Neil Wilby Media

To all intents and purposes it appears as though Ian Hopkins, beleagured Chief Constable of Greater Manchester Police, has either suspended or deleted his account on the well-known social media platform, Twitter.

Yesterday morning, not being able to access his account, I mistakenly believed that Hopkins had ‘blocked’ me. An action he has taken against a number of his critics recently, particularly former GMP police officers whom, like myself as an investigative journalist, has direct access to hard evidence of wrongdoing, both by him and the wider police force he purports to lead.

Upon checking more thoroughly yesterday evening, the matter took a rather more sinister turn. His ‘tweets’ appeared not to be accessible to anyone and a search for his Twitter ‘handle’ (@CCIanHopkins) revealed that ‘This account doesn’t exist’:

Soon afterwards, I contacted the GMP press office and, given the highly significant public interest in this matter, asked for a statement from Ian Hopkins ‘as a matter of priority’. At the time of publishing this article the email remained unacknowledged [there is still no response from GMP or Hopkins two weeks later].

The man in the street, particularly if he is a precept payer in the Greater Manchester region, might reasonably have expected such a public statement to accompany his departure from Twitter, a platform upon which he has relied heavily in his past.

But, in my extensive experience of Hopkins dating back to when I met him, briefly, in 2013, reasonable, or perceptive, infrequently enters his thinking or that of, more collectively, the GMP Command Team of the moment. He is a man consumed by his own arrogance, sense of entitlement and a blame-avoidance obsession that permeates through almost his every action. He has never, seemingly, understood that respect is earned – and not a trinket that goes with the job.

For months now, I have publicly characterised Hopkins as ‘the worst chief constable in the country’. Which is a considerable achievement when one considers the cabal of highly-paid, politically correct, sycophantic, box-ticking incompetents occupying the top job elsewhere.

Following his abject, and cowardly, handling of the publication of the Mayor of Greater Manchester’s Independent Assurance Review of Responses to Child Sexual Exploitation (read in full here), others have now raised their head above the parapet. Two blistering pieces in the normally supine Manchester Evening News, by Jennifer Williams, will have certainly raised heads in London, let alone around the police force’s own operational area.

Maggie Oliver, whose whistleblowing was a major factor in the unravelling of the Rochdale CSE scandal, told me last night that Ian Hopkins was, reportedly, furious following her extensive, and widely acclaimed, interviews in local and national press – and on network television in which her actions were totally vindicated. A point also made, with emphasis, by the Mayor at his launch press conference.

In September last year, I wrote a lengthy, forensic piece highlighting a large number of GMP failings, which is now the best read article ever published on my website. Despite some others resting there for almost five years (grab a cup of coffee and read the full piece here). Hopkins was offered right of reply, but declined. As did the Mayor of Manchester, Andy Burnham, whose almost complete abdication of his statutory role of holding the chief constable to account has become an uncomfortable joke. Not at all aided by this form of self-promotion:

There may well be another reason for the Hopkins exit from Twitter and that is one of his other nemeses: The distastrous failure of the Integrated Policing Operating System (iOPS for short) about which I wrote several articles (read more here) and appeared on ITV’s Granada Reports to break the story.

In the event, the newly appointed Home Secretary, Priti Patel, ‘persuaded’ the Deputy Mayor, the perenially useless Beverley Hughes, to appoint Her Majesty’s Inspector of Constabulary (HMIC) to conduct an inspection of the iOPS project and produce a report of his findings. I’m told, from a normally reliable source, that the draft report was made available to the Mayor’s office in December, 2019 and it is being stalled by Hopkins as a result of the reputational damage it is likely to cause to both the force and its chief constable. Hopkins has resolutely, and one might say mindlessly and obsessively, defended the £80 million project – and its £20 million overspend – whilst, along the way, rubbishing his critics. Notably, with a quite extraordinary, and wholly unwarranted, public attack on the ITV journalist who interviewed me, Matt O’Donohue, for the Granada Reports broadcast. That was followed up by a formal complaint to ITV in which I was also name-checked.

Once the iOPS report is published, attention would undoubtedly have returned to those tweets by Hopkins and the outpouring of well-aimed (and justified) criticism on social media would, very likely, have been considerable and persistent.

In my highly informed view, adjacent to many of the relevant facts, Hopkins is now ‘a dead man walking’. In post, but not in power. Hearing only the arch-sycophants who surround him. A figure of ridicule and scorn amongst the rank and file and retired GMP officers. A man with whom the local Police Federation Chair was, allegedly, prepared to engage in a physical confrontation following a heated argument over iOPS and the danger it represented to Fed Members. A chief constable who describes reasoned and well-evidenced criticism of the force’s many catastrophic failings as a ‘hate campaign’ against him.

Time to go, Mr Hopkins, and the honourable thing to do would be to authorise the publication of the HMIC iOPS report soonest – and then fall on the sword that you thought was destined to touch your shoulder.

Page last updated at 0715 on Tuesday 28th January, 2020.

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