JUDGE BLASTS ‘NICK’ POLICE WHITEWASH
Fury at watchdogs who cleared officers of misconduct in sex abuse fantasist case
THE police watchdogs who cleared five ‘Nick’ scandal detectives are savaged by a former High Court judge today. Richard Henriques says ‘no effective interrogations’ were carried out during the ‘flawed’ inquiry by the independent Office for Police Conduct.
Calling on Home Secretary Priti Patel to take action, he expresses alarm at the watchdog’s ‘lack of knowledge of criminal procedure’.
in an article in today’s Daily Mail, Sir Richard accuses the agency of ‘gross and inexcusable delays’ in a ‘lamentable and inadequate’ inquiry.
His bombshell comments come as the IOPC prepares to publish a report explaining why it exonerated the officers involved in a disastrous VIP child sex abuse probe.
Sources familiar with the dossier call it a ‘disgraceful whitewash’ – ‘sloppy, partial and full of errors’.
Sir Richard, who spent several
months investigating Scotland Yard over Operation Midland before demanding five officers face a misconduct probe, also reveals that the IOPC waited 20 months before taking a statement from him.
He says the official who belatedly contacted him ‘readily conceded her lack of relevant education, training and experience’. He stresses that the woman, who the Daily Mail has decided not to name, should not be made a scapegoat for the serious failings in the case.
Instead he directs the blame higher up the organisation which is led by Michael Lockwood, an accountant who headed a suburban London council.
Last week the appalling failures of what is now considered to be one of Scotland Yard’s most disgraceful investigations were laid bare when Sir Richard’s damning 2016 report on Midland, previously heavily redacted, was published.
It documented how officers made 43 major errors and wasted £2.5million probing bogus claims of VIP child abuse and murder by Nick – the convicted paedophile Carl Beech who is serving 18 years for perjury and other offences.
Yet Steve Rodhouse, the officer who oversaw the shambles, remains in his £240,000-a-year job at the National Crime Agency. Sir Richard’s scathing commen tary in the Mail today will make uncomfortable reading for Miss Patel, who has faced calls to set up a rigorous, fully independent investigation into the conduct of blundering detectives.
There have been repeated demands for Mr Rodhouse, described as an ‘embarrassment’ by a Home Office official, to be removed from his job. Also caught up in the affair is Met Commissioner Cressida Dick, who oversaw the setting up of Midland in November 2014 and who has refused to answer questions from the Mail about her role.
The IOPC’s decision to exonerate all five officers looked even more extraordinary last week following the publication of Sir Richard’s report. It revealed that Mr Rodhouse thought parts of Nick’s account may have been fabricated yet still kept to a strategy of declaring publicly that police believed him.
Geoffrey Robertson QC, who is representing Harvey Proctor, a Tory ex-MP who was falsely accused by Nick, said the Henriques report revealed that ‘Operation Midland was conducted incompetently, negligently and almost with institutional stupidity’.
In his article today, Sir Richard says that he finds ‘it difficult to conceive that no misconduct or criminality was involved by at least one officer’ on the 16-month inquiry, which ended without any arrests or charges.
He concludes by warning: ‘Maintenance of law and order depends upon the effective oversight of those invested with power. Who guards the guards themselves? A malfunctioning police force has not received the necessary oversight.’