The article which featured Anderton was about John Stalker and a number of other honourable English police officers and soldiers who had tried to do the right thing in Ireland. The relevant section read as follows:
The late John Stalker, the former Deputy Chief Constable of Manchester, investigated the RUC’s shoot to kill programme in Ireland in the 1980s. He discovered, for example, that the RUC and MI5 had murdered a teenage boy who had stumbled across an IRA arms dump in a hay shed. Stalker refused to back off and was stabbed in the back by his own side. The deepest wounds were those inflicted by his boss, James Anderton, a man who believed that God spoke ‘to him and through him’. In reality Anderton became an accessory after the fact to the murder of the boy at the hay shed. Stalker was smeared by a corrupt press in Britain, linked to criminality and taken off his inquiry. The killers got away Scot free as did all of those involved in shafting Stalker. Few in Britain could have cared less. Although he cleared his name, Stalker retired from the police early a demoralised man.
The photo which accompanied the article appeared and read as follows:
The original article can be found here: Updated: The very best (and worst) of British.
Anderton was also a homophobe. He claimed homosexuals with AIDS were ‘swirling in a human cesspit of their own making’.
According to The Guardian he ‘encouraged his officers to stalk [Manchester’s] dank alleys and expose anyone caught in a clinch, while police motorboats with spotlights cruised for gay men around the canal’s locks and bridges.’
In 2011, historian Jeff Evans told the Manchester Evening News: ‘I’ve interviewed retired officers who took part in police surveillance of public toilets, lying in the roof space watching men urinate for hours on end.’
He believed that “sodomy in males ought to be against the law”.
Anderton was also a Freemason, a clandestine organisation which rejects Christianity. How Anderton reconciled his membership of that brotherhood with his purported religious beliefs is a mystery. “God works in mysterious ways,” he said. Of his religion, he once boasted: “Given my love of God and my belief in God and Jesus Christ, I have to accept that I may well be used by God [in my police work].”
Despite all the controversy, he was knighted in 1991 during Margaret Thatcher’s premiership before enjoying a full retirement.
Patrick Walker was another criminal who never complained about what was written about him in Village. We accused him of ordering the murder of Patrick Finucane. See The D-G of MI5 who got away with the murder of Patrick Finucane has died.
The article pointed out that: “Village magazine accused Walker of the murder years ago. He was named in one story which has been read more than 22,000 times. He did not sue. He did not even seek a right of reply. His silence now condemns him.”
