An interview with David Conn

David Conn is one of this country's most consequential journalists.

His work on the commercialisation of football, on the corruption within the game's governing body Fifa and his explosive investigation into Baroness Michelle Mone and the VIP PPE lane have made a huge impact.

But for many people, there is one issue that will always be inextricably linked to David's work, and that is Hillsborough.

David was 24-years-old when the FA Cup Semi Final between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest on April 15, 1989 took place. In total 97 Liverpool fans would be unlawfully killed due to the events of that day. For decades afterwards large parts of the establishment in this country would work to try and stop the truth of what happened on that day coming out.

Many will remember David's work for The Guardian in 2009, which brought into cold reality how senior South Yorkshire Police officers amended the statements of junior colleagues who had been present on the day of the disaster to remove criticisms of the force's catastrophic handling of the match operation on the day.

But it was many years earlier that he first met with some of the Hillsborough families and joined their decades-long journey to shed light on the reality of what really happened and who tried to cover it up.

"When Hillsborough happened I was 24 and still doing a law postgraduate degree," says David, who says his legal training would help him with his investigative work once he quit the profession and started writing for a living.

"I was still a student and like every football fan we just knew that was an accident waiting to happen. We had all been in really unsafe situations. As soon as you heard about it, you just knew. As fans we had just been herded around in grounds that were not fit for spectators and this was a disaster that was waiting to happen. It was terrible.

"I used to go to a lot of football at that time, some of the stadiums were not great, but Sheffield Wednesday, even for those times, was unforgivably squalid, uncomfortable and ultimately unsafe."

By 1997, David's work as a freelance sports writer had seen him delving into issues around how football was being run, how the game had changed and how the money within it was all flowing to the top. This led to him writing his influential first book, The Football Business.

By this point, despite a report by Lord Justice Taylor - published a year after the disaster - finding that the main reason for the deaths of the Liverpool fans at Hillsborough was the failure of police control, the families and the victims had spent years facing an establishment whitewash.

The initial inquest, overseen by coroner Dr Stefan Popper, limited the investigations into what happened to events leading up to 3.15pm on the day of the disaster and returned a verdict of accidental death in 1991, to the dismay and anger of the families.

Despite appeals and tireless campaigning, the plight of the Hillsborough families would not really come back into the national public consciousness until Jimmy McGovern's 1996 television film. David was stirred into action.

"I watched that and like the whole country I was educated on what had gone on," he explains. "I had been working on these twin sides of football, writing about the millions being made by people at the top and the underfunding of grassroots football and was planning to write a book about it."

As part of the work on his book, David went to see Phil and Hilda Hammond, whose 14-year-old son Philip Junior was killed at Hillsborough. At the time Phil was the vice-chair of the Hillsborough Family Support Group.

"It was a weeknight," recalls David. "Hilda was there in her nurse uniform after a shift and we just sat and talked for hours. They talked about what had happened, they talked about Philip and they talked about how they had been treated since his death."

David said the combination of the first inquests, the lies and smears of the authorities and the media coverage by newspapers like The S*n in the wake of the disaster had devastated the family, like it had for so many.

"When I left I apologised for taking up so much time," says David. "But Hilda just said, 'that's ok, because you are going to tell the world what happened aren't you?

"That conversation made a huge impact on me," he adds. "Apart from the sheer horror and the pain of it all, I understood that there was a very specific issue here. The first inquest had been a terrible miscarriage of justice and this is what the families were trying to overturn."

In his book, David reported on the miscarriage of justice the families were continuing to face and contrasted it with how football and the big clubs had been able to enrich themselves in the Premier League era.

He adds: "The clubs were all using public money to rebuild their grounds and move on from the 1980s, while the families who had suffered so terribly through football's own neglect had not been able to rebuild their lives.

"I will never ever forget Phil's face when he was talking about his son. The love he had for him and the pain he felt. I did my best with that book but I always felt that any opportunity that I got to report on this, I would always try to do that."

David, originally from Salford but now living near Harrogate in Yorkshire, believes the wider media must take a portion of the blame for not really bringing the cover-up associated with Hillsborough to light sooner.

It would not be until 2009 and the 20th anniversary of the disaster that he felt supported enough to really push the situation to the forefront once again.

"The media is notorious in the Hillsborough story," he explains. "the S*n's reporting had a devastating impact in terms of imprinting the lies into the public consciousness. But even after Jimmy's drama-doc, there wasn't enough coverage. The problem in the media is things have to always be new and there wasn't technically a new line on this because nothing had changed - that was the problem."

But the 20th anniversary saw David, now with The Guardian, backed to do a major piece of work tying together the different elements of the miscarriage of justice and focussing on the changed statements of the police, which he located in the House of Lords library.

He adds: "2009 was a moment and I used that as an opportunity to do a proper investigative piece. I was given backing and support by The Guardian and we managed to make an impact. Not that much of my reporting was new, it had been exposed by others including the families, but there was an opportunity to make an impact with it."

The impact was such that then Culture Secretary Andy Burnham contacted David to speak about his reporting. Mr Burnham and Liverpool MP Maria Eagle would put out statements on the back of the report calling for all documents relating to Hillsborough to be released.

Two days after the article was published, Mr Burnham attended and spoke at the 20th anniversary memorial service at Anfield in a moment that would change the course of history. Interrupted by angry and emotional calls for justice from the gathered crowd, the Merseyside-born cabinet member would then take this message to the heart of government.

This started a journey that would lead to an independent panel being set up and, eventually, the verdicts of the first inquests being overturned and the truth - that the Liverpool fans were unlawfully killed - being confirmed for all to see.

David is clear where the credit for all of this lies. "This is all down to the determined fight of the families over many years. Others like me and Andy did our best to highlight it, but this was their achievement.

"The families pushed for the right people to be on the independent panel including Professor Phil Scraton, which led to such a formidable report," he adds. "the panel did tremendous work gathering, researching and reviewing all the evidence. But the legal system still should have found for the truth much earlier.

"The panel's impact, leading to judges quashing that first inquest just three months later, shows in part, that the law does respond to political pressure and media coverage."

This brings David onto one of the areas he feels most passionate about when talking about Hillsborough today - the failures of the legal system. As a trained lawyer he has perhaps a unique perspective on how dramatically the families were - and continue to be - let down by the justice system of this country.

"I first wrote about Hillsborough in 1997, Jimmy McGovern's did an amazing film in 1996, the families had been campaigning for years before that, it should never have taken anything like as long as it did for the truth to come out," he says, with feeling.

"It is a generational, landmark, monumental failure of the legal system and it has caused so much trauma and suffering. The legal system is never held to account but this is their failure along with the policer and the media."

As David points out, while the new inquests, which concluded in 2016, revealed the truth of what happened, the collapse of a criminal trial in 2021 means no officer has ever been held to account for what happened.

"This should not just be a source of shame for the legal system, it should be a case study for a reckoning," says David. "How on earth did 97 people get killed at an FA Cup Semi-Final at a stadium that the FA deemed suitable for the match and these families and survivors were able to suffer for so many years? There is never any questioning of the legal system, they do not question themselves.

"The law has now recognised that the police case was completely false, that there was no contribution by Liverpool fan behaviour, so all this evidence was false and yet no one police officer has been held to account. I think there needs to be more awareness of that injustice. The first inquest was an absolute disgrace, the police case was an absolute disgrace and then there was the collapse of the trial."

He adds: "Taylor exposed that happened within weeks of the disaster. So how did it get dragged out for 32 years in a legal process that doesn't even deliver justice in the end."

The families and survivors of the disaster are hoping that one reform of the legal system could help to leave a positive legacy from their harrowing experiences and potentially stop others going through what they have - and for so long.

The proposed Public Accountabilities Bill - or Hillsborough Law - would enforce a duty of candour on state authorities, officers and private entities whose activities impact on public safety. In short, it would force these officials to tell the truth at the first time of asking.

On top of this a Hillsborough Law would ensure victims and families have equal representation and receive public funding for lawyers from the start of any proceedings. This is something the Hillsborough families did not have as they faced the unfairness of the first inquests.

After six gruelling years of waiting, the families found out late last year that the current government would be resisting bringing the full package of measures in, but Labour - who appear to be on the verge of power - have committed a Hillsborough Law in full.

"Hillsborough Law is really important," says David. "Not only is it necessary to rebalance the scales of justice, but the families really see it as a potential positive legacy. So to refuse them the positive legacy they have worked for after taking six years to respond, they were devastated."

But he believes a wider reform of the legal system is now needed.

"The Taylor report found for the truth of what happened at Hillsborough, how can that truth then go into the legal system and come out with so many perverse untruths? How the system has taken up the lives of families and survivors. The whole system needs to be looked at."

This critique, however, should not detract from the incredible achievements of the Hillsborough families and victims, who never gave up in their pursuit of truth and justice.

"We all just feel so much for the families," David adds. "I've got to know many of them over the years, they are incredible, wonderful people who loved their loved ones so much and that love has been such a strength to them.

"They have just kept going through these horrendous experiences. It's remarkable in the end, given all the obstacles they faced, that they did get the truth legally established. That is a remarkable triumph."

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