‘NICK’: THE DAMNING DOCUMENT
EXCLUSIVE: Mail discovers police form used to authorise raid on VIP’s home was riddled with falsehoods
A FILE showing police should never have raided the home of Britain’s greatest living soldier can be revealed today.
Detectives claimed in a secret search warrant application that they had no reason to doubt VIP child abuse and murder claims made by the fantasist ‘Nick’.
Signed by a detective sergeant, the document was presented to a judge who approved the raid in March 2015 on the home of Lord Bramall, a D-Day veteran and former head of the Armed Forces.
But an investigation by this newspaper has established that police were aware of at least eight factors that raised serious questions about the outlandish claims made by Nick,
whose real name is Carl Beech. A key factor was that despite extensive efforts police found no evidence to back up Beech’s claim to have suffered physical abuse and injury and to have been absent from school.
Yet officers told district judge Howard Riddle that the 51-year-old former nurse was a ‘consistent’ and ‘credible’ witness.
In the document, which has been seen by the Daily Mail, Judge Riddle wrote that he was assured the implications for the application for the proposed raid had been ‘considered at DAC level’.
This was a reference to Steve Rodhouse, a deputy assistant commissioner with Metropolitan Police and ‘gold commander’ of the bungled £2.5million investigation.
The revelations about the warrants for raids on the homes of Lord Bramall, former home secretary Lord Brittan and ex Tory MP Harvey Proctor, will pile pressure on Home Secretary Priti Patel to order a fresh inquiry into the fiasco.
Last week she demanded a full explanation of the police watchdog’s decision to clear three Operation Midland officers.
Two more senior officers – including Mr Rodhouse – were controversially exonerated two years ago.
Victims of Beech’s lies, and their families, are furious that no police officer has been held to account over the Met’s disastrous investigation.
Today the Daily Mail can also reveal that a rookie worker at the Independent Office for Police Conduct, who was in her late 20s, was the ‘lead investigator’ during the two-year probe that cleared the three officers of misconduct last month.
The latest developments come a week after a former High Court judge said that police broke the law with Operation Midland.
In an astonishing intervention, Sir Richard Henriques told the Daily Mail that officers used false evidence to obtain the search warrants and should now face a criminal investigation.
He said that detectives did not have the right to search the properties because their description of Beech as a consistent witness was false, effectively fooling a judge into granting the warrants.
He also alleged that the ‘course of justice was perverted with shocking consequences’, saying he found it astonishing that no officer has been brought to book.
In 2016 Sir Richard wrote a scathing report for Scotland Yard about Operation Midland. It identified 43 blunders, was heavily redacted and has never been fully made public.
In the wake of the Mail’s revelations last week, a string of distinguished law enforcement figures – including former Met chief Lord Stedophile vens, and former director of public prosecutions Lord Macdonald, have called for an unredacted version of the dossier to be released.
Sir Richard’s broadside at the Met and police watchdogs came days after vicar’s son Beech was jailed for 18 years for telling a string of lies about alleged VIP child sex abuse and serial murders.
At his ten-week trial, jurors heard the fantasist told officers that he was used as a human dartboard by the former heads of MI5 and MI6, that his dog was kidnapped by a spy chief, and that the pae-found ring shot dead his horse. The court also heard that Beech is now a convicted paedophile after child porn offences came to light when an independent police force, at Sir Richard’s behest, started investigating him on suspicion of making false claims about a deadly Establishment paedophile ring.
In the wake of his convictions, Scotland Yard chiefs faced intense criticism over staggering incompetence in 16- month investigation launched on the word of a pathological liar.
But shortly after Beech was guilty, the Independent Office for Police Conduct announced the three officers accused of misconduct over search warrant applications had been cleared.
The watchdog said the officers, led by senior investigating officer detective chief inspector Diane Tudway, acted ‘with due diligence and in good faith at the time’.
But Sir Richard told this newspaper the finding was ‘in conflict’ with his review of Operation Midland in 2016.
Following Beech’s convictions, Met Deputy Commissioner Sir Stephen House said he believed all five officers probed by police watchdogs over Operation Midland ‘worked in good faith’.
They cooperated fully with both the Henriques Review and the Independent Office for Police Conduct investigations, he added.
THE inquiry into allegations of a VIP sex abuse ring codenamed Operation Midland ranks as the most disgraceful episode in the recent history of the Metropolitan Police. A scandal suggesting something rotten in the state of our law-enforcement system.
Acting on the flimsiest pretext, Scotland Yard officers invaded the homes of innocent people in lightning raids, employing search warrants obtained after a court was deceived. In an omission described by an eminent former High Court judge as a perversion of justice and potentially criminal, the investigating team failed to disclose evidence that undermined the case for the house searches, carried out in the full glare of national publicity and resulting in enormous distress for those involved.
These were not the misguided acts of a few inexperienced junior officers but the systematic violation of that most basic of rights — the one protecting law-abiding householders from the arbitrary invasion of their homes by agents of the state. This outrage was sanctioned in the highest reaches of the Met and carried out by detectives displaying a cavalier and contemptuous attitude towards due process.
Operation Midland was a rogue investigation fuelled by an insane Met policy demanding that alleged victims of sexual abuse should not only be listened to seriously but automatically believed.
Society bestows upon the police the right to enter private premises if there are reasonable grounds for doing so during a criminal inquiry — and this privilege should be dependent upon officers using this power wisely and proportionately. Otherwise, we will be living in a banana republic.
That the Midland team — backed by then Deputy Assistant Commissioner Steve Rodhouse, now operations chief of the National Crime Agency — abused this power is made abundantly clear in documents obtained by the Mail.
As this scandal — exposed not by politicians or the official police watchdog but by a Mail investigation — emerges, it poses the question: who effectively polices the police?
Our report today reveals investigators had evidence which made it clear allegations by the serial fantasist Carl Beech concerning the supposed torture and murder of boys by Establishment figures were riddled with inconsistencies but these doubts were not placed before the judge granting the search warrants.
This resulted in untold misery for the targets of the search operation — Field Marshal Lord Bramall, one of Britain’s most distinguished soldiers, the late Lord Brittan and former MP Harvey Proctor.
There were no less than eight separate factors casting doubt on Beech’s version of events. Despite nationwide publicity, no witnesses had come forward to verify his story, and indeed there was no evidence of other victims even existing.
Yet, these failings and other salient facts were not disclosed to the judge who authorised the raids.
This grievous misconduct is there in black and white — in the applications for the search warrants submitted in court. In a declaration by the officer seeking a warrant to search Lord Bramall’s home, he agrees that: ‘To the best of my knowledge and belief: This application discloses all the information that is material to what the court must decide, including anything that might reasonably be considered capable of undermining any of the grounds of the application.’
Answering the requirement for ‘duty of disclosure’ in the case of anything that might call into question the credibility of information received by investigators, the officer enters the response ‘N/A’ — not applicable.
This is utterly false — and it ended in detectives rampaging through the lives of innocent people, living and dead, in a deranged witch-hunt masquerading as a responsible criminal investigation.
All at the behest of Beech, a grandstanding Walter Mitty whose account of devilish sex parties involving Establishment figures torturing and murdering boys would strain the credulity of a sceptical layman, never mind the seasoned detectives of Scotland Yard.
Incompetence on an epic scale is clearly a major ingredient of this fiasco, with common sense flying out of the window. But it is contempt for the law — bordering on criminality — combined with a total disregard for the consequences for individuals that is the mark of this dark farce.
The retired High Court judge who reviewed Midland following its implosion, Sir Richard Henriques, believes some of the police officers involved should face criminal investigation. Amazingly, his full findings are still unavailable to the public — a scandal in itself.
The Met is sticking by its claim that Midland was carried out in good faith. In a weasel-worded statement, it admits that it ‘did not get everything right’ but reminds us that it was conducted under ‘intense scrutiny’. The answer to which is, so what?
The treatment of the Midland victims was appalling. But they were prominent people with access to lawyers. Imagine if this had involved poorer, less prominent families — what chance would they have had of redress? Would these abuses ever have come to light?
And what of the Independent Office for Police Conduct, the supposed police watchdog, which managed to exonerate some of the officers involved without even bothering to interview them? Its credibility as an impartial investigator of alleged malpractice is fatally compromised.
Labour is in the frame, too. Commons home affairs committee chair Yvette Cooper dodges calls for a parliamentary inquiry, while Mayor of London Sadiq Khan is equally mealy-mouthed. Are they afraid of shining too much light on the role in this sordid affair of Labour deputy leader Tom Watson, who stoked the frenzy resulting in Midland?
This imbroglio may not have been the creation of current Commissioner Cressida Dick but it is eating away at the credibility of her force. She must act — and decisively.
Today the Mail demands that the Commissioner publish the Henriques report in full and establish a robust independent inquiry, possibly involving an outside police force. There should also be a thorough review of the workings of the IOPC.
The time has come for people to be called to account, via an independent criminal investigation.
The law is the law — whoever the culprit.