Congratulations to the Met: you are officially no longer the worst run police force in the United Kingdom. The West Midlands force, led by their flailing chief Craig Guildford, are doing the damnedest to take the crown off Sir Mark Rowley and his London rozzers. The centre of the Birmingham controversy is the intelligence used to make the decision to ban Maccabi Tel Aviv fans from attending a football match that took place at Villa Park in November.
Such intelligence seems to have been in short supply. For Guildford has today been forced to offer a ‘profound apology’ to MPs after admitting that he had given them incorrect evidence on Monday about the decision to ban Maccabi Tel Aviv football fans. The reason for the error? Some of the ‘intelligence’ was actually generated by AI. This included creating a fictitious match between Maccabi Tel Aviv and West Ham which ‘arose as a result of a use of Microsoft Copilot.’ Blimey…
The chief constable had previously told MPs that the force did not use AI and that the mistake regarding the West Ham match was made by ‘one individual doing one Google search’. But Guildford says today that ‘I had understood and been advised that the match had been identified by way of a Google search in preparation for attending the Home Affairs Committee. My belief that this was the case was honestly held and there was no intention to mislead the committee’.
It comes as the Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, prepares to make a statement to MPs about the findings of a report by His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary into the decision to ban Maccabi Tel Aviv fans. Given his repeated own goals, Steerpike doesn’t fancy Guildford’s chances…
UPDATE: Labour MP Sean Woodcock calls on Guilford to quit, writing on X: ‘He should do the decent thing and resign as his position has become untenable.’
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