If the case against Lord Janner’s still not heard in court, British justice is rotten to the core

ALMOST two months have passed since the Director of Public Prosecutions decided Lord Janner wasn’t fit to stand trial for child sexual abuse offences.

But rather than quietly slipping away from the news headlines, the case against Janner seems to be getting stronger as each week passes — and the stench of a cover-up grows ever more pungent.

It stinks that the timing of Alison Saunders’s decision meant it avoided scrutiny while Parliament wasn’t sitting. And let’s not forget she’d had the file for many months.

Consider the furious response from the police and Janner’s alleged victims to Mrs Saunders’s acknowledgement that there was credible evidence to charge the peer, but it was not in the public interest to do so.

Or the fact that Janner, who is 86, remains a member of the House of Lords, and was well enough to sign a letter confirming he wanted to remain a peer just a week before he was ruled unfit to face charges because he was suffering from dementia.

Calamitous

What reeks to high heaven is that it feels as if the Establishment is looking after its own. The public can see that the operation of justice is not being fully brought to bear in the face of such allegations of serious criminality.

That’s why enough is enough. We cannot continue to have confidence in the Director of Public Prosecutions, who has argued that she is determined to pursue justice for child abuse victims.

Alison Saunders seems to have learned nothing from the calamitous errors of Norman Skelhorn, a DPP who famously ruled it wasn’t in the public interest to prosecute Liberal MP Cyril Smith — whose crimes I fully exposed in a book last year — for child sexual abuse in the late Sixties.

Yesterday’s revelations that Scottish police are investigating a case where Greville Janner allegedly took a teenage boy to Scotland with him in the Seventies and sexually assaulted him, shows how widespread investigations into the Labour peer have been.

We could now potentially have the farcical situation where the Scottish authorities move to prosecute Janner, while the English authorities refuse to do so.

We don’t know what information police in Scotland have regarding these latest sex abuse claims, but it’s obviously enough to warrant an investigation, and it begs the question of whether the Crown Prosecution Service in London was aware of the new allegations.

If not, questions will be asked as to whether it could have influenced Mrs Saunders enough to change her decision not to bring charges, which has been roundly criticised, and after which she has been forced to draft in an unnamed external QC to re- examine the case.

In recent weeks, investigations by this newspaper have exposed serious allegations about the activities of Janner in the Seventies and Eighties.

Indeed, his case has come to epitomise a time we’re all desperate to leave behind. It represents an era where sexual abuse crimes by high-profile figures were routinely swept under the carpet.

This was a period of recent history where criminal figures like the Krays were said to provide ‘rent boys’ for Establishment figures such as Lord Boothby and Tom Driberg MP; when sex parties regularly took place in and around Westminster; and the Paedophile Information Exchange was openly lobbying MPs to lower the age of consent.

That culture allowed the likes of Sir Cyril Smith to prey on boys in children’s homes and schools with impunity.

Of course, there is far greater public awareness of this type of crime today, but sometimes it feels as if little has changed at the top of society since the days when, as Lord Tebbit admitted, the instinct of people in charge was ‘ to protect’ the system.

George Orwell famously said that England was the most class-ridden country under the sun. ‘It’s a land of snobbery and privilege ruled by the old and silly,’ he said.

Nothing illustrates this divide more sharply than the stream of allegations which have emerged in recent years about MPs and peers being able to prey on vulnerable children in care homes, and rape them knowing the law will never catch up with them.

It is all a chilling throwback to a kind of droit du seigneur; powerful people sexually exploiting vulnerable children from lower social classes, which has been a feature of British life for centuries.

Certainly, the sense of entitlement in the man at the heart of the latest paedophile allegations — Greville Janner — is particularly strong: he even inherited his seat in Parliament from his father.

And in Janner’s case we’re not simply talking about accusations of groping.

Last year, police officers from Leicester — where Janner held his parliamentary seat, and where he is alleged to have abused several children — made a 250-mile round trip to visit me to discuss this case. What I heard was stomach-churning.

Even today, I can’t think about what I was told by those police officers without getting upset.

This is a frightening case that demands that the allegations are tested in a court of law.

Similarities

If the DPP remains adamant that Janner is too ill to stand in the dock, then there must be a so- called trial of the facts instead — so that justice can be seen to be done.

This simply means that all the allegations can be aired in a courtroom, and witnesses allowed to put their side of the story. But the defendant will not be present.

There are precedents to support this. After all, in 2012 the former Labour MP Margaret Moran was found guilty by a jury of false accounting and six charges of forgery, despite having been absent from court because she had been deemed by psychiatrists to be unfit to plead.

And, in a case with striking similarities to Janner’s, five years ago at Exeter Crown Court Michael Collingwood, also suffering from dementia, was found to have ‘done the act charged’ when a case of the sexual abuse of under-age girls was heard in his absence.

The idea that Janner can simply sidestep justice is just not palatable to the British public. Someone must have the courage to reverse Alison Saunders’s decision.

For this is not just the story of one privileged man — it is about the lives of those who say he abused and damaged them when they were too young to stop it.

We’re all slowly coming to terms with the scale of child abuse in the United Kingdom, but its impact is still not properly understood.

Unspeakable

Only last month, Australia’s Royal Commission into institutional child abuse heard how children who have been abused often have a life expectancy that’s 20 years shorter than those who haven’t. That’s because they are prone to suicide.

This highlights a stark, often unspeakable truth. That while some elderly peers and MPs managed to escape justice for many years, their victims were unable to live with the immense harm that had been done to them.

‘Justice will not be served until those who are unaffected are as outraged as those who are,’ said one of the founding fathers of the United States, Benjamin Franklin.

While we currently have a situation where alleged victims are being treated for posttraumatic shock as a result of Mrs Saunders’s decision not to prosecute Janner, and an unnamed QC is leading a review of her decision with no apparent timetable in place, there seems very little prospect of such justice being served.

In the case of the monstrous Cyril Smith, I’ve seen and felt at first hand the outrage and fury that Benjamin Franklin referred to. Thanks to a complicit Establishment, Smith was able to die without ever facing a courtroom. The same thing goes for Jimmy Savile.

At present, several of Greville Janner’s alleged victims are preparing a civil case for damages, but if he is innocent, let those who accuse him have their day in a criminal court, and a jury can decide the truth.

Anything less, and the feeling will remain that there is something rotten at the heart of British justice.