A cloud hanging over Cliff Richard for 544 days and another stain on British justice
FOUR years ago, when police began their high-profile investigation into VIP child abuse, senior officers vowed that their actions would be ‘proportionate and consistent’.
How hollow those words look today.
Time after time, people who are national figures have been subject to lurid allegations that turn out to be fragile, baseless or even fantastical.
We might have expected the authorities to learn from the circus they inspired in August 2014 when plainclothes officers in five unmarked cars raided Sir Cliff Richard’s Berkshire home while a helicopter chartered by the BBC hovered overhead to broadcast live pictures.
Of course, none of us knows the truth of the allegations laid against him about an incident way back in 1985, but in a sense that is not the point.
Shame
For as this newspaper reported yesterday, it is now 544 days since the day Sir Cliff was so publicly outed as a suspected sex offender — and yet still no file has been sent to the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS).
That’s three times longer than it took to bring the Nazi hierarchy to trial at Nuremberg after World War II, which cost the lives of 50 million people.
Can the police or the CPS seriously think this is being proportionate and consistent?
They certainly don’t seem to feel the shame they are so generously heaping on others.
Former Chief of the Defence Staff, Field Marshal Lord Bramall, is the latest in a long line of victims — and ‘victims’ is the right word in what is supposed to be a process of justice.
Lord Bramall is a man I know and regard as of the highest personal integrity. Not even the wildest conspiracy theorist could have considered him to be a dangerous criminal.
Yet even though he was in his 90s and his wife was frail (in fact, she died a few weeks later), 20 officers raided their home as though he were a Mafia kingpin.
Worse still, in his case, as in others, the police inquiries had no obvious sense of urgency even once the name of the ‘suspect’ was in the public domain.
Last month, almost a year later, there was a grudging admission that there was never anything convincing against him in the first place.
It does not take much imagination to guess what it must be like to be publicly accused of sexual molestation, rape or paedophilia.
There have been reports that Sir Cliff was selling the home that was raided, feeling it had been defiled, and he has been spending much of his time since in Portugal.
The former Tory MP Harvey Proctor, who also faced an anonymous accuser, has moved abroad in disgust.
The transfixing shame is enough to destroy people’s lives. And there is no way to alleviate the pressure. The more you deny the allegations, the more that people think there must be something to them.
Justice is inverted. Gossips insist they always knew there was something odd about you as they discuss the story with a knowing wink and a nod. In the case of Lord Brittan, he died in January 2015 under a terrible cloud of suspicion.
And that’s another thing. No one is formally cleared by these inquiries. There is no exoneration and, as yet, no apology.
Having had their reputations trashed, the men in question are simply told ‘ no further action’ will be taken — what’s known in the jargon as NFA.
The title of comedian Jim Davidson’s book was clearly heartfelt — No Further Action: The Darkest Year Of My Life.
Even the dead are not safe. Last year, the Wiltshire police made an extraordinary television appeal for witnesses to come forward with claims of abuse by the former prime minister Sir Edward Heath.
It was an open invitation for cranks, fantasists and conspiracy theorists to tarnish Sir Edward’s name.
All too predictably, not a single piece of credible evidence has been produced against him. We have perverted the very concept of British justice.
The great irony in all this is that we used to be indignant that so few cases of sexual assault resulted in conviction.
We were appalled when Esther Rantzen’s ChildLine first exposed the staggering extent of child abuse in Britain.
We were horrified when we learned about institutionalised cruelty and sexual exploitation in care homes, churches and boarding schools.
We were outraged when it seemed there had been coverups in sex abuse rings, such as those in Rotherham and the scandal of the serial childmolesting MP Cyril Smith.
And we were incandescent when the staggering truth emerged about the greatest abuser of them all, Jimmy Savile.
As a result of cases like those, a mantra developed that every child’s allegation should be believed; every woman who complained of a sex assault should be taken at face value; every ‘survivor’ of historic molestation must be deemed credible.
It’s convenient to overlook the fact that the police were in the dock for inaction — precisely the opposite of the overreaction they stand accused of. Little wonder that a senior officer told me recently: ‘We’re damned if we do and damned if we don’t.’
Failures
Nor should we neglect the fact that some of the historic allegations have been proved in court, with long prison sentences handed down to celebrities such as Gary Glitter, Max Clifford and Rolf Harris.
But there plainly is a problem — one that the sorry story of Sir Cliff Richard’s treatment makes all too plain. The fact is that the police are not detached professionals. Perhaps inevitably, they reflect the vagaries of public opinion and the changes in our cultural attitudes.
As I saw myself from my years on Crimewatch, police investigations can get carried on a tide of public sentiment.
Allied to that, police chiefs and detectives, stung by their failures in the past over Savile and others, are keen to prove themselves.
But they don’t have the resources, which is one reason these latest inquiries have been so wretchedly protracted.
Putting things right will not just be a matter of refining legal processes. We like to revere the British method of justice, stretching back to before the time of Magna Carta.
But our judicial system is antiquated and its approach to sex crimes, in particular, is riddled with contradictions.
There is the tension, for instance, between the need for anonymity for rape victims or, indeed, for the accused, and the tradition that justice should be transparent.
Mockery
I note that MPs are planning to vote this week to grant themselves anonymity if any of them are arrested — a move that would make a mockery of equality under the law.
If MPs can be arrested without being shamed by public exposure, then why not peers, police officers or celebrities — or ordinary members of the public, whose lives can also be destroyed by scandalous allegations?
There are many other contradictions, too, as the case of Sir Cliff proves all too graphically, such as the conflict between the need to carry out thorough investigations and the danger of creating severe delays during which time a person’s reputation takes a fearful battering. After all, justice delayed is justice denied.
Also, let’s face it, the traditional much- cherished adversarial system of prosecution and defence is hardly the ideal way to establish the truth in the emotionally charged, intimate arena of sexual relations, where faded memories, misconceptions, outright lies and changing moral attitudes all play their part.
Even the essential verdicts of traditional law, guilty and not guilty, seem crude when the real world of human relations has so few absolutes.
Until we are prepared to change the way the police investigate historic sex allegations, I fear it will be hard to avoid more people like Lord Bramall and Sir Cliff Richard being hounded in the future, while many serious and dangerous offenders still go free.