the times | Tuesday October 20 2020 1GM 17
News
A police officer who took a two-hour
dinner break and left the Manchester
Arena foyer half an hour before a
terrorist carried out a suicide attack has
admitted that it was unacceptable.
PC Jessica Bullough told the public
inquiry into the May 2017 attack that
she “probably” would have asked Sal-
man Abedi about his heavy rucksack
but missed him because of her extra-
long break, during which she drove half
an hour to buy a kebab.
She received an award for her brav-
ery after she ran past colleagues to be-
come the first officer on the scene after
the explosion.
No police officers were in the City
Room foyer at the time of the bomb,
despite instructions from a British
Transport Police sergeant that it should
be patrolled at all times.
The inquiry also heard evidence
from a father who was waiting for his
four daughters outside the Ariana
Grande concert when Abedi killed
himself and 22 others. Neal Hatfield
patrick kidd
TMS
[email protected] | @timesdiary
Worst Bond is
licence to chill
If you find this year feels repetitive
be grateful you are not an Oxford
academic who decided to watch
one of the worst James Bond films
every week until the pandemic
passes. Andrew Sillett, a classics
lecturer, has now seen Die Another
Day 26 consecutive times with his
wife, who had not seen a Bond film
before and now has no desire to
see another. Sillett says he thought
the idea would replace all the other
cancelled landmarks of their week.
“Every week I find myself hoping
that Halle Berry below, and Pierce
Brosnan will have found some
chemistry,” he says, “that the
excruciatingly long car chase will
zip by and that somebody will
explain how a bone marrow
transplant in Cuba turned a
Korean taekwondo star into Dame
Maggie Smith’s son.” Every week
he is disappointed, though he has
enjoyed spotting the bloopers, such
as when Brosnan jumps off a ship,
hits his stunt trampoline too hard
and briefly returns to the screen.
“After a few more months of this,”
he says, “I might even understand
the plot.”The French have taken lockdown
seriously, with a 9pm curfew in many
towns, but an exception has been
made for the national sport. Philippe
Phloppe, my man in the Breton
facemask, sent a cutting about Le
Fruit de la Passion, a swingers’ club
in the aptly named central town of
Lubersac, which has been granted
an exemption to stay open until
2am so long as patrons avoid what
is called “the hugging corner”. I’d
have thought Covid is the least
of the things you could catch
there.bacon made
artist speechless
Maggi Hambling turns 75 on
Friday, a CBE and other
awards to her name, but theartist still cringes at the memory
of being 17 and meeting Francis
Bacon. The painter visited her art
school in Ipswich and Hambling
was chosen to show off her work.
“He talked to me but I was so
nervous I couldn’t say anything,”
she tells Radio Times. “It would
have been like talking to God.” She
later heard that Bacon had told
the teachers that he had liked her
painting and wondered if the girl
who created it was deaf and dumb.waste is not johnson’s bag
It is not true that Boris Johnson
can’t do detail, his latest biographer
says, only the detail that bores him.
Tom Bower told the How To
Academy that the PM could be
very engaged when in the mood.
“He was fascinated by how to build
houses when he was [London]
mayor,” he said, “but completely
uninterested in waste disposal.”
Perhaps that explains why we
haven’t had a cabinet reshuffle.mischief in the house?
Thirty years after the BBC aired
House of Cards, the drama about a
Machiavellian chief whip still
delights MPs. Ric Holden, one of
the 2019 Tory intake and a former
adviser to Gavin Williamson, that
poundshop Francis Urquhart, was
loudly whistling the show’s theme
as he strolled across parliament
yesterday. Is mischief in the air?
As Urquhart was fond of saying:
“You might very well think that, I
couldn’t possibly comment”.After two years of reading Today’s
Railways Europe every month in
search of a story, Lackey Jack has
finally struck gold (well, bronzeish).
“Last year there were 7,500 delays
on the Swedish rail network
caused by trains hitting wild
animals,” my sidekick said, his
little eyes gleaming, “which
cost Sweden £125 million.”
Most of it, he added,
involved stray elk or
reindeer. “So much for their
famous herd immunity,” I replied.Officer on two-hour dinner break missed bomber
Duncan Gardham
Fiona Hamilton Crime & Security Editor
saw Abedi, 22, who he said looked like a
Bond villain, ten minutes before he det-
onated the bomb: “Alarm bells in my
head went straight away. I thought it’s a
suicide bomber straight away, with very
little doubt in my mind, my heart was
racing as soon as I saw him.”
Mr Hatfield said that he kept a watch
on Abedi, trying to convince himself
that he was not a suicide bomber, and
thought that police and security offi-
cers would arrive. He added: “I looked
him in his eyes and I could see he was
emotionally distressed... He seemed
frightened, he didn’t seem right.
“My heart was getting faster and fast-
er and I was thinking, ‘This guy is mov-
ing into position to do something right
now.’ I thought to myself if that’s a
bomb we were all dead, I really did.”
He described the moment the bomb
went off: “There was a massive flash of
light like sheet lighting and it filled the
whole of the room.”
PC Bullough broke down in tears
earlier as she described how she had
struggled to cope in the arena after the
explosion. She was a probationer but
was the most senior officer on dutybecause an experienced officer had
spent seven hours dealing with an
arrest for burglary and never made it to
the arena.
She admitted that taking a meal
break between 7.27pm and 9.36pm was
unacceptable.
The inquiry heard that she
and a colleague, Mark Ren-
shaw, a police community
support officer, drove half an
hour to the Longsight area ofthe city to get a kebab and
then went to a Northern
Rail office to eat it.
PC Bullough admitted
that her role included pat-
rolling the mezzanine
level, where the
bomber was hid-
ing for an hour
before his attack,
at 10.31pm on
May 22, and
looking out for
“suspicious char-
acters”.
Paul Greaney,
QC, counsel to theinquiry, told her that she had missed
Abedi walking to the foyer from the
railway platform because she had been
on her dinner break.
Julie Merchant, a member of an anti-
bootlegging operation at the arena, said
that she had told PC Bullough there was
a “crank” praying in the corner but the
officer said that she had “no recollect-
ion at all” of the conversation. CCTV
showed Ms Merchant pointing out the
spot to the officer.
She broke down in tears as she was
asked about her actions after the bomb,
for which she received a medal. “The
training I had was not sufficient to deal
with what I was witnessing,” she said.PC Jessica Bullough was
awarded a bravery medal
for her actions during the
Manchester Arena attack