[i] He hadn’t better tell them. (CGEL, p.113)
[ii] He had better not tell her. (CGEL, p.196)
According to CGEL, negation can be marked after or before better. But I can’t find any examples of [i] in COCA or BNC. So it seems to be not grammatical issue but others in there. Why aren’t there any examples of [i] in those corpuses?
Answer
As a speaker of US English, I am nonplussed by your version [i]; I have only encountered [ii].
The only circumstance in which I could imagine [i] occurring is an ‘echoic’ denial of the positive proposition:
A: He’d better tell them.
B: No, he hadn’t better tell them. He’d better keep his mouth shut.
But the idiom may be used differently in the British English which is CGEL’s underlying standard.
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