The Chief Constable of West Midlands Police has been able to walk away with his full pension intact amid a roaring scandal encompassing the banning of Israeli football fans from a British city, a blur of A.I. hallucinations, alleged Islamic extremism, and threats of anti-Semitic violence.
Chief Constable Craig Guildford of West Midlands Police (WMP) announced his retirement on Friday, the culmination of weeks of controversy over his force’s handling of a Europa League football match played between Israeli side Maccabi Tel Aviv and local team Aston Villa in November. The local demographics of Aston Villa’s home ground in a north Birmingham suburb skews heavily Muslim, and the local Member of Parliament, pro-Gaza independent Ayoub Khan, campaigned hard after the match was announced to see Israeli travelling fans banned.
The decision to make no seats at the football ground available to Israeli fans was already controversial when it was announced in October 2025. As reported at the time, a Conservative MP called Khan an “unintegrated, racist antisemite” for his campaign to keep Israelis out of his part of Birmingham, Reform UK called it an extreme expression of racial discrimination, and the Israeli government said that it was “shameful”.
Yet the scandal only developed after the Israeli fans were blamed for being banned despite the police holding undisclosed intelligence that if they actually came to Birmingham, they would be attacked by armed mobs of locals, and that the police relied on a “hallucinating” A.I. chatbot to justify their decision.
Conservative MP Nick Timothy, who has been leading the charge on the Maccabi controversy, has stated that “local Islamist thugs” living in the Aston area planned to arm themselves and attack visiting Jewish fans and that police knew this. Officers covered it up, however, and “police took the side of Islamists,” he claimed. “Police suppressed that information and instead they fabricated intelligence that pinned the blame entirely on the Israelis. They lied.”
Police cited the infamous Maccabi away match in the Netherlands in 2024, when fights broke out in the streets, as a pretext for issuing the ban. Yet an interim report by the Chief Inspector of Constabulary found the WMP had exaggerated the violence, and even blamed it on the Israeli fans. In one case, WMP documents cited an instance of Israeli fans throwing locals into the river in Amsterdam, where it was actually an Israeli fan who was thrown in the river.
Another justification for the ban was violence that police said took place at another previous football match played by Maccabi in the UK. Yet that football match was a work of fiction: police officers had asked an A.I. chatbot, ‘Copilot’, which ‘hallucinated’ the event, and police did not double-check what they’d been told.
The inspectorate found the WMP withheld their secret concerns about anti-Jewish protests that could take place and made “misleading public statements” about their decisions. The WMP later said it had decided not talk about potential violence by ‘locals’ living around the Aston ground to “avoid increasing local community tension”.
Even if these decisions came about due to “carelessness rather than any deliberate distortion”, the Inspectorate still warned this was not good for public confidence in the police.
Home Secretary (interior minister) of the United Kingdom, Shabana Mahmood, said she no longer had confidence in the police boss of Britain’s second city on Wednesday, but a 2011 reform of policing by the Conservative-Liberal coalition government meant she was powerless to actually sack Guildford. Instead, Guildford got the time to arrange his own retirement.
Lord Austin, once a Labour Member of Parliament for nearby Dudley who now sits as a peer in the House of Lords, was one of a handful of Labour figures for whom the conduct of WMP fell short. He said in a strongly-worded statement that police boss Guildford should have been fired weeks ago, along with several other senior officers at the force. He said:
Over the last few months, senior officers at West Midlands Police made up or exaggerated information to support a decision they had already made.
They capitulated to Islamist extremists, racists, sectarian politicians, hate preachers and even violent thugs who they knew were planning to arm themselves to attack Israelis. They hid that from the public and instead of arresting them, they blamed the Israelis… West Midlands Police made up evidence and then repeatedly lied about it to the local Jewish community, the wider public, and Parliament.
We have seen the same failure to confront extremists and racists on the hate marches that have taken over our cities over the last few years, as well as the disgraceful protests we’ve seen outside synagogues. We need the Government and the police to take really serious action to stamp out the evil poison of anti-Jewish racism for good and they should start by clearing out anyone in West Midlands Police involved in this scandal.
Reform UK’s Zia Yusuf also said Guildford should have been sacked and noted the police boss had “misled the public and capitulated to violent extremism… We must not allow Islamists, thugs or terrorists to believe they can dictate what happens on our streets.”
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