Scotland Yard’s sterling reputation is in the gutter after Mail exposes Operation Midland fiasco, writes RICHARD LITTLEJOHN
Not so long ago, Met Commissioner Cressida Dick lambasted TV dramas such as Line Of Duty for painting a wholly inaccurate picture of today’s police ‘service’.
After meeting one of the show’s stars, Vicky McClure, Dick decided to watch a couple of episodes. ‘I was absolutely outraged by the level of casual and extreme corruption that was being portrayed as the way the police is in 2018/19,’ she said. ‘It’s so far from that. The standards and the professionalism are so high.’
How hollow her words ring today, after Daily Mail’s devastating exposure of cover-up and abuse of power at the highest levels of Scotland Yard.
The Daily Mail’s investigation, led by Stephen Wright, has revealed a culture of buck-passing and duplicity among senior Metropolitan Police officers. And Dick of Dock Green is clearly implicated, despite her best efforts to distance herself.
Today’s sensational cache of emails, uncovered by the Mail, only serves to confirm the lengths to which the top brass at the Yard were prepared to go to avoid the truth, following the collapse of the deranged VIP sex and murder investigation.
Not so long ago, Met Commissioner Cressida Dick lambasted TV dramas such as Line Of Duty for painting a wholly inaccurate picture of today’s police ‘service’.
When Watson started promoting wild allegations of rape by a mentally ill Labour activist called Jane, Scotland Yard swung into action
‘It is crucial that Cress (Dick) is not pulled into this,’ reads one. There were attempts to prevent her speaking to High Court judge Sir Richard Henriques, who had been appointed to investigate the multiple failures of Operation Midland — the official title of the Paedos In High Places inquiry, which snared former Cabinet minister Leon Brittan and other innocent men.
Dick was furious when Home Secretary Priti Patel announced a further review by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary. She argued that officers already cleared of wrongdoing without even being interviewed should not be reinvestigated.
Having read Henriques’ damning verdict on Midland in the Mail yesterday, it is easy to understand why she wouldn’t want this damaging affair reopened — especially as he now believes there should be a full criminal investigation.
Not before time. The Augean stables at the Yard must be cleansed without further delay. For the past decade, the senior ranks at Scotland Yard have been out of control, a law unto themselves. They have turned justice on its head, arresting first and asking questions later — always assuming guilt, not innocence.
Let us pause to recap briefly how we got here.
After Jimmy Savile died in 2011, the full horror of his serial sex crimes came to light. Attention quickly turned to the repeated failure of the police to bring him to justice.
In search of redemption, they first started seeking out other celebrities they could accuse of ‘historic’ sex abuse. Then, conveniently, along came Labour’s deputy chairman Tom Watson, who hid behind Parliamentary privilege to allege a web of sex crimes committed by Tory politicians dating back decades and leading directly to Downing Street.
Rather than dismiss Watson as a muck-raking, publicity-seeking opportunist, the Old Bill rushed to embrace his outlandish claims.
When Watson started promoting wild allegations of rape by a mentally ill Labour activist called Jane, Scotland Yard swung into action. But after an initial inquiry, both a senior detective, DCI Paul Settle, and the Crown Prosecution Service concluded there was no merit to her claims and there should be no further action.
Yet Scotland Yard treated her no better than a gangster’s moll. Even after then Commissioner Bernard Hogan-Howe knew her late husband was innocent, it took him nine months to impart that news to her
Watson cranked up his campaign, writing to the CPS and demanding that it reopen the Jane rape case.
He then started peddling further lurid allegations of murder and sex abuse made by a fantasist called Carl Beech, aka Nick, who was subsequently jailed for 18 years. Scotland Yard set up Operation Midland, the first time it had begun a full-scale murder inquiry without any evidence whatsoever that anyone had been murdered.
Soon the net was dragging in blameless public figures such as the war hero Lord Bramall, Lord Brittan and the former Tory MP Harvey Proctor.
Det Supt Kenny McDonald told the Press that Nick’s claims were ‘credible and true’. This was later described by Dick, then an Assistant Commissioner in overall charge of the operation, as a mistake.
Yet as the Mail has revealed, when the Yard applied, several weeks later, for a warrant to search Brittan’s home, they told the judge that they considered their witness, Nick, to be both ‘credible’ and ‘telling the truth’.
That was enough for the warrant to be granted. The raid took place six short weeks after he died, as his widow was sorting through condolence cards, including many from former prime ministers and Cabinet members.
Lady Brittan spoke for the first time this week about the scandalous treatment she and her husband were forced to endure.
I defy anyone to read her interview, or listen to it on Mail+, without being overcome by a sense of rage and disgust at the behaviour of many of those senior police officers we trust to uphold the law without fear or favour.
For more than five years, Lady Brittan has kept her counsel. Until now. What is most striking is that, despite her enduring and justifiable anger, she has maintained her dignity.
Former Assistant Commissioner ‘Fat Pat’ Gallan, who was in day-to-day control of Midland, was allowed to take early retirement and is now an executive director of HMRC
Her remarks are measured, composed and all the more deadly because of it. She speaks calmly and with authority. So when she accuses the Yard of ‘institutional rot’ we should pay close attention. She was, after all, married to a politician who was once in overall charge of the police.
More than a dozen officers turned up on her doorstep and proceeded to ransack her home, looking for ‘evidence’.
They justified the warrant on the grounds that she might refuse them entry, and one officer was overheard saying she wouldn’t have time to hide anything.
It’s almost impossible to think of a more offensive slur to aim at a 74-year-old woman who was a lay magistrate for 26 years, balancing the need to dispense justice with mercy and understanding.
Lady Brittan is the epitome of a certain kind of Englishwoman, who has devoted her life to service and duty, receiving a damehood and CBE along the way. You can imagine her as one of those resolute ladies who served in the Special Operations Executive helping to win World War II.
Yet Scotland Yard treated her no better than a gangster’s moll. Even after then Commissioner Bernard Hogan-Howe knew her late husband was innocent, it took him nine months to impart that news to her. And even longer to issue a few weasel words of ‘regret’ for her ordeal.
Despite the fact that the criminally botched Operation Midland happened on his watch, at his instigation, Hyphen-Howe is just one of the men and women who has not only escaped censure, but has gone on to bigger and better pastures.
As this newspaper reported on Thursday, most of the main players have been promoted or given lucrative sinecures elsewhere in the system. Hyphen-Howe has been rewarded with a peerage and a job in the Cabinet Office. He has a £5 million pension pot and a Swiss chalet.
Steve Rodhouse, the ‘gold commander’, who approved the Brittan warrant, pulls in a £300,000 salary package at Britain’s equivalent of the FBI.
Former Assistant Commissioner ‘Fat Pat’ Gallan, who was in day-to-day control of Midland, was allowed to take early retirement and is now an executive director of HMRC.
Steve Rodhouse, the ‘gold commander’, who approved the Brittan warrant, pulls in a £300,000 salary package at Britain’s equivalent of the FBI
And, of course, ‘Cress’ is now Commissioner of the Met, a Dame on £230,000 a year. The labyrinthine management structure at Scotland Yard seems to be designed to ensure that no one ever takes any responsibility, or blame, for anything.
So when Lady Brittan says that ‘the Metropolitan Police has preferred its corporate or personal ambitions to a strong moral compass’ what reasonable person can argue? Scotland Yard as careerist gravy train is a fairly modern phenomenon. It was once a beacon of public service, a byword for professionalism.
You simply can’t imagine any of this happening under the leadership of distinguished former Commissioners, such as Paul Condon, Peter Imbert or John Stevens, aka Captain Beaujolais.
None of them would have pretended, as Hyphen-Howe did, that they couldn’t possibly keep tabs on everything which was going on under their command — particularly when it involved an ex-Home Secretary accused of rape.
Any hapless DCI who tried to persuade John Stevens that they should raid the home of a senior politician on the basis of ‘credible and true’ evidence from a known fantasist would spend the rest of their career out at Elstree, wearing a pointed hat and directing traffic.
The ‘institutional rot’ Lady Brittan describes so accurately set in under New Labour and reached its nadir during the stewardship of Hyphen-Howe. The Mail’s investigation this week has concentrated on the indignities heaped upon Lady Brittan, and the disgusting hounding of her wholly innocent husband to the grave and beyond.
But let’s not forget that Leon Brittan was just one individual subjected to the jackboots treatment by Hyphen-Howe’s stormtroopers.
In the wake of the Savile scandal, the police embarked on a frenzied witch-hunt against wrongly accused entertainment personalities, including Jimmy Tarbuck, Jim Davidson, Paul Gambaccini and Cliff Richard.
Ransacking homes on the flimsiest of pretexts became standard operating procedure. How many times have we seen coppers carting away bin liners full of ‘evidence’ from the homes of ‘suspects’.
The process is the punishment, all designed to create an impression of guilt — a domestic variant of the cynical American ‘perp walk’.
Det Supt Kenny McDonald told the Press that Nick’s claims were ‘credible and true’. This was later described by Dick, then an Assistant Commissioner in overall charge of the operation, as a mistake
Let’s not forget, either, the Gestapo tactics the Old Bill used against journalists accused of phone-hacking and paying public servants for information.
Heavy-handed dawn raids were again the order of the day, as Plods in their Size Tens riffled through teenage girls’ knicker drawers, confiscated love letters and bank statements and ripped company cars apart.
Just as Operation Midland was wound up without a single conviction, so too was nothing meaningful ever made to stick against Fleet Street’s finest. Still, it showed them who was boss, eh?
I’ve followed all these developments since Savile died, and Tom Watson began his insane vendetta against Tory politicians, alive and dead. Watson, whom I immediately dubbed the Nonce Finder General, was undoubtedly the catalyst which lit the blue touchpaper and eventually led to Lady Brittan’s front door.
He should have been in the dock alongside his protege Beech. And if there was any justice in the world he would now be sharing a cell with him.
Those who continue to give him houseroom should be ashamed of themselves. For the past year he’s been head of UK Music, an industry in crisis, during which time he’s pocketed an estimated £100,000-plus for doing nothing apart from writing a book and appearing on a crass reality rowing boat show.
His day of reckoning is still to come. But, in the greater scheme of things, for now, Watson is a sideshow.
More from Richard Littlejohn for the Daily Mail…
What matters urgently is the unravelling of what was once the most admired police force in the world. A clean, incorruptible criminal justice system, beyond reproach, is the very foundation of our civil society.
Once that goes, only anarchy and contempt for the law remains. Scotland Yard is facing its most serious crisis since the Stephen Lawrence scandal. It is mired, in Lady Brittan’s memorable phrase, in a culture of ‘cover-up and flick away’.
And as she says, rightly: ‘In the end it’s the leadership of any police force. That’s where the bucks stops.’
Only, sadly, that’s no longer the case. The buck stops nowhere, certainly not with Dick of Dock Green.
The usual ‘sources close to’ say that the Commissioner is ‘graciously’ prepared to stand down when her current contract ends next year and won’t seek an extension.
That’s big of her, but it’s nowhere near enough. Significantly, Priti Flamingo yesterday failed conspicuously to express her confidence in Dick, despite being asked several times to do so in a radio interview. (Only later did an aide to the Home Secretary clarify that the Commissioner still enjoyed her support.)
Even if Dick graciously consents to fall on her sword tomorrow, there still has to be a proper criminal investigation, as Sir Richard Henriques insists.
That should start with the immediate arrest of those responsible for deliberately misleading a judge to obtain an unlawful search warrant.
It’s time a few senior coppers had their front doors kicked in and their homes ransacked, too.
Among the items confiscated from Lady Brittan’s house were a number of Inspector Morse videos. Even if the TV adaptations of Colin Dexter’s novels painted an unrealistically positive portrait of a police service dedicated to truth and justice, those days are long gone.
These days, Line Of Duty seems nearer the mark. If that show’s creator Jed Mercurio is ever asked to dramatise the events surrounding Operation Midland and the subsequent cover-up, he’ll have a field day.
Line Of Duty’s chief investigator Supt Ted Hastings would take one look at what’s been going on at Scotland Yard, throw his head in his hands and exclaim: Mother of God!
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