Police told 4 times to axe Brittan rape investigation
SCOTLAND Yard admitted yesterday that it refused to drop a baseless rape claim against former Home Secretary Leon Brittan over fears of a media and public backlash.
Senior officers confessed they were told four times by the Crown Prosecution Service that there were no grounds to charge the Tory peer over the historic allegations.
But they refused to abandon the case for almost three years – hounding him until his death in January. Even after he died, they still urged the CPS to review the case.
In a lengthy statement yesterday, the Metropolitan Police admitted detectives had been aware since September 2013 that there was ‘not a strong case’ against Lord Brittan.
But they claimed that a decision to scrap the prosecution against such a high-profile public figure ‘would undoubtedly have resulted in media criticism and public cynicism’.
Last night, a friend of Lord Brittan said this was a ‘tacit admission’ that detectives continued the highly damaging and hurtful investigation for purely political reasons, adding: ‘That is about as far away from natural justice as you can get.’
The Yard statement raises fresh questions for deputy Labour leader Tom Watson, who championed the case against Lord Brittan and demanded the CPS pursue it despite the lack of evidence. He has refused to apologise for unjustly blackening the peer’s name.
Pressure is also increasing on Met boss Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe, who claimed yesterday that he ‘couldn’t remember’ whether he had been informed that there was no evidence against Lord Brittan.
‘We investigate about 800,000 crimes, so I just can’t remember,’ he said. Critics pointed out that very few of those crimes would involve serious sexual allegations against a former Home Secretary.
In an attempt to distance Sir Bernard from the shambles, the statement added that it would not have been ‘appropriate for the Commissioner to interfere in the investigation into a rape allegation, whoever was involved’.
The Yard also admitted Lord Brittan’s widow should have been informed that the rape allegation was baseless. The peer died in January without being told he had been cleared of the rape allegation, made by a Labour activist with severe mental health problems. The close friend of Lord Brittan
‘VIP likely to be treated less fairly’
told the Daily Mail: ‘ The underlying message is that the police went back to the CPS, time and time again, because of the pressure coming from Tom Watson and the rape accuser.
‘What it shows is that if you are a VIP, you are likely to be treated less fairly by the police than if you are a normal citizen. The Met has admitted they have acted in a certain way because of the political climate.’
The CPS first said there was no case against Lord Brittan two years ago. Yet it was only last week that a senior officer grudgingly informed his widow that there had been no evidence against her husband and apologised for the delay in informing her of the outcome of the case.
In its 2,050 word statement, the force included a detailed timeline of developments in the inquiry, sparked when the woman known as ‘Jane’ made an allegation in November 2012 that she had been raped by Lord Brittan in London in 1967, when she was 19. The timeline shows that the CPS said there was no basis for a prosecution three times before Lord Brittan died, and again on a fourth occasion after his death.
The Met was unapologetic yesterday for its pursuit of Lord Brittan. Its statement said: ‘It was felt that these were highly unusual circumstances where the previous independence of the police to tackle sexual offending by VIPs had been publicly called into question.’