Charge Joe, or let him go

Four years on from Joe Anderson’s arrest, Jack argues it’s time for the Crown Prosecution Service to just get on with it

A photo illustration by Jake Greenhalgh

By Jack Walton

It was roughly around this time of year in 2022 when I sat in Joe Anderson’s car in a fairly nondescript residential area at the edge of the city centre. Our six hours together were drawing to a close, and we climbed out the car and walked the surrounding streets where he had grown up. Anderson, whose reputation as mayor had been as a hardy, brash figure, was surprisingly reflective. He talked about his childhood and told me he expected no favours in our piece, only fairness.

I was aware that a lot of our readers would have no sympathy for Joe at all. The reputational damage the city had suffered as a result of the Caller report (which he viewed as a politically motivated assassination of his record), his arrest, and the proceeding government intervention was far from minor. But equally, here was a man who’d lost three siblings in quick succession, who had to deal with two of his sons being diagnosed with a rare form of cancer, who’d lost his career and income overnight, and who had been left to stew on his settee not knowing if his case would ever go to trial.

We walked around Kent Street, near where he grew up, and he posed for a photo next to the street sign. He told me how it was rare for him to go out into the city at all these days. “There’s been moments where I’ve been really depressed,” he said, explaining the bullying his grandchildren had received after his arrest and the death threats he’d received personally. Despite everything, it was hard not to sympathise with him on a human level.

After we published the story, lots of people felt that I’d been too kind. One suggested the profile was approaching “hagiography”. Others felt a few too many words had been expended on Anderson’s difficult childhood, a few too little on brown envelopes. Not Joe, mind. I’d been out the night before the article was published but woke up on Saturday to an unpleasant hangover and an even more unpleasant text. I’ve changed phones since then so I can’t quote it verbatim, but I near-enough remember his parting shot: “I asked for fairness, you failed on that front.”

It would be too easy to fall back on the centrists’ adage in such a situation (well, if I’ve upset both sides I must be doing something right), but inevitably with a figure so polarising there was going to be split opinion. In the days before we published I’d called up Peter Kilfoyle, the former Walton MP who had dedicated a good chunk of the Anderson years to a blog shedding light on what he saw as the mayor’s “disastrous tenure of office”. Indeed, in his final blog post he’d had to turn to a line 2,500 years old, from Plato, to capture the thanklessness of his toil: “Those who are able to see beyond the shadows and lies of their culture, will never be understood, let alone be believed by the masses.”

On the phone to me, Kilfoyle was unforgiving of Anderson’s tribulations in purgatory. Asked if he felt any sympathy at all for Joe, he said bluntly: “Justice must not only be done but be seen to be done. He wasted so much money it’s incredible.” Anderson, when confronted with this analysis, told me Kilfoyle was probably “onto his second bottle of wine” when writing most of his blog posts and should be paid little notice.

This month, two years will have passed since that chat with Anderson. And last Wednesday was the fourth anniversary of his arrest. His name is less of a feature in the city’s news cycle now, the government commissioners have since left, another mayor called Anderson has left too, the mayoral post has been abolished, and the new council is in place. And still, Anderson waits.

I’m just going to come out and say it: I feel sorry for him. I may actually be the only person outside the Anderson homestead and the House of Lords who does so, but I do nonetheless.

I’ve had many conversations about Joe’s predicament in the past few years, and very rarely have I heard a single word of sympathy. Kilfoyle’s logic is something that’s been repeated to me over and over. It seems to follow that because Joe Anderson was a bad mayor, or a wasteful one, that his current predicament is fair enough. But I can’t see it that way. There are other mechanisms to remove rubbish mayors, like not voting for them. Putting a zip line on top of the library might be a very bad idea, but it’s not a criminal offence.

Of course, I’m being facetious. The wasted money and eyebrow-raising contracts doled out under Anderson’s mayorship deserve to be documented and investigated. The Caller report did the hard yards on that front, analysing 65 Anderson-era contracts given out by Liverpool City Council and concluding that none of them represented Best Value. Indeed, despite our start in 2021, after Anderson’s tenure had already ended, I’d like to think The Post has also played some small part in that investigative process (Matt O’Donoghue’s story from last year revealing how Anderson’s cash-strapped council found £1 million to waste on an investment in supercars would be one such example).

And more to the point: if Anderson has committed any crimes, then throw the book at him, sure. That goes without saying. But four years on and I still find that people will far too easily allow their dislike to blot out reason. Four years is a long time; you don’t have to be a fan of the man to recognise the inherent unfairness of a case like this dragging on without an end in sight. There comes a point at which you feel the Crown Prosecution Service (who were handed the case file from Merseyside Police’s Operation Aloft investigation last year) need to put up, or shut up. And not just for Joe Anderson’s sake. For the city’s sake, too.

A couple of years ago, we wrote a report on why several high-profile businesses had chosen to leave the city region, and why Liverpool underperforms when it comes to foreign investment. We spoke to business owners in the area who listed lots of possibilities, like a perceived disconnect between the public and private sectors. But one great towering reason given was that the city’s reputation was in the mud. Liverpool was the place where 21 police officers came crashing through the mayor’s door early in the morning to cart him off to the station. “It’s like, hmmm, I think we’ll open an office in Manchester instead, thanks,” one of them said.

Anderson’s case has faded from view a bit in the two years since, sure, but Liverpool is still very much the city with the arrested mayor. That shadow will never truly lift until he’s either charged or the charges are dropped.

A further issue is the lack of faith this all instils in our judiciary. Before Operation Aloft, you might remember Operation Sheridan. Sheridan was Lancashire Police’s probe into separate corruption issues involving ex-Liverpool City Council chief executive Ged Fitzgerald, and it began in 2012. It took four years from the police handing the file to the Crown Prosecution Service for any charges to be made. Anderson is only a bit part player in Sheridan, interviewed but not one of the four charged. Anyway, by the time all four have been trialled, it’ll be 2025 at the earliest. So that’s 13 years and a cost to the taxpayer of something probably approaching £10 million.

As for Aloft, we have no clue when it’ll conclude. Nor do we know how much the whole thing will have cost. In February 2022, then-Liverpool Lib Dem leader Richard Kemp wrote a letter to Merseyside Police explaining the huge reputational and financial damage their drawn-out investigation was causing the city, and, kindly, could they get a move on. It’s hardly like Kemp is a huge Anderson apologist. In our interview with Anderson, he described Kemp as a man so deceitful he could “crawl under a snake’s belly with a top hat on”, to which Kemp replied in a blog post he would “wear his comment about me as a badge of honour”. But Kemp, to his credit, could see the unfairness of Anderson’s plight. That letter was sent nearly three years ago.

Before publication, The Post reached out to the Crown Prosecution Service to ask if they could reassure the public that a decision will be made at some point. They responded with a short statement:

“We do not provide timelines when it comes to charging decisions and it would not be appropriate to comment further at this stage.”

A couple of weeks ago, I reached out to Joe to ask if he wanted to talk ahead of this piece. He replied amicably enough but said he didn’t. He said he’d lost faith in journalists like me covering his case with the impartiality he thinks he deserves. Fair enough. He told me he was still working on his tell-all book, the one he was working on the last time we spoke two years ago. I felt like I was stuck in a time warp.

Liverpool has tried to move on from the Anderson days. Its new council is seen as vaguely competent in a boringly grey sort of way, which I guess is what municipal governments are meant to be. No more zip lines, no more supercars. But really, for a line to truly be drawn under the long Anderson years, the city deserves closure, one way or another. And whatever you think of him, so does Joe.