Daily Mail, Tuesday, July 30, 2019 Page Stephen Glover
be granted to carry out searches.
These highly intrusive proce-
dures, which of course turned up
nothing, were upsetting in the
extreme to the wholly innocent,
and also elderly, people involved.
One such case involved Lord
Bramall, a World War II hero and
former Chief of the Defence Staff.
In 2015, 20 police mounted a dawn
raid on his Hampshire home and
stayed for ten hours. This left his
wife, who suffered from Alzheim-
er’s, bewildered and confused.
Tragically for Lord Bramall, his
wife died before he could finally
clear his name. His identity had
already been leaked to the media,
prompting a disgusting campaign
against him on the internet.
Sir Richard Henriques is clear
that senior police officers must
have been aware of the inconsist-
encies in Beech’s evidence, and
would surely have known there
was no legal basis for ransacking
people’s private homes.
He even goes further, and asks
whether the police were guilty of
‘knowingly misleading a district
judge’, which in Sir Richard’s
reasonable estimation would
amount to a misdemeanour ‘far
more serious than mere miscon-
duct’. There is, he declares, reason
to believe that ‘the course of
justice was perverted, with
shocking consequences’.
And yet, so far, not one police
officer has been officially repri-
manded for behaviour one might
usually associate with a former
East European communist staterather than a mature democracy
in which the police are enjoined to
respect the rule of law.
Last week, the Independent
Office for Police Conduct finally
published its findings — after
nearly three years of delibera-
tions, which is surely an inexcusa-
ble length of time for such an
inquiry to have taken.
This grandiloquent body came
to the unpersuasive conclusion
that officers investigating Beech’sallegations acted ‘with due dili-
gence and good faith at the time’.
Such a whitewash is totally at
variance with Sir Richard’s
revelations in today’s Mail. I can’t
imagine that even one person in a
hundred will side with the Inde-
pendent Office for Police Conduct
rather than a former judge whose
only interest lies in disclosing the
truth.
It seems outrageous than no
senior police officer has beenproperly held to account while, as
Sir Richard rightly remarks, the
lives of several innocent people
have been ‘blighted’.
Lady Brittan’s husband, ex-
Home Secretary Leon Brittan,
died with Beech’s false allegations
hanging over him, not knowing
that his name would be cleared.
Months after his death, police
were still trawling through Lady
Brittan’s garden.
Meanwhile, former Deputy
Assistant Commissioner Steve
Rodhouse, who was in charge of
Operation Midland, is now a
£175,000-a-year director general
at the National Crime Agency.
Superintendent Kenny McDonald,
the investigating officer who
thought Beech was a model of
credibility, retired weeks before
the fantasist’s trial began with a
£250,000 pension pot.
Incompetence is one thing, and
we certainly don’t know whether
these particular officers were
guilty of anything worse. But any
policeman who appears to have
broken the law should face a
criminal investigation, as Sir
Richard suggests.
The question remains why the
boys in blue may have been
prepared to bend the rules.
Sympathetic souls may say in
their defence that after the
scandal of Jimmy Savile, whose
epic sexual abuse was overlooked
by the authorities over many
years, the police were overzealous.
If true, that is no justification.O
THERS point with good
cause to the figure of
Tom Watson, Labour’s
deputy leader, who met
Beech in his Westminster office
before he made his ludicrous
claims to the Metropolitan Police.
He publicly urged officers to
pursue these, and no doubt they
felt under pressure to do so.
Mr Watson still has not apolo-
gised for his unhappy role in this
affair, and if he had a modicum of
humility or decency this self-
satisfied man would admit he
made a serious error of judgment.
For all that, the ramifications of
Sir Richard’s revelations go far
deeper. They raise questions
about police conduct and
accountability.
I am afraid I no longer have as
much faith in their good sense and
fairness, in particular of the most
senior officers, as I once did.
A big shock for me came with
Operation Elveden in 2012, when
police made dawn raids on the
homes of journalists accused of
making payments to public
officials. That did not seem
consonant with a free society.
Needless to say, what happened
to Carl Beech’s victims as a result
of the inhumane and ill-consid-
ered behaviour of the police was
very much worse. Those charged
with enforcing the law might as
well have been living in a different
moral universe to the rest of us.
Lord Bramall has said that what
was done to him was more painful
than any experience he had ever
undergone serving Queen and
country. This from a very brave
man who won the Military Cross.
The terrifying lesson I draw is
that if the police can treat such
eminent people as Lord Bramall,
Leon Brittan, Harvey Proctor and
the rest of them in such a brutal
way, then none of us is safe.E
MINENT former High Court
judges do not normally
challenge Establishment
thinking. It is virtually
unprecedented for one of theirnumber to step forward and allege
police incompetence, and possibly
illegality, on a vast scale.
So we owe Sir Richard Henriques a great
debt for his breathtaking revelations
published in today’s Mail. It can’t have
been easy for this one-time pillar of the
judiciary to blow the gaff on the forces of
law and order in such a public way.
No one can plausibly question the veracity
or accuracy of his disturbing, and entirely
convincing, claims. For he is a highly
respected senior ex-judge of great experi-
ence and profound legal knowledge.
He also wrote in 2016 an official report
about Operation Midland — the Metropoli-
tan Police Service’s cack-handed inquiry
into sex allegations against prominent
supposed offenders, which cost £2.5 million.
There can be little doubt that Sir Richard
has considered this lamentable and ill-
conceived investigation more painstakingly
than any other person alive.
The nub of his complaint — which was
redacted from his published, highly critical
report — is that the police ‘unlawfully’
searched the homes of Lord Bramall, Lady
Brittan and Harvey Proctor as part of
Operation Midland.
These unfortunate victims, along with
several others, were targeted by police after
baseless falsehoods had been circulated by
Carl Beech, once known as ‘Nick’. The 51-
year-old fantasist was jailed for 18 years
last week for his ‘hideous and repugnant’
lies about alleged VIP sex abuse.
What is so deeply worrying about Sir
Richard’s allegations is not only that the
police credulously went along with Beech’s
absurd stories, with one senior officer,
Superintendent Kenny McDonald,
idiotically describing them as ‘credible and
true’ during the investigation.
More pertinently, the worry is that in
making applications to search the houses
of Lord Bramall, Lady Brittan and Harvey
Proctor, police officers made statements
that ignored the many inconsistencies in
Carl Beech’s testimony.
F
OR example, Beech told Wiltshire
Police he was first raped by an
unnamed lieutenant-colonel. But
he informed the Metropolitan
Police he was first raped by his stepfather.
Many other glaring inconsistencies were
also withheld from the district judge, whose
approval was needed before warrants could
If police
behave so
unlawfully,
how can
we ever
have faith in
them again?
Incompetence is one thing. But
any policeman who appears
to have broken the law should
face a criminal investigation