One of my Xmas presents was a copy of Phil Scraton's book Hillsborough The Truth. In it, he notes the murder of Ken Bigley, a charity worker, by the so-called Islamic State in Iraq in one of those gruesome videos that these heartless lunatics like to launch onto the world from time to time. Poor Ken was a Scouser and Phil Scraton picks-up the following quote which conflates his murder with the suffering of the families bereaved at the Leppings Lane End in Sheffield by a certain someone who put his rather large foot in it again yesterday in a different context. Guess who wrote the following:
The deaths of more than 50 (sic) Liverpool football supporters at Hillsborough in 1989 was undeniably a greater tragedy than the single death, however horrible, of Mr Bigley; but there is no excuse for Liverpool's failure to acknowledge, even to this day, the part played in the disaster by drunken fans at the back of the crowd who mindlessly tried to fight their way into the ground that Saturday afternoon. The police became a convenient scapegoat,The Sun newspaper a whipping-boy for daring, albeit in a tasteless fashion, to hint at the wider causes of the incident.
These wholly unfounded words about what actually happened in Yorkshire on 15 April 1989 were written by...
Our very learned Foreign Secretary, the Right Honourable Mr Boris Johnson.