Bar Standards Board clears barrister over Hillsborough remarks

A senior barrister who repeated discredited police allegations about the behaviour of Liverpool supporters at the Hillsborough disaster has been cleared of misconduct by his profession’s Bar Standards Board (BSB).

Jonathan Goldberg QC made his remarks last May in a BBC interview after the collapse of the final Hillsborough-related criminal trial, claiming that late-arriving Liverpool supporters had caused “a riot” at the 1989 FA Cup semi-final against Nottingham Forest at Hillsborough, and crushed “innocents” who had arrived early.

Goldberg also made a speech outside the court, where he had represented Peter Metcalf, the then South Yorkshire police solicitor, who was acquitted of perverting the course of justice for advising that dozens of police officers’ written accounts should be amended.

Goldberg described the prosecution of Metcalf and two former South Yorkshire police officers as “a witch-hunt”, and said the money spent on criminal investigations into the disaster and its aftermath “would have been better spent on building new hospitals or schools, perhaps in Liverpool”.

Many relatives of the 97 men, women and children killed at Hillsborough, and the mayors of Liverpool city region and Greater Manchester, Steve Rotheram and Andy Burnham, complained to the BSB about Goldberg’s remarks.

The evidence of South Yorkshire police officers, accusing Liverpool supporters of drunkenness and blaming them for the disaster, has been repeatedly rejected: by Lord Justice Taylor in his 1989 public inquiry; by the Hillsborough Independent Panel in 2012; by three senior judges, including the lord chief justice, when they quashed the first inquest in 2012; and by the jury at the 2014-16 inquest.

The BSB decided, however, that