Irvine Patnick was unlucky in dying only months after he was forced to admit that statement he had made to a local news agency and in the House of Commons about the actions of Liverpool fans in the Hillsborough Stadium disaster were, as he put it, “plain wrong”. He apologised, but it was felt that he had left it too late to do so. He felt he had been misled by the police and he was almost certainly correct, but it was his taste for the limelight that had got him into trouble. He had not questioned or checked what he had been told, but relayed it as fact. Days after the tragedy, Patnick had also asked the Home Secretary to "examine the part that alcohol played in the disaster".
But it would be unjust to let a scandal, in which he admitted that he was wholly in the wrong, to completely overshadow his career as a successful businessman and as a local politician. His success, at the age of 57, in gaining selection for the Sheffield Hallam constituency, for which 160 other Conservatives had applied, was as much a tribute to the position he held in local politics as to his populist views. He was an unabashed right winger, who had led the Conservative minority on the South Yorkshire County Council from its inception in 1874 to its abolition in 1986 and he was appointed as deputy chairman of the residuary body 1985-7. Previously he had served on the Sheffield City Council and he doubled service on the County County Council with service on the Sheffield Metropolitan District Council 1971-88.
He coined the derisive phrase, “the Socialist Republic of South Yorkshire”, which his political opponents turned into a proud boast, and that in may ways epitomised one of the troubles with his political career, as Peter Darling noted in the Sheffield Argus: he had “never frightened the enemy; he makes them laugh, not tremble.” He was irrepressible, flamboyant, ebullient, but even when people knew that what he was saying was right, they did not always think him wise in the way that he put it.
Although he admitted that he would begrudge the fact that he would no longer be a TV star, he accepted appointment as an assistant Whip in July 1989: “it's like seeing a very juicy meal that you want to get to and finding there is an invisible barrier stopping you”, he said. Promoted to be a full whip in 1990 he remained in the Whips Office until 1994. He had earlier received an OBE for his political services. He was now knighted. Three years later he lost his parliamentary seat to the Liberal Democrats and returned to business, becoming the chairman of Keyturn Solutions Ltd.1997-2004 and Watt Solutions Ltd 2004-09.
Cyril Irvine Patnick was the second of four sons born to Aaron Michael Patnick, a dealer, and Bessie Levine. He was educated in Sheffield at the Central Technical School and went on to study at the Sheffield Polytechnic. He built a successful career as a building contractor and was later the special projects director of Eversure Textiles Ltd and a director of Sheefield United.
In 1960 he married Lynda Margaret Rosenfeld. They had a daughter and a son.
He was elected to the Sheffield City Council in 1967, briefly serving as its deputy leader, but stood down to contest Sheffield Hillsborough in the 1970 General Election. He returned to what became the Sheffield Metropolitan District Council in 1971 and in 1975 was elected to the new Metropolitan County Council, leading the Conservative opposition until the Council was abolished in 1986. He remained a Metropolitan District Councillor until 1988. He described the small Tory group which he led on Sheffield's metropolitan county council during the 1980s as "the conscience of the ratepayers and, at times, of the Labour group". He found plenty to ridicule, not least £4,000 spent on a statue to a long-dead local Communist and a peace declaration concluded with Sheffield’s Soviet twin city of Donetsk. Above all, he attacked the extortionate rates which drove many firms from the area.
In the meantime he had contested Hillsborough again in 1979, predictably without success, and his track record made him a strong and ultimately successful contender for what then seemed the safe Conservative territory of Sheffield Hallam. He won it in June 1987 with a reduced majority and held it in 1992.
He had served on the party’s national executive since 1982 and chaired its National Advisory Committee on Local Government 1989-90. In earlier years he had served as Chairman of the, Yorkshire and Humberside Council for Sport and Recreation 1979–85 and as a memberof the : Sheffield Community Health Council, 1974–75; the Yorkshire and Humberside Tourist Board 1977–79; and a Governor of the Sports Aid Foundation, Yorkshire and Humberside 1980–85.
Once elected, he used his maiden speech in Parliament in July 1987 to attack the city's councillors for trying to curb police activities during the 1984 to 1985 miners' strike at a time when feelings in South Yorkshire were still raw following that bitterly-fought dispute. For the most part he was an unabashed right winger, opposing sanctions on South Africa, voting to bring back the death penalty, opposing any reduction in the age of consent for homosexuals and strongly supporting Section 28. Less predictably he supported abortion. He also served as Vice Chairman of the Conservative backbench Environment Committee 1988-89.
After his period in the Whips Office he served as deputy Chairman of the Channel Tunnel Rail Link Select Committee 1996-6, as a Member of the Council of Europe 1995–97; and of Western European Union 1995–97. He lost his seat to the Liberal Democrat Richard Allan in the 1997 General Election and called it a day as far as his political career was concerned. He continued in business until 2009, but in his later years was beset by heart problems. He died on 30 December 2012.
Patnick was the vice-president of Sheffield’s Kingfield Synagogue, life president of Sheffield Jewish Representative Council, and a former national vice-chairman of the British Maccabi sports and youth organisation. He was also the chairman of trustees of The Trust for Research into Freemasonry, a charity established to support the Centre for Research into Free Masonry and Fraternalism at the University of Sheffield. Through freemasonry he may well have had strong links with members of the South Yorkshire police.
Following the disclosure of his role in creating what the Prime Minister has called an "unjust and untrue narrative that sought to blame the fans", Labour MP John Mann wrote to Cameron asking that Patnick be stripped of his knighthood for his "shameful and disgusting behaviour.", He was also heavily criticised by the Hillsborough Justice Campaign: "It needs to be remembered that this man vilified Liverpool and was part of a lying machine which shamefully damaged the reputation of those fans." While the independent enquiry into the Hillsborough disaster had found that "the source for these despicable untruths was a Sheffield news agency reporting conversations with South Yorkshire Police and Irvine Patnick, the then MP for Sheffield Hallam", there was something more than a little distasteful about the self-serving statement made by Kelvin MacKenzie, formerly Editor of the Sun, which had made ‘drunken fans’ a front page splash:: "It was a fundamental mistake. The mistake was I believed what an MP said."
Patnick, almost certainly, was less party to a conspiracy than a self-publicist feeding on what the police had told him. When he was approached by the news agency White’s, he confirmed that he had heard accounts of the behaviour of Liverpool fans from police officers and when he accompanied Margaret Thatcher on a tour of the grounds after the tragedy, he undoubtedly told her of the "mayhem caused by drunks" and that policemen had told him that they were "hampered, harassed, punched and kicked". White’s talked also with the Police and the South Yorkshire Police Federation. That does not of course excuse him, more particularly because he seemed reluctant to come to the conclusion he had been misled. However, in his statement on 13 September 2012, Patnick offered a sincere apology, saying it was now clear the information he had received from some police officers at the time was "wholly inaccurate, misleading and plain wrong". He added: "However, I totally accept responsibility for passing such information on without asking further questions. So, many years after this tragic event, I am deeply and sincerely sorry for the part I played in adding to the pain and suffering of the victims' families."
To those inclined to think this gross error should be the final judgement on his career, some words from an officer in his constituency party offer a genuine corrective. Alan Ryder said: "He was a very good councillor in Sheffield and he was also a local MP at a time when obviously, when he was on the council and in government, he was very much a minority in this area, being only one of a very small band of Tories. He always did his best for Sheffield, his record over the years shows that, and I'm sure everybody who knew him would say the same."