LITTLEJOHN

AGATHA CHRISTIE’S Ordeal By Innocence was a highlight of BBC1’s easter schedule. For a minute, I thought it might be a drama about celebrities falsely accused of ‘historic’ sex crimes.

especially when I read that one of the original actors, ed Westwick, had been written out of the script because he had fallen foul of the #MeToo madness.

The details of the accusations against him need not detain us, particularly as Westwick denies them and has yet to be charged with anything.

The only surprise is that the police and Crown Prosecution service haven’t called a press conference to appeal for more of his ‘victims’ to come forward, promising that they will be believed, however lurid and implausible their stories.

Two news items yesterday brought into sharp relief the shocking travesty that so- called British justice has become in recent years.

The first was a report that Alison saunders is standing down as director of Public Prosecutions after five years. did she jump or was she pushed? she maintains it was her decision. Frankly, who cares? All that matters is she’s going.

saunders should have been sacked long ago. she has used her office to further a naked political agenda, like a pushy u.s. district attorney in pursuit of re-election.

Hand in glove with sections of the police, her prime targets have included ageing disc jockeys and TV presenters accused of sex crimes and tabloid journalists seeking the truth by paying public officials for information.

At times, it has seemed as if the CPs and scotland Yard were taking their marching orders directly from nonce Finder General Tom Watson, Labour’s loathsome deputy leader, whose mission in life is apparently to smear as many Tories as possible, dead or alive.

In her desperation to secure more rape convictions, to appease the feminist lobby, saunders has presided over a culture that considered it perfectly acceptable to withold evidence from defence counsel which could prove their client’s innocence.

Perverting the course of justice is supposed to be a criminal offence. under Alison saunders it seems to have become an instrument of public policy.

The presumption of innocence, the foundation of the British criminal justice system for centuries, has been turned on its head, replaced with a presumption of guilt — even before credible evidence has been produced, or anyone has been formally charged.

Prosecutors have taken to holding pre-trial press conferences, presumably with the intention of establishing an impression of guilt. We have been treading dangerously closely towards adopting the American ‘perp walk’ — whereby suspects are paraded ostentatiously in handcuffs before the cameras immediately after their arrest.

SAUNDERS herself gave one such media conference following the arrest of a doctor in north London accused of carrying out the grotesque practice of female genital mutilation (FGM), so eager was she to secure a conviction.

Without going into the gory details, when the case eventually came to court it was revealed that the doctor on trial had not performed FGM, merely repaired the damage done by an earlier procedure. It took the jury just a few minutes to find him not guilty.

There can be no doubt that this prosecution was politically motivated, simply to satisfy saunders’ determination to be seen to be ‘doing something’ about FGM, even if that meant putting an innocent doctor through hell.

Politics also lay behind her decision to extend the interpretation of what constitutes a ‘hate crime’, a ludicrous concept that disregards intent and relies solely on interpretation. so if someone, anyone, alleges that such an offence has been committed, then one is deemed automatically to have taken place.

Fortunately, juries have not always behaved as saunders might have wished, regularly throwing out an assortment of charges against journalists, entertainers and alleged rapists.

In the case of serial sex offenders such as rolf Harris and stuart Hall, prosecutions were justified and the guilty verdicts welcomed widely. But countless other, wholly innocent men had their lives destroyed by the post- Jimmy savile hysteria.

I won’t name them all here yet again. They’ve suffered enough. But I’m sure Cliff richard will forgive me for reminding you of the heavy-handed raid on his home, complete with BBC television helicopter hovering overhead.

All of this came about not just because the law had failed to catch savile while he was alive, but because of a shift in policy on saunders’ watch.

Instead of acting impartially and weighing the evidence before deciding whether to prosecute someone, the culture decreed that the ‘ victim’ would always be believed, especially in sex cases.

That’s what led directly to a string of high-profile miscarriages of justice. It was a policy wholeheartedly embraced by the police and caused everyone from the late Prime Minister edward Heath to Lord Bramall, former head of the Armed Forces, to be falsely accused on the word of a fantasist, promoted by Tom Watson.

so it was heartening yesterday to read the second piece of good news, a statement from Metropolitan Police chief Cressida dick instructing her officers to investigate impartially, not blindly believe complainants.

This is a marked shift of emphasis from her hapless predecessor Bernard Hyphen-Howe, whose period in office resulted in innocent individuals being falsely accused of crimes various and left dangling in legal limbo, sometimes for years. under saunders and Hyphen-Howe, the dispensation of British justice came to resemble something one would expect to find in Putin’s russia, not the nation that gave the world Magna Carta.

Let’s hope, too, that Commissioner dick also gets round to ending the systemic abuse of police bail and ransacking homes of anyone accused of even fairly minor crimes.

during Hyphen-Howe’s disastrous tour of duty, it became commonplace to see police officers emerging from suspects’ houses carrying black bin liners groaning with personal possessions.

In the case of an old newspaper friend of mine wrongly accused of involvement in phone hacking, detectives even searched his teenage daughters’ knicker drawers. What the hell were they hoping to find?

nothing, really. The intention was simply to intimidate.

Much as they deny it, it would appear that the police view any allegation of wrongdoing as an excuse to turn the suspect’s life — and that of his or her family — upside down, in the hope of stumbling across something to charge them with.

This outrageous practice has to end. These fishing expeditions would shame a spanish factory ship.

There’s always an outcry over stop and search, the consequences of which we are now having to live with. since stop and search was scaled back, London now has more murders than new York.

But somehow, we never hear much of a peep (outside this column), especially from politicians, about the clumsy, comprehensive, completely unjustified searches of innocent people’s homes.

WE MUST remain ever vigilant. Only yesterday, we also learned that police are using spy technology to download the entire contents of mobile phones belonging not just to suspects, but to witnesses and victims of crime, too. There can be absolutely no justification for this monstrous invasion of privacy.

I wonder how Alison saunders would react to the news that police are surreptitiously harvesting data, Facebook style. If her track record as DPP is anything to go by, she’d probably argue that the ends justify the means.

In a self- serving interview with radio 4 yesterday, saunders refused to show any contrition or offer any apology to those falsely accused men and women whose lives were ruined on her watch.

Betraying her barely disguised Leftist inclinations, she blamed any shortcomings during her time in office on spending ‘cuts’. Of course she did.

It’s a miracle she still managed to find millions to persecute so many innocent people.

saunders now saunters off to a lucrative job in private practice, complete with a £1.8 million pension pot from grateful taxpayers.

Meanwhile, those she dragged through the courts, even though they were guilty of no crime, are still trying to rebuild their lives.

While saunders polishes her CV, they are condemned for eternity, associated on the internet as, at best, ‘ accused’ or ‘alleged’ sex criminals, the ‘ FGM’ doctor and so on.

For them, their ordeal by innocence is far from over.

Presumption of innocence has been replaced by a presumption of guilt