22 2GN The Sunday Times May 29, 2022
COMMENT
ESTABLISHED 182250-somethings, get out of your
gardens: Britain needs you
Dominic Lawson
exposed the full scale of the Met’s failings
(including the fact that the search warrant in
Bramall’s case was legally invalid), Hogan-
Howe felt compelled to apologise in person to
the old soldier. Bramall recalled: “Sitting where
you are, Dominic, in that chair, [Hogan-Howe]
said to me, ‘We knew almost at once that none
of these ridiculous allegations applied to you,
but we could not stop making you a suspect for
a further ten months because we in the
Metropolitan Police would have been accused
of not investigating properly.’” Shocked and yet
not surprised, I said to Bramall, “So it was all
about their public relations?” He replied:
“Exactly. Their own public relations.”
Bramall died a few months later. I can only
imagine what he would have thought about
the idea of Hogan-Howe later becoming
head of the National Crime Agency, or of
Hogan-Howe’s observation to our reporter
Dipesh Gadher that “Operation Midland was a
difficult episode... for myself ”.
But there are surviving real casualties of
Operation Midland who gave their view last
week. Diana Brittan, the widow of the former
home secretary Leon Brittan (who had seen
their garden dug up by detectives looking for
the bodies of imaginary and never named
victims), declared last week: “Lord Hogan-
Howe presided over numerous high-profile
failures, including the pursuit of baseless
allegations against my late husband, and there
is little evidence that he is a suitable candidate
for this role.”
And Harvey Proctor, the former MP also
named by Beech as one of his torturers, who
lost his job and his home as a result of the
allegations, told GB News: “When I had a
meeting in December 2016 with Bernard
Hogan-Howe, he said he couldn’t be expected
to know all about the investigations into what
he described as VIPs. Well, this particular
investigation involved a former prime minister,
a former home secretary, the head of the
British armed forces, the head of MI5 and MI6.
If he didn’t know, he should have got the
sack for not knowing. I don’t think we should
have a man like that in charge of the National
Crime Agency.”
But, as Bramall revealed to me, Hogan-Howe
knew all along — and knew it was madness,
even as, publicly, the Met described Beech’s
claims as “credible and true”, to the
unimaginable distress of the falsely accused.
Downing Street’s advocacy of Bernard
Hogan-Howe is, however, a real offence:
against public decency.
[email protected]T
here is no more enduring political
principle than “You scratch my back
and I’ll scratch yours”. For the latest
example, look no further than the
revelation on our front page last week
that Downing Street had “knocked
back” the two final candidates for the
vacant post of head of the National
Crime Agency and insisted that the Home
Office reconsider the rejected candidacy of
Lord Hogan-Howe.
This is Bernard Hogan-Howe, the former
commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. Or,
more relevantly to this tale, the chap who took
part in a film for Boris Johnson’s campaign for
the Conservative Party leadership in 2019, to
declare the former mayor of London “really
great. I found him to be loyal, honourable, and
he did what he promised to do.”
Not everyone would recognise that
encomium. But, to be fair, Johnson has been
loyal to Hogan-Howe: the ex-cop has been
rewarded with, among other government
sinecures, the role of non-executive director of
the Cabinet Office. And — who knows? —
perhaps the PM had “promised” to back his
chum for the role of boss of the National
Crime Agency (sometimes described,
hyperbolically, as Britain’s FBI). Although it
is not clear, in this opaque business, if the idea
of Hogan-Howe’s taking on the role was
originally his own or the PM’s.
Whichever the case, this is a scandal. Not
because of prime ministerial intervention in a
process that is meant to be purely a Home
Office affair: we’ve all seen enough episodes of
Yes Minister to know how this sort of thing
works. Nor do I think that, from a purely
technical point of view, Hogan-Howe would do
the job less well than the two finalists rejected
by Johnson — the acting NCA chief, Graeme
Biggar, and the assistant Met commissioner
Neil Basu.
The latter’s supporters claim that Basu’s
vocal advocacy for “positive discrimination” to
make British policing more representative of
ethnic minorities lies behind Johnson’s
rejection of his candidacy. But that politicised
argument does not explain why Biggar, who
has been standing in for the past eight months
since the former NCA chief, Lynne Owens,
stepped down, has also been deemed
unsuitable by Downing Street.
No — it’s clear that what the PM wants is
positive discrimination in favour of his chum.
And the scandal? That Hogan-Howe presided
with a shocking combination of cynicism and
complacency over Operation Midland, whichwas based on accepting as true the claims of
Carl Beech — known at the time as “Nick” — that
as a child he had been tortured for years by a
murderous gang of paedophiles whose number
included the former prime minister Edward
Heath, the odd cabinet minister and heads of
the army, MI5 and MI6. Beech, who turned out
to be a real paedophile himself, was, as a result
of a later investigation by Northumbria police,
convicted of perverting the course of justice,
fraud and child sex offences and given an 18-
year sentence.
I wrote in 2016 that Hogan-Howe was then
describing Operation Midland as “quality”
even though, almost a year into the
investigation, its officers had still not thought it
worthwhile contacting Beech’s ex-wife, who
knew him quite well enough to observe that he
was a “fantasist ... who jumped on the Savile
bandwagon to make a quick buck”. Nor, ever,
did the Met ask Beech if he would allow a
physical examination to show the scars from
the tortures he described in fantastic detail.
The Jimmy Savile point was telling. The Met
was fixated with the fact that the police had
been seen to have taken insufficiently seriously
allegations of the predations of that (knighted)
TV presenter and charity campaigner.
Operation Midland was not policing but PR.
One of Beech’s alleged torturers — who he
also claimed had been part of a bevy of top
brass raping him on Salisbury Plain on
Remembrance Sunday — was the head of the
army during the Falklands conflict, Edwin
Bramall. When I interviewed the 95-year-old
Field Marshal Lord Bramall in 2019 this hero of
the D-Day landings told me how the way the
investigation had been conducted — which
involved 20 police officers descending on his
home to turn over the place — had caused him
much more pain than any of the injuries he had
received as a soldier in the service of his
country.
Eventually, after an inquiry carried out by
the retired judge Sir Richard Henriques hadI
haven’t felt sorry for the Duchess of Sussex
for ages. It’s not as though I think she’s the
Wicked Witch of the West, but, having at
first found her a wondrous breath of fresh
air, I’m no longer so sure. I like tenacious,
determined women, though, and Meghan
is certainly that: the very definition of
cake-and-eat-it, like a headstrong
heroine in a bodice-ripper. In those books the
women have pulled themselves up by their
bootstraps and always contrive to live happily
ever after. The men, glowering poshly from
atop a horse, not so much. Still, the real world
isn’t a bodice-ripper, which in the circs is
probably just as well.
Meghan’s parents, Thomas Markle and Doria
Ragland, separated when she was two and
divorced when she was six; she subsequently
lived with her mother. Markle already had two
children, Samantha and Thomas Jr. Meghan is
estranged from her father and her half-sister,
whom she doesn’t seem to have had a huge
amount to do with. She has not spoken to
Samantha for about a decade, which does not
stop Samantha having an inordinate number of
opinions about Meghan, all of them sour, that
she is keen to share.
The father, when he isn’t staging paparazzi
shots for money, casts himself as a bewildered
loving parent. He is always saying it’s an
outrage that he’s never met his grandchildren,
it having apparently not occurred to him that
being indignant about this on any TV show
that’ll have him is not necessarily going to
swing things his way.
Since Meghan won’t see him willingly,
Thomas Markle seeks to force himself into her
life in other ways, which is creepy and must be
horrible for her. Hence: Meghan and Harry are
coming over for the Queen’s Jubilee
celebrations this week, so Thomas Markle
thought he would too, in the alleged hope of a
reconciliation, and to this end organised to stay
with Lady Colin Campbell, most recently seen
as a contestant on MTV’s Celebs on the Farm.Perhaps he was going to leap out of the crowd
as she passed, yelling, “Meghan! It’s Dad!”,
thereby making everything OK. That there isn’t
a person in the world who wouldn’t find this
kind of ambush upsetting, disturbing and
humiliating either hasn’t occurred to him or,
worse, has.
Both Samantha and Thomas Markle sound
like the sort of people who would give the
impression of being furiously aggrieved even
when they were asleep (somewhere in this is
the sense that Meghan is awful for not sharing
her financial good fortune with them, her ever-
loving kin). You’ll remember the father setting
up paparazzi shots days before he was due to
walk Meghan down the aisle, which is what led
to the non-speaking, and there’s plenty more in
that vein. Anyway: now he’s had a stroke, and
Samantha is on hand to tell everyone that
Meghan shows no signs of wanting to go and
visit him, and that she should because he’s her
father, and that it all goes to prove that she is a
terrible person.
Is it awful not to visit your estranged father
after he’s had a stroke? I don’t think it is,
actually. Nobody estranges themselves from
their parents lightly, or on a whim: the usual
reason is emotional self-protection. Nobody
can adjudicate over this. People don’t have the
right to say, “Come on, it’s not that bad,” or “It
was a long time ago,” or “I’ve heard worse.” A
person has every right to cut another personout of their life, even if that other person is a
parent. Some people are toxic, or toxic in the
context of a family, and their long-suffering
children do not have a duty to endure their
toxicity — let alone endure it uncomplainingly,
like saints, at the cost of their own happiness
and wellbeing. Why should they?
And yet here is Meghan, berated in the usual
places for making a private visit last week to the
site of the massacre in Texas, where she laid
some white roses and donated food to the
community centre, but not bestirring herself to
take white roses or even the humblest snack to
her father. Why won’t she do the decent thing?
What if he dies? Does being someone’s father
mean so little? Well, yes, sometimes I’m afraid
it does. The uncomplicated act of having
fathered a child doesn’t automatically make
someone a magnificent and respect-worthy
person. That’s more to do with their actions.
The idea of the hospital-bed reconciliation is
a powerful one, because it suggests a magical
wiping of the slate and pleasingly neat proof
that love — or forgiveness — does conquer all.
But whether you go and say “get well soon” or
“goodbye” is not a decision anyone can be
forced or guilt-tripped into — “do the decent
thing, you’ll feel so much better” — by people
who only have the sketchiest idea of the ins and
outs of the situation. Or of the levels of misery
caused in the past, or perhaps of the work — I
would be amazed if Meghan and Harry were
not having (individual) counselling — that has
been put into processing an action that may
appear strange or unfilial, but that is a matter
of emotional survival for the person to whom it
is happening.
Dysfunctional people always try to reel you
back into their chaos and mess. Resisting that is
a courageous act, doubly so when the whole
sorry thing is played out in public, as here.
Meghan cutting her father out of her life will
have been a considered and painful decision,
and is nobody’s business but her own.
@IndiaKnightIndia Knight
Cutting off a toxic parent can be a brave and necessary act of self-protection
Meghan has every right to
blank her deadbeat dad
The Operation Midland scandal should make the ex-Met chief a pariah
Dysfunctional people
always try to reel you
back into their chaos
Bramall said the
police hurt him more
than any war injury
The PM’s favourite cop
merits no preferment
R
eaders heading off for a half-
term break in the UK would be
well advised to book pubs and
restaurants in advance, and
even if you can get a table, don’t
expect the full menu. More than
a year after the last lockdown
ended, Covid-related labour
shortages mean industries such as hospi-
tality are still operating well below their
previous capacity. Waiters, waitresses
and chefs are in short supply; so are HGV
drivers, computer programmers, teach-
ers and lawyers. The tightness in Britain’s
workforce doesn’t discriminate between
sectors. The record 1.3 million vacancies
amount to one of the key factors holding
back economic growth and fuelling
inflation.
It seems strange to think that two years
ago we were worrying about an unem-
ployment crisis, because what we have
ended up with is an employment crisis. At
3.7 per cent, unemployment is at its low-
est level since 1974. Some of that is testa-
ment to the success of the furlough
scheme instituted by Rishi Sunak, the
chancellor. Part of it is down to Brexit,
which contributed to the exodus of
200,000 EU citizens over the past two
years. But there is also something very
unusual going on. About 450,000 people
have left the workforce since 2019 — a big
drop by past standards. Trying to explain
why the Bank of England had been wrong-
footed by employment dynamics this
month, Andrew Bailey, the governor, was
clear that the fall had been driven by a rise
in the number of “economically inactive
people” — those who do not have a job and
are not looking for one.
The phrase might summon the image
of a young flâneur enjoying a cigarette in
the sun, but people aged 50 and over are
the main demographic. The great resigna-
tion has become the great retirement. If it
can be reversed, even partially, it offers an
opportunity for companies in need of
staff to fling open the café doors on a Mon-
day morning or work an extra shift at the
factory.
The Office for National Statistics (ONS)
interviewed some of these older work-
force leavers in February. Almost two
thirds — 63 per cent — said they had quit
their job sooner than expected; the ONSdid not say this, but some probably glided
straight from furlough to the exit. Almost
half said they had retired of their own voli-
tion. Crucially, one in four said they would
consider going back to work. Most cited
the desire to socialise or do a job they
enjoyed ahead of making money as the
primary motivation. That means they
won’t be lured back with bungs. Flexible
working hours were the No 1 demand, fol-
lowed by the right to work from home and
then the ability to fit a job around their
caring responsibilities.
The Treasury has just thrown £15 bil-
lion at the cost-of-living crisis and is not
flush with cash. It has been quietly claw-
ing back some of the billions of pounds
earmarked during the pandemic for
employment support schemes such as
Kickstart and Restart. Unsurprisingly,
there has been far less demand for these
safety nets than initially expected. Yet
rather than sweep the coppers back into
No 11’s piggy bank, ministers could rede-
ploy a small amount into encouraging a
great “un-retirement”.
Many of those who have left employ-
ment early have done so because they
were suffering burnout or stress. The gov-
ernment helps the unemployed find jobs,
but why not extend the service to those
who are not claiming benefits and would
like to earn money but are anxious about
re-entering the workforce? Employers
should also be proactive in recruiting
those in the 50-plus bracket. They should
think about how they can make work
more appealing and manageable — per-
haps cutting the length of shifts for work-
ers at the older end of the spectrum, or
giving staff more choice over when and
how they work. Enlightened induction
processes and managers who understand
the need for fresh thinking would then
help retain the over-50s coaxed back into
service.
There is a big prize to be won in recon-
necting with the economy some of those
who are economically inactive. The
strained state of the labour market is one
of Covid’s longer-lasting legacies. If it can
be eased, it will help to speed up the econ-
omy and curb price rises.
To readers who may be among the van-
ished 450,000, please take note: your
country’s workforce needs you.Scandalous wait for justice in
contaminated blood scandal
In the 1970s and 1980s some 5,000
haemophiliacs in Britain contracted HIV
or hepatitis C after being infected with a
contaminated treatment. Known as factor
VIII, it was seen as a miracle cure for hae-
mophilia, a genetic disorder in which the
blood fails to clot. But the factor VIII that
was supposed to save them hid a dark
secret: the blood products used to make it
were riddled with deadly diseases. Many
ministers and senior government officials
knew about the dangers but failed to act.
As a result, more than 2,800 people in
the UK alone are known to have died
after receiving contaminated blood prod-
ucts in what has been described as the
“worst treatment disaster in the history of
the NHS”.
The number of people who lost their
lives make this the gravest man-made
disaster in postwar British history, out-
stripping the combined death tolls of
other, more well-known tragedies such as
Hillsborough, Grenfell and Lockerbie.
Tens of thousands more lives have
been destroyed, including the families of
those affected, because the victims
unknowingly went on to infect them too.
It is hard to comprehend that no
organisation or individual has been held
to account for this tragedy and no propercompensation paid out. Instead, those
who survived have spent the past 40 years
searching for answers.
The Sunday Times has led their fight
for justice from the beginning. Now it
seems that their long battle may finally be
over: ministers are poised to recognise
the state’s culpability for the first time and
are preparing to accept that there is a
“strong moral case” for a taxpayer-funded
scheme to compensate those affected.
The scheme, the details of are yet to be
determined, could involve hundreds of
millions of pounds.
Such a move is welcome, but it is
scandalous that it took so long.
The government must now act without
delay to give those who continue to suffer
the best end to their lives, which, in many
cases, have been blighted by illness and
hardship through no fault of their own.
According to the Haemophilia Society,
more than 400 people infected by
contaminated blood have died since an
inquiry into the scandal was announced
by Theresa May in July 2017.
Although the money will never make
up for what so many have lost, it will come
as some comfort to the few who remain
that justice delayed will at last not be jus-
tice denied.How many ounces does a dead cat weigh?
Boris Johnson’s cabinet responded to
the long-awaited release of Sue Gray’s
report into Partygate with typical dignity
last week, immediately announcing a
windfall energy tax. Sir Lynton Crosby, the
Tories’ Australian election guru, likens
this kind of distraction tactic to throwing a
deceased feline on the table. More cats arefor the chop this week. Among the bliz-
zard of announcements will be a consulta-
tion into whether we should bring back
imperial measures — inches, feet, yards,
etc. These were officially replaced by the
metric system in 1965, and missed by very
few until the Gray report’s publication.
Sadly, there was no imperial measure
for political cynicism.Dead cats in pounds and ounces