The police should stand firm against moral panic, not facilitate its spread

The Met’s behaviour over its botched Operation Midland undermines our trust in the justice system

It is during times of national stress and even crisis that institutions prove their value. At such times, we recall who and what we should trust. Which is why we hold them to such a high standard. For institutions in a democracy work in a very specific way. They gain loyalty from the public because they have given loyalty to us. Such reciprocity is the key.

And that is why it is so serious when we learn that the police or any other institution set up to serve the public appears to have misled the public or done something which has actually worked against the public.

The release this week of a report into lessons unlearned by the Metropolitan Police Service is a deeply disturbing moment. The report was commissioned in October by Priti Patel, the Home Secretary. It constitutes the third inquiry into the Met’s investigation (known as Operation Midland) of the clearly fictitious claims made about a murderous ring of paedophiles in high positions in public life. An earlier inquiry into police actions was carried out by retired High

Court judge Sir Richard Henriques and delivered in 2016. This latest report is into whether the police had learned any lessons from the damning conclusions of his report. Its findings are dire.

The latest inquiry concludes that the police effectively ignored the catalogue of mistakes uncovered in 2016. After receiving the Henriques findings, the police seemed to be more interested in protecting the reputation of its own force than in learning from its appalling mistakes. For three years, the Met failed to act on Henriques’ urgent recommendations. The Met Commissioner, Dame Cressida Dick, has yet to explain this state of affairs.

There are people who will get lost in the weeds of this. Which is why the bigger picture of institutional failure needs to be recalled. The problem with Operation Midland is not just that it defamed people and destroyed their lives and reputations. People like the former Conservative MP Harvey Proctor were the victims of a fantasist (Carl Beech) who was subsequently sent to prison for 18 years for perverting the course of justice. But Proctor and others were also the victims of a police force which bizarrely believed someone whom multiple journalists and others had already identified as the malicious fantasist that he was.

Still, this was not the deepest level at which the Met proved dysfunctional. That level was the one at which the police force – like other institutions – had most need to prove itself. To prove that it was a bulwark against the irrationality and fears of a passing moment.

It is worth casting our minds back to the time at which the Beech allegations were at their height. The crimes of Jimmy Savile had been posthumously exposed, leading to justifiable public anger and amazement that somebody could have got away with acting as he had simply because of his high-profile position. Savile having died, there was nobody to have a reckoning with. This left the ground open for a classic moral panic and stampede. Fertile ground for demagogues, frauds and a collection of moral hucksters.

It was inevitable that opportunists would step into the void that had opened. On this occasion, the Labour MP Tom Watson was the person who appointed himself witchfinder general. In a set of extraordinary interventions in Parliament, he placed a conspiracy theory that would disgrace an online discussion forum on to the record in Hansard. In late October 2012, three weeks after the Savile exposé, Watson used parliamentary privilege to demand David Cameron’s government investigate “clear intelligence suggesting a powerful paedophile network linked to Parliament and No10”. He later wrote to Cameron warning him against caution in the subsequent investigations. For, Watson claimed with typically ignorant grandiosity, “decorous caution is the friend of the paedophile”.

Many institutions failed in the days and weeks that followed. Sections of the media went to town on allegations that the briefest smell test should have suggested were bogus. Many people failed to exercise decent judgment. The now sainted Phillip Schofield tried to ambush the prime minister on morning TV by handing him a list of alleged high-ranking paedophiles. It was a disgraceful moment, which Cameron was suitably and admirably restrained in side-stepping. But there was an insanity in the air. The LBC radio shock-jock James O’brien ran show after show in which he gave the Beech allegations an absolutely clear run. O’brien repeatedly warned his listeners about high-profile, murderous paedophile gangs. Day after day he used LBC to allege that lies were truths.

Perhaps it is inevitable that shockjocks get away with such tirades. Perhaps they are not held in high enough regard for there to be any wider effort to go after their lies with a pooper-scooper.

But the police? It remains dumbfounding how the police in those crucial hours decided to stampede in the same direction as figures such as Watson and O’brien. How could the Met have dared to describe the Beech allegations – ahead of its investigations – as “credible and true”? How could the police have even thought of giving a press conference in front of the former Salisbury residence of the then long-deceased Sir Edward Heath? This is not the behaviour of an institution keeping its head while all about them are losing theirs. It is a textbook example of an institution joining a public panic and, by joining that panic, making it infinitely worse than it would otherwise have been. Behaviour legitimised, incidentally, by guidance drawn up by Keir Starmer, as DPP, that encouraged prosecutors not to focus on the credibility of those making allegations.

The lessons to learn are certainly specific – as the Henriques report set out. But they are also huge and directional: to do with the whole leadership of the force. For, at a moment when portions of the public, press and even Parliament are losing their heads, it is crucial that a force like the Met makes it clear that this country still has a seriously functioning system of justice, and that this system moves slowly because it moves judiciously. That means not whipping along the 24-hour news cycle, but standing athwart it. It means calling for calm until the evidence is in. It means reminding people of the precious principle of innocent until proven guilty. This is exactly what the police did not do in those days.

It is inevitable that whenever an institution experiences criticism, it behaves – as most people do – with a degree of self-protection. It is natural to have an inclination to hunker down, protect one’s own and not accept that wrong was done. Or to accept it publicly but to cavil and sulk in private. It is Cressida Dick’s problem if it is judged that her force did indeed act in this way. But it is a wider problem for this country that we have a police force apparently unwilling to learn from its own mistakes. Not just for its own sake. But for ours.

For in the time ahead there are likely to be greater trials than a classic paedophile panic. And it would be good for people to feel confident that, when such times come, we have a police force that will not buckle before every wind, but stand against it, protect the public, and with decorous caution perform its necessarily judicious job.

follow Douglas Murray on Twitter @Douglaskmurray; read more at telegraph.co.uk/opinion