What’s happening in Middlesbrough could be happening anywhere else tomorrow - Euan McColm

I can’t remember exactly what he’d done - a shady planning thing, most likely - but, whatever his offence, it was enough to fill a bit of white space in the middle of a local Sunday paper on a quiet news week.

Already a political outsider - or lunatic, according to his colleagues - the victim of my “exposé” called my office a few days after the paper had hit the streets to suggest we have a drink.

I was surprised but amused by the idea and a couple of hours later, I was sitting opposite him in a pub on Grange Road in Middlesbrough where he told me he thought we might be able to help each other. This man was what we might consider a rogue. He laughed off whatever it was I had revealed about him and said he had some real stories for me.

I spent the next couple of hours listening to tales of corruption and sleaze involving outwardly respectable public servants. And not only did he have the stories, he had the receipts, sheafs of council papers marked private and confidential, photocopies of letters, and bank documents, too.

We drank excessively while I triaged the information he was giving me. The alcoholic lemonade Hooch had recently been introduced to market and we had that with Stella Artois in potent shandies.

There were three or four stories in among all the stuff my new source had brought and I divided the documents into piles.

When he left, he handed me a small waxy package. It was a half ounce of sticky black hashish which, over the following days, I disposed of carefully. I thought of that weird meeting last week as I watched news coverage of unfolding gang violence on my old stomping ground.

Last weekend, a car containing five men and traveling in the wrong direction along the A66 near Middlesbrough smashed head-on into a police car in which two officers were on patrol. There were no survivors.

In time, we will know more about the circumstances of the smash but it has already been confirmed the men in the car which was on the wrong carriageway were known to police and it has been reported they had been involved in a chase after an earlier gang attack on a house in Middlesbrough.

Since then, the Teesside town has ensured days draining tension punctuated by flashes of terrifying violence. On Wednesday, 34-year-old Natalie McDonald and her seven-year-old niece Valentina Foster died in a fire at their home in Grangetown, Middlesbrough.

Police from neighbouring forces have been drafted in to support local officers amid fear of a tit-for-tat escalation of what is already a fraught and dangerous situation.

In 1995, the Middlesbrough where I worked was at the centre of a story of optimism and rebirth.

Eight years previously, on September 12, 1987, then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had been photographed in Teesside’s post-industrial wastelands of Thornaby and Stockton.

The iconic images of Thatcher’s “walk in the wilderness” symbolised difficult change taking place across the United Kingdom. The challenges in Middlesbrough were much same as those in Bathgate or Linwood.

By the mid ‘90s, the Teesside Development Council and the Government had successfully completed a number of redevelopment projects.

The fact the new political establishment was centred in the north east added to the sense things were on the up for a region that had seemed to be in terminal decline. The constituencies around Middlesbrough were held by key members of the rising New Labour elite, including soon-to-be Prime Minister Tony Blair to the north west in Sedgefield, Peter Mandelson in Hartlepool, Alan Milburn in Darlington, and the late Mo Mowlam in Redcar.

At the time, there was a mood of optimism in Middlesbrough and its environs. Things not only could, they definitely would get better.

Looking back, the rebirth of Teesside more than three decades ago was little more than a quick paint job. It was all very well building new office blocks but once they were up and running, who’d have the money to use them?

The fundamental - and, perhaps, intractable - problem of how a community might be sustained after the jobs that brought it together are gone was not addressed.

While New Labour superstars told a story of rebirth, Teesside - like so many places - was in continuing decline.

Yes, there were new industrial and retail parks but the internet was already lurking in the bushes, waiting to pounce.

Thanks to the councillor I turned over 32 years ago, I saw the grimmest side of Middlesbrough, a town where gangs had plugged themselves into the UK’s illegal drugs network and were not merely dealing but importing and moving significant quantities of product.

I met gangsters, drug dealers and - in one especially dark moment - a man old enough to be my father who offered to introduce me to a girl young enough to be my daughter. I was 26.

The seeds of Middlesbrough’s current problems were planted long ago when the political establishment put the spinning of a story about rebirth before the more complicated business of engineering an actual rebirth.

Years of neglect, cuts to police funding, and an ever shrinking jobs market have scarred Teesside, just as they have working class communities the length of the UK. The dark events of recent days may have been extreme, indeed, but they were hardly unusual for our times.

What’s happening now in Middlesbrough could be happening anywhere else tomorrow.