desperate attempts to find that something. She developed a fixation with Colombia, suggesting that her experience in Northern Ireland qualified her to facilitate a rapprochement between the Colombian Government and the terrorists who ran its drugs trade. And talk about believing your own hype: at one drugs conference she joked to the audience that she was an icon and that, as a 'pin-up in the City' could 'have had any man she wished'. But why would the sternly Methodist Blunkett want to go soft on cannabis? 'I don't know the relationship between David and Mo but strange things started to happen,' Hellawell says cautiously. It couldn't be that Blunkett wanted to do it just because Mo had failed to? 'I don't know. I don't know the relationship. I would tell you if I did.' At least the debate is out of the way now. 'But it isn't out of the way! It's a dog's dinner and nobody knows where they are. Police officers question whether they should be stopping people. Young people stopped are asking police why. Dealers clearly believe it's a free-for-all. And one thing that has not come out is the strength of this stuff. Netherweed - skunk, it is called - is hallucinogenic. As we have never taken it, it would blow our minds. It is nasty, horrible stuff.' So I shouldn't get some for my father, who, at 86, has worryingly begun to express curiosity about drug culture? 'Not unless you are after his inheritance.' After Hellawell quit, pro-legalisers rushed to say he was 'out of touch'. Since, over ten years as a chief constable, first in Cleveland and then in West Yorkshire, he was addicted to community meetings and even walking the beat with his constables, this seems tough. Only one incident betrays old-fashioned attitudes. This is in an anecdote about the Duke of Edinburgh, who, having opened a new building society in Leeds, drank two pints of Tetley's and announced his intention of piloting the royal plane home. Hellawell simply joked: 'You may be breathalysed, Sir.' The idea of a woozy septuagenarian Duke behind a joystick terrifies me, but Hellawell says he was just trying to inject humour: 'I would hope that these are not double standards. I had a constant dialogue with politicians over alcohol.' He, incidentally, barely drinks. But if calling him out of touch is unfair, calling him dishonest is a travesty. The memoirs are dangerously candid. The section on his early days in Huddersfield, where he joined the force after his first job as a miner, show him colluding in a corrupt and violent police culture. One scene has him and a colleague beating up three 'unsavoury characters' in a pub lavatory. 'It was a cult thing. They were bruiser people,' says Brenda, who adds that when her husband returned from Bramshill Police College, where he was fast-tracked, the bruisers soon lost respect for him. Nevertheless, as late as 1981, as a new divisional commander in Leeds, he admits to 'manhandling' a youth evading arrest. The duty inspector arrived and whispered: 'We can't do that now, Sir.' Hellawell released his grasp on the man's throat. The most striking example of his honesty, however, is the frankness with which he discusses his background. Because of his soft voice, military bearing, officer's moustache, Italian ties and 'hand-bulled Oxford-fronted shoes', plus the flash cars that earned him the nickname 'Knight Rider', people often assume that he is posh. In fact his Yorkshire childhood competes with Angela's Ashes for awfulness. His father, who probably wasn't his father, disappeared when he was four. His mother, a mill hand, was raped, but later moved in with her rapist. As a baby he was tied to a table leg and later punished by being locked in a coal shed. At seven or eight he was repeatedly sexually assaulted by a young man who had access to their rooms. It was only, he thinks, because he excelled at sport and had the luck to meet 'Bren' in his teens that he negotiated his way out of a dead-end childhood. Did he feel loved as a child? 'Huh. That is a difficult question. I felt I was on my own. I felt my mother loved me and she is still alive and I don't want to hurt her, but to the question 'Did I feel loved?' the answer is: no, I did not feel loved - but I did not know what love was.' I ask Brenda if he was hard work at first. 'He came with a lot of baggage, a damaged package. But he is a strong person, and a strong personality can override a lot of things.' 'I think,' he continues, 'I have felt at peace with myself for a good ten years now. Up until my late forties I didn't realise how my childhood affected me and my relationships with people. I had a degree of insecurity and, when I was younger, a desire to please. When people have had that kind of experience you can see it in them. I did a lot of work with the abused when I was at Hull University, particularly after the Cleveland child abuse cases. I felt I could manage that because I could manage it myself.' An eye operation in his late forties finally corrected a squint - until then he had avoided looking people in the eyes. The shyness seems to have been resolved, however, for his house is covered with Jock Ewing-like photo-portraits of himself, as well as of his three children and ten grandchildren. He denies that the perception of his failure as czar has dented his self-image. 'I have never thought particularly highly of myself and I have also always seen the good in other people, even when they have done wrong things.' His charity extends to Tony Blair, even though he gave his czar an almost impossible mission, working across 16 departments of state and ensuring that they hit their targets without making enemies along the way. It would, I say, have been possible only with Blair's full backing. 'Correct, and maybe this is where I am naive, but I don't think I ever lost Blair's backing. My dealings with Blair have always been positive. You know, 'You've got this job, Keith. Get on with it and I'll give you my support'.' But everyone leaves Blair's presence warmly convinced that they have got through to him. 'I think my background means I rarely get conned with people. I think I am a reasonable judge of character,' he counters. But his judgment on the Government is no less certain. 'They were constantly wanting to come out with new things. I kept saying, 'The strategy is there. Forget the new things. People don't believe them and you are going to undermine your credit and credibility by doing it'.' Sure enough, after 'Cannabis: the SemiDecriminalisation', we can look forward to Blunkett's New Improved Drug Strategy. 'He is going to relaunch it and repackage it and it will be the emperor's new clothes,' he cautions. Or, I suppose, the Emperor's new Labour. The copper's tale, although it has its comical aspects, carries a sober moral: less, on reflection, Murder on the Orient Express, more An Inspector Calls.
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