Exclusive: Former senior Northants police officer reveals all about working with dishonest chief constable
Exclusive: Former senior Northants police officer reveals all about working with dishonest chief constable
Just weeks after retiring, former chief superintendent Mick Stamper who spent 30 years protecting the Northamptonshire public, has decided to tell all about working for Nick Adderley
By Sarah Ward
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Mick Stamper worked for Northamptonshire Police for 30 years, working his way up through the ranks from police constable to chief superintendent. For the last four years of his service he worked under chief constable Nick Adderley. Last month Adderley was sacked, kicked out of the force for a string of dishonest claims on his CV and for falsifying his naval record. His disciplinary hearing established that rather than the false legend he had created about himself as a decorated naval officer who had served in the 1982 Falklands conflict, he had in fact served for just a short time, not making it beyond the lowest rank of able seaman. Adderley, 57, has been banned from ever serving as an officer again and is awaiting to hear whether he will face criminal charges for misrepresenting his military service. He is also under investigation by Staffordshire Police, his employer before he arrived in Northants in 2018.
After witnessing Adderley’s lies at close distance, Mick Stamper, who retired from the force two months ago, has decided to speak out about what it was like to work with the dishonest chief constable. His reasoning for doing so is this:
“Whenever one copper does something wrong this big tar brush comes out. It’s about 100,000 officers wide and we all get tarred with it. We are not all sex offenders, we are not all thieves, we are not all lying and I thought to myself, ‘I can see what is going to happen here. The good folk of Northamptonshire Police are going to get tarred with this.’ I have worked with them for 30 odd years and if there is just one thing I want to get across here is that they are good people and they work so hard.
“I want to get across to whoever reads this, that police officers are really good people, who work really hard and it is an honour to have worked with them.”
First impressions
Nick Adderley’s first day at Northants Police was on 5 August 2018. When Adderley joined the organisation it was in the doldrums.
As Mick Stamper explains:
“The force was in a right state then, in terms of the morale of the force. It had an operating model that was not really working. There were 700 odd crimes waiting allocation.
“We didn’t deploy to house burglaries. It was a bit wishy washy. We were going through austerity. To be fair to Simon Edens [the then chief constable] the force was struggling for money, he wasn’t getting on with Stephen Mold [the police, fire and crime commissioner] and it was all going south.”
Simon Edens retired in 2018 and after impressing the police and crime commissioner at interview, in came Nick Adderley, a long serving officer from the North West of England, who had a no nonsense approach.
Mick Stamper says:
“I have always believed that one of the key things with leadership is that you have to pick the right leader for the right moment. There is a time for technocrats, there’s a time for Churchill types. Nick came in and he was like a breath of air blowing into the force.
“What the force needed more than anything was just something blowing through it. He came in and he re-engaged all the superintendents so he was starting to pull them all back in and involve them in what was going on in the force; he committed to changing the operating model. You could see what he was trying to do. I can always remember him saying to me, “I could turn over the table in this place.”
Naval tales and other lies
From day one, Adderley’s naval record was front and centre. When he arrived he moved the chief constable’s office from a small inconspicuous room at the Wootton Hall headquarters in Northampton (where the previous chief had resided) into a grander office, one more befitting of the most important person in the building. On the wall he mounted a large painting of a naval warship, which Stamper says was inscribed underneath with Adderley’s name and naval rank. In the corner of a room was a naval flag, (known as an ensign), which another staff member told Stamper had been from the ship displayed on the wall.
A bravery award which he was given as a police constable in his Cheshire days was also on public display.
In his disciplinary hearing, the catalogue of lies that Nick Adderley had stated on his CV about his navy days and the false stories that had been published by the media and in books were exposed. His claim to have studied at the country’s renowned naval college was proved a lie (ludicrously Adderley said he had put this untruth on his CV to show his level of ambition), along with the whopper that he had been a military negotiator in Haiti.
Mick Stamper remembers other stories told to him by Adderley, that he now questions. He says not long after starting, Adderley had shown him a scar on his arm, which he claimed to have received in the line of duty. He also told his senior officers at an away day that he had worked with special forces on the Crumlin Road in Belfast, which Stamper says raised a few eyebrows. On another occasion he talked about taking the ship he was in command of to see the Norwegian Fjords.
He also told Mick Stamper that the reason he had left his illustrious naval career to become a relatively lowly police constable was due to his first wife leaving him with the children. [NN Journal has spoken to a former relative of Adderley’s who disputes this claim and says Adderley left the family home. We have attempted to contact Nick Adderley through his solicitors about this claim and the others made my Mick Stamper and have not received a response].
Stamper says:
“We had a leadership day once and he showed a video of this guy who turned the ship around and he talked about, ‘When I was in the navy we would do it like this, and this is how we are going to do it in Northamptonshire Police’. We never did.
“It was full on. It was almost as if he had examined every area of his life, through which someone could view him through and it was the navy.”
Looking back and reading the reports that came out during the disciplinary hearing, Mick Stamper has come to a conclusion about how Adderley managed to fool so many for so long.
He says:
“This is how I think he gets away with it. During the course of my career I’ve worked with undercover officers and I remember one of them saying to me, ‘If you’ve got a good enough legend, and big enough balls you can get away with anything.’ That’s Nick Adderley. He had a good enough legend and big enough balls. ‘Let me show you the scar on my arm. Let me show you my ships. Let me show you the Remembrance Day parade with my medals and my hat.’
“Who lies? ‘They are a chief? It’s almost like you’re being hypnotised. Your mind is already looking to go that way and then we follow it.
“We all wanted to get away from the Edens era. So we’re almost like following the Pied Piper.”
Leadership style and personality
“I think there are two sides to Nick. if you’re looking up at the television screen it’s like ‘Yeah, look at that.’ But when you get behind it, he’s like the Wizard Oz.”
Within weeks of coming into the force Adderley had set his stall out as a man of action, labelling Northamptonshire Police a ‘progressive force’ and regularly posting videos to YouTube to communicate with residents.
In 2019 he equipped frontline officers with tasers saying his staff needed better protection.
“I have absolutely no doubt that Nick Adderley cared for the safety of his officers. He would have liked the adulation from the officers for doing the taser rollout but I honestly believe that he did the taser roll out because he cares about cops,” says Mick Stamper.
He says that Adderley was keen to be liked by all.
“Nick just needs to be loved. In all its various guises. He just needs people to tell him he’s great. It’s tragic. Because how can you be a senior police officer and want people to like you? Be a vet if you want everyone to love you.”
He says when the force was getting into ‘financial strife’ and millions of savings needed to be found, he did not want to let anyone go.
Mick Stamper says:
“I didn’t want to let anyone go, but if you’ve only got £100, you can’t spend £200 can you?
“He always wanted to be everyone’s friend. Always. It was quite weird to watch.”
Mick Stamper says on appearances Adderley was making significant changes within Northants Police, devolving decision making, but after a while it became clear he was keen to control everything.
He says:
“I think he improved the relationship between chief officers and the rest of the force. He definitely tried to engage the workforce and he encouraged us to engage with the workforce. And he definitely tried to devolve decision making.
“That was the message he was giving, but it wasn't really, because then we went to having longer and longer and more laborious meetings where we would have to go and present stuff that once upon a time we’d just have gone and done. I think he wanted to keep control. Nick was very paranoid. You could see it. He didn’t trust anyone on his command floor with anything.
“He was always watching his back. I think he was always worried that he was going to get usurped.”
In Stamper’s view he was also a bully.
He says:
“He does not shout a lot but it’s the way he does things. He’ll confront people in meetings. Sometimes someone has not done something they should have done and instead of approaching it on the quiet, he does it in performance meetings.
“It’s a classic technique for bullying. The performance pack would come out, there might be 40-50 slides on the performance of the force. Nick would chair the meeting, which is unusual in itself because usually chiefs don't do that.
“What he would do, is he would plough through into some tiny bit of detail, almost innocuous and then when you get to one slide, he’d say, ‘Dave, Jim’, whoever ‘tell me about this’ and then of course they couldn't. It’s just in there for background. He’d say, ‘You should know this. You should be on top of your business.’ That was the sort of thing he’d do.
“So of course everyone is now starting to worry. Everyone would say the same thing ‘Chief I don’t know that’. He’d say, ‘You should know it and go and get me some kind of explanation outside of here.’”
He also said he was often not across the detail:
“He does not read anything. I remember another senior officer saying, ‘he doesn’t want to do the hard yards. He doesn’t want to put the work in.’ Which is why he would never go to the partnership meetings.
“I used to drag him along every now and again and say, ‘Nick you really need to come along and let them see you.”
Promoting his trusted aide
Shortly after Adderley arrived the force’s deputy moved on and new deputy Simon Nickless was appointed from Cleveland Police.
But Mick Stamper says the only person that Adderley appeared to trust was Colleen Rattigan, his former chief of staff. Under his leadership Colleen Rattigan had a rapid rise between 2019 and 2023, from community safety manager (with a salary of around £43,000) to assistant chief officer for the national aviation programme, which came with a salary of just over £115,000. In this temporary role she would work with Nick Adderley who was the national aviation lead on the National Police Chiefs’ Council. (When Adderley was suspended another chief constable took on the aviation portfolio).
An FOI submitted by NN Journal earlier this year disclosed that Colleen Rattigan had been promoted four times by Adderley and on at least three of those occasions the job had not been advertised to other staff or applied for by Colleen Rattigan.1 The police force said the new roles had been created after a re-evaluation of the existing role that Colleen Rattigan had been working in.
In the FOI response Northamptonshire Police said:
“Vacancies should be advertised in most cases but in certain circumstances, or with the agreement of the HR Advisory Team, it may be possible to fill a vacant post without advertising the vacancy.”
Having spoken with other senior officers who worked in Northants Police at the time, NN Journal is aware the rapid promotion of Colleen Rattigan was seen as unfair by many and had led to resentment in many quarters.
Stamper’s own career was curtailed by Adderley.
After a clash with another senior officer, he had been moved out of his post as head of local policing (he says rather than tackle the issue Adderley would move the lower ranking person out of the way) and was put in charge of the managing the project for the new Darby House police and fire hub in Wellingborough. Last summer, he was told by another member of police staff that Adderley was going to dismantle the corporate development department he was in charge of. Adderley however did not broach it with him until some time later.
In a tense meeting, Stamper, after realising that Adderley was not being honest with him, told the chief constable what he thought of how he was being treated following what he had seen as four loyal years of service to him. After that he was ignored. He had projects taken away from him by Adderley and at one point was accused by the chief constable of not acting correctly during the operation of a high profile county event, an accusation which Stamper refuted.
Mick Stamper recalls:
“He said: ‘I think you’ve misconstrued me.’ If I had a pound for every time I heard Nick Adderley say, ‘I think you’ve misconstrued me’, I’d have a better watch on and a nicer car.”
He later received a written apology on behalf of the force from interim chief constable Ivan Balhatchet, for the untrue accusations made against him by Adderley.
After 30 years of service Mick Stamper retired from policing in May this year.
Media image
Part of Adderley’s defence in his misconduct hearing was that the reason he had not corrected the common conception that he was a naval war hero - it had been reported in the late 2000s by the Manchester Evening News - was because he had no interest in his media image and did not read the reports about himself.
Mick Stamper says this is untrue, and instead Adderley was ‘always concerned he was not getting enough’ media attention and was constantly checking his social media.
Any person who had ever encountered Adderley’s regular tweets would also have been aware of how he liked to promote his own image, regularly re-tweeting posts that praised him.
Mick Stamper says:
“When he was getting praise and adulation from across the country on social media. We’re all sat in Northants Police saying, ‘does no one know what’s going on here?’”
Mick Stamper recounts a story in which after he had attended a conference with then home secretary Suella Braverman who had praised Greater Manchester Police for their work on home burglaries, Adderley had admonished him and the media team saying it was a perfect example of them not being proactive enough when it came to positive media.
He also remembers Adderley ignoring a presentation he was giving about a proposal which would have had important implications for staff and instead of paying attention Adderley was checking his social media feed.
Adderley’s downfall
After temporarily retiring in February last year for pension reasons, Adderley was reappointed to the post of chief constable two months later.
But just four months later the wheels fell off, when Paul Fell, who was a director in police, fire and crime commissioner Stephen Mold’s office, took a phone call from Jennifer Eastman, the second wife of Nick Adderley, who said she had seen a photo of him wearing military medals which were not his.
After speaking with Adderley and smelling a rat, Paul Fell referred it to the Independent Office for Police Conduct and the Sun newspaper broke the story in early October accusing Adderley of being a Walter Mitty and exposing that he had repeatedly worn the South Atlantic Medal given to Falklands war veterans despite only being 15 at the time of the war.
NN Journal also obtained part of the CV that was shown to the panel who appointed Adderley as chief constable in 2018, which clearly showed that he had claimed to be a Commander in the navy.
The summer and autumn of last year was a time of crisis in Northamptonshire’s policing organisations as commissioner Stephen Mold was also engulfed in scandal, after he had appointed his close friend and rumoured girlfriend Nicci Marzec to the post of chief fire officer, despite her lack of experience. There were regular protests by the Fire Brigades Union and local councillors, with Marzec standing down and Mold appointing former police officer Nikky Watson instead.
Mick Stamper says when the news first broke about the medals, many in the organisation thought it was rubbish.
He says:
“The initial reaction was ‘this is a load of nonsense’. But then it all starts to come and you start to remember.”
He says that as far back as 2019 he had started to internally question Adderley’s experience as an officer, but as to why Adderley was not rumbled during his time as chief constable and his lies were instead exposed by his ex wife, he thinks many were perhaps too scared to look too closely or question the force’s most senior officer.
He says:
“You have got to understand the silent forces that work within the police force. If you stand up and challenge the chief, you’re finished.”
Legacy
Adderley led Northamptonshire Police for five years. When he joined in 2018, its performance according to inspectors required improvement. Weakness cited included crime prevention, investigating and safeguarding vulnerable victims.
Within a few months of his arrival there was another full inspection which was published in September 2019 with chief inspector Zoe Billingham acknowledging the impact of austerity on the force but rating it requires improvement or inadequate in all areas. She said:
“ . . the force needs to improve how it prevents crime and anti-social behaviour, and how it engages with communities and partner organisations to solve local problems.
“The force is not investigating crime effectively. I am concerned about the standard of investigations and the lack of scrutiny by supervisors and senior managers.
“The force doesn’t always respond to vulnerable people quickly enough, so it could miss opportunities to safeguard people at risk.”
Another report by the police watchdog in 2021, three years into Nick Adderley’s rule, found the force was requiring improvement in the majority of areas assessed. Adderley said he ‘refuted’ the assessment the force was still underperforming and insisted significant improvements were happening.
Mick Stamper says:
“An issue he never really addressed was the workload going onto frontline officers. You get a massive growth in your establishment and straight away, you think to yourself is, ‘what can we do with this?’ We should have put them onto response for two years.
“The mistake when we get new officers is they are not competent, but we treat them as if they are competent. We shuffle our officers. 24 officers will come out of response and be promoted and be replaced with 25 inexperienced officers.
“It was a combination of shifts, workload and the simple fact we have recruited people that were too inexperienced. We were promoting our sergeants. These people are good but it’s just happening too quick.
“People were leaving hand over fist.”
In 2021 a number of officers told police inspectors that they were feeling ‘overwhelmed’ and burned out’. At the time NN Journal questioned the police about this matter, and asked whether it had anything to do with the chief constable. The response was:
“The Chief Constable we have now is one of the most supportive police leaders in the country, evidenced by the immeasurable amount of respect he commands by officers across the country. To make this correlation would be unjust and something we, as a Force, refute wholeheartedly.”
The most recent inspection of the force, published in February 2024, while Adderley was on suspension, highlighted improvements, but many of the old problems remained, showing that Adderley’s time as chief constable was not transformative. The overall view was that the force was ‘adequate’ and while improvements in some areas had been made, further work is needed.
What should happen now?
The former chief superintendent is certain that there needs to be a reckoning and the happenings of the Nick Adderley years cannot be swept under the carpet.
He says:
“It needs clearing up. It is like painting over mould if you don’t. It will come through.
“His legacy remains in the force. Everyone follows the chief’s behaviours. You only get promoted if you follow the chief’s behaviours. You have to behave in a certain way and then those behaviours trickle down.
“For example, yawping off on Twitter because the chief does. It needs to be exorcised, removed, cut out - not painted over.
He concludes:
“Nick should face the same laws and rules of every other person, the same as a junior officer would, an ordinary citizen would and I leave that with the judiciary. I think Northamptonshire needs a chief constable who is experienced and is able to lead the people through this and reset them. Because they are good people - they just need a good leader.”
Northamptonshire Police response
We asked Northamptonshire Police about the promotions of Colleen Rattigan which appeared to be without due process.
We were given this joint response from the police force and from the office of the police, fire and crime commissioner:
“We know that we have a huge job to do to rebuild the trust that has been damaged as a result of Mr Adderley's dismissal.
“We have said that we are carrying out a full review into his vetting and any other checks into information that was provided in support of his appointment. We will make the results public when the review is complete and we will take all the actions needed to make sure this does not happen again.
“After that, we will take a wider look to consider anything else we need to do as a result of Mr Adderley's time as Chief Constable. We are committed to being open and honest about the implications of this case so that lessons are learned across policing if they need to be.
“As our review is ongoing, we will not comment further on any ongoing investigations or complaints at this stage.”
Nick Adderley’s right to reply
We have attempted to contact Nick Adderley through his solicitors to give him a right to reply on what has been said by Mick Stamper. We have not had a response.
Colleen Rattigan was promoted from community safety manager to head of executive support in July 2019. In the FOI response Northants Police said the information about whether the job was advertised was not available due to a system change. She was promoted to chief of staff in October 2020, with a salary of up to £64,000 and then head of strategy and innovation in December 2022, with a salary of up to £80,000. Seven months later she became an assistant chief officer, on a temporary promotion.
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There will not be the usual Friday brief tomorrow as I’m taking a short holiday. I’ll compensate with an extra article next week.
Excellent piece to read NNJournal, gives more insight from the people that worked with him.
Wow, what an article! It should win an award!
I feel the complex infrastructure of the police and the issue of fraud is explained in great detail. so a layman, such as myself, can understand it.
The problem is clear, from this article that from day one a lack of robust scrutiny and attention to detail was lacking. With recruitment, infrastructure and atitudes a) innaffective employment of Adderley b) with the unscrupulous four promotions of Colleen Rattigan c) promotions to sergeants leaving an inexperienced groundforce d) an inneffective HR structure that is not allowing staff to speak up annonymously about issues so if you speak up you are compromised.
Northampton is such a mess I fear but I hope and pray we are starting to see a deconstruction of Police, Council and Political powers that may give the Northampton people the support they deserve.
None of this exposure would be happening without the groundbreaking NN Journal and Sarah Ward.