The competition may be intense, but surely the most contemptible man in Britain today is Craig Guildford, the chief constable of West Midlands Police.
Guildford was eviscerated yesterday in the Commons by Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood, as she declared she had lost confidence in him and that, if she had the power, she would sack him.
Not for more than two decades has a Home Secretary been so blistering about a serving police chief.
Guildford is the man responsible for the scandal rocking WMP, which has exposed him and his Force for lying, exaggerating evidence and covering up inconvenient facts.
And, despite what Mahmood called a ‘devastating’ independent report into their decision to ban visiting Israeli fans from last November’s match between Aston Villa and Maccabi Tel Aviv, as I write there he still sits in his chief constable’s office, carrying on as if nothing has happened.
The report, compiled by Sir Andy Cooke, the chief inspector of constabulary, lays bare the lies, cluelessness, deceit and cover-up by WMP.
Rather than ‘following the evidence’, Sir Andy says the force was driven by ‘confirmation bias’ and went looking for evidence to support their assumption that Maccabi fans were the problem.
So they focussed on the match the Israeli club played in Amsterdam in November 2024, which was marred by violence outside the stadium.
West Midlands Police chief constable Craig Guildford at Home Affairs Committee on January 6
Home Affairs Committee hearing on football policing at the House of Commons on January 6
They’d found their golden excuse to ban the Maccabi fans, wilfully ignoring subsequent fixtures the club played in Greece, Norway, Turkey and Ukraine that had passed off peacefully.
But even when it came to the game in the Netherlands, the WMP made ‘exaggerated or simply untrue’ claims about who was responsible for the disturbance.
The real story was that Maccabi fans were attacked by local Muslim gangs – not the other way round, as WMP claimed.
Sir Andy strikes a red pen through each of the Force’s eight claims about the Amsterdam match, saying invariably: ‘This overstates the evidence… This is inaccurate… This is a conflation of multiple sources of information and is incorrectly stated as fact…’ On and on, it dismantles WMP’s ‘evidence’, until it’s nothing but a smoking ruin.
But worse still was how the Force hoodwinked the public with ‘misleading’ statements about the threat posed by Maccabi fans, when WMP knew full well that its own intelligence showed that the real danger came from elements within the local Muslim community, who were planning violent attacks.
But as we have seen from his car crash performances in front of the home affairs committee, ‘brazen’ is Craig Guildford’s middle name.
When confronted by MPs last week as to why he had failed to submit that intel to the committee, he had the front to suggest it was their fault for not asking for it.
And yesterday he loftily explained how his force didn’t at all use artificial intelligence to gather evidence – until he eventually admitted that an officer had used AI to search for previous matches involving Maccabi.
That alone is hardly a crime, but what is criminal is the officer’s lack of basic fact-checking: the fixture with West Ham that their AI search had thrown up was entirely fictitious.
If he had a shred of decency, Guildford would already have resigned in disgrace. When a Home Secretary tells the country you’re not fit to wear the badge, there really is little else you can do. But his determination to cling on shames his uniform.
