Nick AddADelay and day 3 of his never ending misconduct hearing

My best laid plans of me writing this all down and getting this out yesterday, in an incredible bit of symbolism, mirrored Adderley’s current PR image in that it all went from gold to shit very quickly.

The entire process should have been both sides giving closing submissions straight off the bat at 9.30am, the panel retires and we come back the following day, meaning everyone is out by early morning. For me this meaning getting some work done and catching up on everything, but alas Adderley and his team had other plans and we were there until gone 3.30pm yesterday being virtually no further along than when the day started.

This charade of proceedings though did have the advantage of exposing what his true game in all of this is, delay delay delay. So much so I was half expecting a tannoy announcement to tell me of a points failure at Clapham Junction, before hearing a monotone apology, the type said with all the enthusiasm of a small child opening a knitted jumper from his grandmother at Christmas.

What should have been closing submissions for both sides was instead yet another application made by Adderley’s team as they objected to the books he contributed to being entered as evidence so late in the game. It is worth noting this comes after initially telling the chair the previous day he was planning to take the stand in the morning if they could break early and when this was rejected and he was backed into a corner needing to take the stand and make best use of the time, he refused to, something he would have always known he was planning to do, but chose to obfuscate and mislead.

For anyone not in the know, the applications being made like this require the barrister of the side making them, to lay out their position to the chair & his panel (the judges for want of a better term) and the other side to make representations, with the panel then retiring to consider them. This can take around 30 mins for each side, but with Adderley’s barrister being deliberately slow and drawn out in his speech, with long pauses and pontificating at every turn, fixating on each point this draws closer to an hour each time.

Since day 1, all Adderley has done is throw up roadblocks and object to everything so this tactic with the books was becoming tiresome at this point. Beggs KC for the prosecution argued these books were over 10 years old and Adderley provided direct quotes in both so this should come as no surprise to him. The fact they were entered late is due to Mr Beggs planning to question him and not anticipating he would lie about making such quotes or just refuse to take the stand, hence the books themselves needing to be entered as evidence for consideration. They are books available to buy in the public domain, something he was interviewed for and about a major incident in his life that many of his officers were involved, hardly shocking secrets he is being blindsided with.

It might not shock you to reveal I am the person who found one of the books and shared this publicly since April, whereas a colleague also looking into Adderley found the other last year, so there are questions raised WHY the IOPC didn’t find this until the Bank Holiday weekend and enter these into evidence, almost as if someone within the IOPC is trying to help derail the case against Adderley, by giving him grounds to muddy the water and fight this case on a technicality rather than on the merits, deflecting away from the key question of the case, namely “did he lie?”

Once all the faff of this application was out of the way and then accepted, Adderley’s team then objected to why the authors of the books were not called as witnesses. One of the authors John Scheerhout, is also the journalist who did several news articles promulgating multiple lies about Adderley over the years, seeming to act as his PR agent. Watch the video below for Adderley’s comments about the press.

Nick Adderley talking on 2 interviews about getting his “key message” going out and how to use the media.

John Scheerhout was contacted by the IOPC in February, but he has refused to cooperate and attend.

This caused Adderley’s team to object again and want the IOPC to be questioned to explain why this contact was not in the evidence bundle, they were in attendance at the hearing so were able to take the stand and get this next roadblock Adderley’s team put up out of the way very quickly to prevent a further delay. They mentioned emails sent to the journalist.

Adderley’s team then raised another objection to see the emails the IOPC had sent, as you might expect further delay, only 30 mins here and there but it all starts to add up and eat away into the day, preventing any progress being made.

We then get to early afternoon and via his barrister, as lest we forget he will not give evidence himself, Adderley basically calls out both authors as liars, saying they copied and pasted this lie about him being a Lt with 10 years service and serving in the Falklands from elsewhere. His position is that he never made direct quotes and it is only fair the authors are put on the stand to say where the quotes they used came from. This is something only the prosecution can do if they want to submit the evidence as the burden of proof is on them to prove the case, not Adderley to present witnesses to disprove.

Just pause for a moment and consider a few things here before we go any further.

Adderley claims these lies printed about him are things he should have corrected but overlooked as he was not interested in his media profile.

Somewhat at odds with the verbal incontinence he suffered from with his addiction to his Twitter megaphone, encouraging pile ons and replying with acerbic comments to anyone who ever challenged him and called him out.

When you also see posts where he directly says about reviewing the media to observe the changes he made over the last 5 years, how articles mentioning him somehow escaped his notice is to quote Mr Beggs KC “risible!”

The claim of “over 10 years in the Royal Navy” that journalists and by extension, authors of books wrote since 2011 through to 2023 also just so happens to be the exact same lie he wrote down on his CV, his developed vetting forms and his job application to become Chief Constable in 2018.

What an amazing coincidence, the very lies he is a victim of, claiming them to be a single lie someone else made up that was a copy and paste job for all journalists, just so happens to be the same thing HE copies and pastes onto not 1, not 2 but 3 of his documents he all signs off as an honest and accurate representation.

The same 2018 CV also claims he went to Haiti in 1984 to help quell the civil uprising as a senior Navy diplomat and negotiator, matching the similar lie a journalist also printed in 2011.

Yet in the face of these identical lies, Adderley would have you believe he had no input into these journalists inventing such lies, and this is just an amazing coincidence the very same lies he was unaware of also magically appeared from his own hand on his CV years later.

With your disbelief suspended at how farcical this claim is and taking you to a point of humour, I then take you to a point of horror and disgust. The author of the “Lured to their deaths” is John Scheerhout a journalist for the Manchester Evening News, however the author of an extraordinary sacrifice is Bryn Hughes, the father of murdered PC, Nicola Hughes.

I do not want to focus on this man too much or analyse his support of Nick Adderley as such things are intrinsically linked to both his grief over his murdered daughter and the support he got in the immediate aftermath. To pick apart such support and highlight how false it was, would be to re-open old wounds and start to change his perception of the support that got him through a horrific situation and just retraumatise the poor man. He has found his peace and this means he did so with support, however fake from Adderley, it is just basic human decency to leave him be.

Proving just how morally bankrupt he truly is, after Bryn Hughes even gave a character witness statement to support Adderley in the hearing, he basically calls Bryn Hughes a liar, saying he made up the direct quotes from Adderley in the book, even though they are not verbatim copy and pastes from John Scheerhout’s book and appear to be first person quotes, written by someone who has published other works. Adderley went on to contact Mr Hughes, get him to provide emails to say Adderley never made the quotes and he just got them from elsewhere. However much he felt he was helping Adderley by doing this, it was in essence, undermining the authenticity of his book he wrote to honour his daughter he buried.

It might come as a shock to learn that the prosecution and Mr Beggs KC said there was no need to call Mr Hughes as he had been through the worst trauma a parent could ever go through and dragging him through a witness stand to relive it would be cruel and unnecessary, and in any event the charge against Adderley is failing to correct articles, not questioning the author of them.

Adderley however was backed into a corner and due to him being the only one that wanted the authors on the stand, was forced to get a witness statement from Mr Hughes and see if he would attend and sit in the witness seat.

UN-FUCKING-BELIEVABLE!

Apologies for the language but this actually angered me a great deal. I have no dog in the fight and did not know the officers so will not show any faux grief here, but just as a human being with basic decency and compassion, this behaviour shows multiple examples of disrespect and what I would deem cruelty. Showing how, to Nick Adderley, the entire world revolves around him and we are all just guest stars with him having no consideration for anyone’s feelings but his own.

As you might expect Mr Hughes confirmed he did not want to attend but would provide a witness statement for Adderley, Mr Scheerhout however continues his best impersonation of The Scarlet Pimpernel and remains MIA.

Adderley’s team rubbed their hands together with glee announcing they could not POSSIBLY do any closing submissions without having Scheerhout give witness evidence as to why, in Adderley’s words, he lied.

Mr Beggs KC however confirmed that due to time constraints he was happy to give closing submissions there and then irrespective of what evidence Scheerhout gives.

Adderley honourably suggested via his barrister that matters be adjourned until Scheerhout can attend and give evidence and as this is unlikely to be the next day, this means kicking the case into the long grass for many more weeks, perhaps even months with Adderley creaming off £14k a month (due to rise to £14.8k due to inflation) on suspension while matters are dragged out again.

The chair was having none of this even interjecting twice telling Adderley’s brief to “do not put words in my mouth” and chastising him for interrupting saying “the more you interrupt me, the longer this will take!” He stated that if Scheerhout could attend tomorrow he would be questioned and if he could not attend tomorrow, he would deal with the evidence on the face of it.

Adderley’s team appeared flustered, their bluff being called and harping on about how unfair it was to limit this to such a deadline before curtly being told by the chair “you have gotten what you wanted, we’re trying to get him to attend!”

The reality is that I wholly doubt Scheerhout will attend, as while many people may be happy to bend the truth and muddy the waters to help Adderley, the lie being asked of John Scheerhout, to say he directly misquoted Adderley and invented a fiction for his book, that was published through Reach PLC, creates a quandry of legal nightmares if he now has to recount parts of it, given this was published in line with regulatory guidelines. This opens both him, his paper and the wider Trinity Mirror (now known as Reach PLC) to unwanted attention and legal terrors.

Whatever cosy relationship we think GMP have with Manchester Evening News, when we consider the likelihood and probability that these lies undoubtedly fell from Adderley’s lips, by then asking the person who documented such lies to fall on their own sword just to save him could be too big of an ask.

So with Scheerhout unlikely to attend and the chair focused on keeping the hearing on track ready for closing submissions so the panel can retire, we are left to wonder what new applications and roadblocks Adderley’s team can throw up to try to delay this further as this seems to have been their ultimate aim all along. I suspect for him to bleed as much money out of the system as possible hoping this that with the passage of time, interest in this will ebb away, allowing this to be buried by his friends and contacts.

However with new lies about Adderley being uncovered every week, a Pandora’s box of further corruption involving officers under his command at Northants Police that he protected further implicating him due to explode shortly, the additional criminal investigations by Staffordshire Police and the general embarrassment to the Police that he has become through his risible lies presented to extricate himself, the media interest & attention in him is very much going in the wrong direction.

I await the outcome of what should be the 4^th and final day of the hearing with closing submissions, however remain fully prepared for the now well rehearsed tactic of Adderley’s only real weapon of applications and delays, to be locked and loaded, firing yet another salvo off today. Such a barrage of applications will be targeted and seek to obliterate the available time left, with the collateral damage of also obliterating the funds of the public purse bankrolling all of this, but perhaps more importantly, obliterating the remaining patience of the panel, press and general public watching this omnishambles.