My friend Peter Chippindale, a Guardian journalist, first drew my attention to the Birmingham pub bombings. He had reported on the trial in 1975 and remarked that he thought the men were innocent. He had come to that conclusion from his attendance at court and from talking to the relatives of the convicted men.
Little did I realise that nearly 50 years later, long after the men had been freed and their convictions quashed, the case would still play a big part in my life.
For many years I lacked resources, but I eventually persuaded the Granada Television programme World in Action to take me on to conduct a proper investigation. My Granada colleagues and I made three programmes. The first destroyed the forensic evidence that had been one of the two key planks of the prosecution case. The second, based on the testimony of a former police officer, shed light on the treatment of the six men during their first three days in custody, when four of them had been persuaded to confess. It was a terrifying story involving police dogs in cells, threats with shotguns and even a mock execution.
In addition, I pursued a third line of inquiry: I realised from the outset that one could go on indefinitely knocking down the case against the six men, but that would only prove that the case against them was weak. To prove their innocence it would be necessary to track down the actual perpetrators and persuade some or all of them to own up in sufficient detail that it was no longer possible for those in authority to continue to assert that the right people were in custody.
My first port of call was Michael Murray, who had served a 12-year sentence for involvement in terrorism offences in the West Midlands and who had long been rumoured to have been involved in the pub bombings. He was not at all keen to see me, but was eventually persuaded to do so.
Murray owned up to having been one of two men who had made the bombs and also to making the warning call. He gave me a general account of the bombings. Four men had been involved, two had made the bombs and two had planted them. The targets were not the pubs, but the buildings in which they were situated: the tax office in New Street and the Rotunda next to the railway station.
As with previous bombings in the West Midlands, the intention had been to give the police enough warning to evacuate the buildings, but the warning call was botched and there was insufficient time. The result was that 21 people died and 200 more suffered injuries, some of them life-changing.
Murray confirmed that none of the six convicted men had been members of the IRA and none had been involved in these or any other bombings. He was, however, acquainted with two of them, who had been his workmates at a Birmingham engineering firm.
I realised, however, that merely having interviewed one of the two people who had made the bombs would not demonstrate beyond doubt the innocence of the convicted men. The police never claimed to have caught those who had made the bombs. To prove the innocence of the convicted men, I would have to track down one or both of the men who had planted the bombs.
I, therefore, set about finding as many as possible of those who had been planting bombs in and around Birmingham in the mid-70s.
Gradually I narrowed the field to a handful of suspects and when I had the same name from three separate sources, I moved in upon him. He did not immediately admit to his role. On the night of the pub bombings he claimed to have been warned to stay at home. After a while, I said to him, “I think you were in the pubs”, and it all came tumbling out. He was the junior of two men who planted both bombs in both pubs. He had been assured there would be plenty of warning, but it all went wrong. His full story is to be found in my book, Error of Judgement.
The book was published in 1986 to a mixed reception, but no one ever alleged that I had made it all up. From the West Midlands police there was silence. For many years the official police line was, “We never said we’d got all of them. Mr Mullin must have interviewed one or two who got away.”
By now, however, it was becoming harder to keep the lid on. In 1987, the then home secretary, Douglas Hurd, referred the case to the court of appeal, presided over by the lord chief justice, Lord Lane. Despite a welter of new evidence he and his two colleagues sat stone-faced and at the end dismissed the appeal out of hand. “The longer this hearing has gone, the more convinced we have become that the verdict of the jury was correct,” he said, words that would come back to haunt him.
In 1990 my Granada colleagues and I made the third documentary in which we interviewed the actual bomber, albeit heavily disguised. Granada also broadcast a primetime, star-studded drama documentary, Who Bombed Birmingham?, in which I was played by the actor John Hurt. In due course the Home Office ordered yet another inquiry, this one to be conducted by the chief constable of Devon and Cornwall, and he soon turned up new evidence. In particular, he located the original police notebooks and it quickly became clear that the confessions were false.
The end when it came was spectacular. By now the case was a cause celebre. The six men, who had served 17 years in prison, emerged blinking into the daylight to be greeted by cheering crowds and a wall of cameras. Standing with them, facing the world’s cameras, was one of the proudest days of my life.
But that was not the end of the story. Almost immediately a whispering campaign began, encouraged by people at the highest levels of the police and the legal profession. It went roughly as follows: “OK, maybe the forensic evidence was dodgy. Maybe the police did invent the confessions, but we know they did it. And if they didn’t do the pubs, they were involved in other terrorist bombings.” None of this was true.
Only recently has the penny begun to drop, largely thanks to a vigorous campaign led by relatives of some of the victims. In 2018, the West Midlands police reopened the investigation, but inevitably, almost 50 years after the event, the trail has gone cold. Of the four bombers, only two are still alive. Where possible, I have cooperated with the investigation. I have, for example, handed over the notes of my interviews with Michael Murray, who died in 1999, and a redacted copy of my notes of the interview with one of the two men who planted the bombs.
What I have not been willing to do, however, is to disclose his identity or those of other people I interviewed. As a result the West Midlands police applied for an order under the Terrorism Act to force me to reveal my sources. This I declined to do. Protection of sources is a cornerstone of the free press in a democracy.
I entirely understand the determination of the victims’ relatives that those responsible for this atrocity should face justice. In their place I would feel the same. But when I came on the scene nobody was doing any investigating and it is mainly as a result of my investigation that the names of three of the four perpetrators are known. I interviewed a total of 16 or 17 former members of the IRA during the course of my investigation and in every case I gave absolute assurances that I would not disclose their identities. Had I not done so, no one would have talked to me.
My investigation led not merely to the overturning of one of the biggest miscarriages of justice in British legal history. It resulted also in the winding up of the notorious West Midlands Serious Crime Squad and the quashing of at least 30 other convictions. In addition, it led to a royal commission that recommended, among other things, the setting up of the Criminal Cases Review Commission, which thus far has resulted in the quashing of a further 500 or so convictions, some of the latest being the scandalous cases of the post office operators who were persecuted by the Post Office.
It was overwhelmingly in the public interest. I have no difficulty in justifying this.
Chris Mullin was the MP for Sunderland South from 1987 to 2010. He was a minister in the Blair government and was for four years chairman of the home affairs select committee
