The Outsider: The Autobiography of One of Britain's Most Controversial Policemen

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So Wednesday’s annual shareholder meeting at embattled retailer Sports Direct – where Hellawell will be bracing himself for investors to vote on his future as the company’s chairman – merely appears like the continuation of a trend. The Financial Times and its journalism are subject to a self-regulation regime under the FT Editorial Code of Practice.

His mother, a club dancer, was always bringing home different men, and would tie him to the table-leg to keep him quiet.

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If you do not allow these cookies we will not know when you have visited our site, and will not be able to monitor its performance. View image in fullscreen Keith Hellawell held his role as advisor to Labour on drugs policy, or the nation’s ‘drug tsar’ from 1998 to 2003. The tough life of one of Britain’s most senior policemen, who rose through the ranks from poverty and deprivation to the highest office, and went on to become Blair’s ‘Drug Czar’.He deals with the issues of racism, sexism and political correctness, and provides a rare insight into the workings of the judiciary, royalty and the establishment. tv View image in fullscreen Keith Hellawell appearing before the Scottish Affairs Committee 2015 Photograph: parliamentlive. He resigned from his position in July 2002 over the government's reclassification of cannabis from a Class B to a Class C substance.

These cookies allow us to count visits and traffic sources so we can measure and improve the performance of our site. He endured it as a controversial chief constable of West Yorkshire police – and then memorably again during his quarrelsome stint as an adviser on drugs policy to the last Labour government. However, since then, new rules mean that non-executive directors in companies with a single dominant investor must be put to a vote of minority shareholders first. He has previously talked of how he never knew his father and how as a boy he was repeatedly sexually assaulted by a young man who had access to their tenement rooms. It was just part of the rapport thing [to get Sutcliffe to open up], that was all,” he told the Sunday Times in 2000, but a disgusted Broadmoor staffer informed the Daily Mail and Hellawell was lambasted in the press.Thereafter he as successively Deputy Chief Constable, Humberside Police, Chief Constable, Cleveland Police, and Chief Constable, West Yorkshire Police. In the 1980s he was seconded to interrogate Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, and reportedly succeeded in establishing that the serial killer had attempted two further murders. It was his expertise in narcotics that led to his appointment in 1998 as the UK’s “drug tsar”, only for that position to be downgraded in 2001 to an advisory role.