New inquiry sparked by MoS exposé of confession
POLICE launched Operation Velum in 2016 after The Mail on Sunday revealed claims that a confession implicating Jeremy Thorpe in a plot to murder his former lover was destroyed in a Whitehall cover-up.
The claims came from Dennis Meighan who said the truth about his role in the affair had always weighed heavily on his mind. This newspaper published his sensational account of the affair in December 2014.
It led to Gwent Police’s Major Incident Team being asked by the Independent Police Complaints Commission to carry out an investigation into the ‘circumstances of the conspiracy to murder Norman Scott’.
It appeared to be a positive attempt to establish who in Whitehall, or elsewhere, had the authority to destroy Meighan’s confession implicating Thorpe in the conspiracy – and replace it with a fake statement that made no mention of the Liberal leader.
But when two detectives interviewed a Mail on Sunday reporter at a hotel in Richmond, Surrey, in March 2016, it became clear that the Velum team was more interested in putting Meighan behind bars than exposing the outrageous cover-up.
It did, however, identify the detective who appeared to have witnessed the fake confession Meighan was forced to sign at Brentford police station back in 1975. Gwent Police traced the officer – but he said he had never heard of Meighan.
Their efforts were detailed in a letter sent from CPS senior prosecutor Nicola Rees to Norman Scott in February last year. To Mr Scott’s chagrin, the letter detailed the reasons the inquiry had stalled – one of them being that Andrew Newton, who could confirm Meighan’s role, was dead. As we now know, that was not true.
The letter makes clear that it had indeed been the police’s intention to prosecute Meighan for conspiring to murder Norman Scott and Rees said she was satisfied ‘Gwent police have carried out all possible lines of inquiry.
‘… Having completed their inquiries police have passed the file to me to consider the possibility of bringing charges against either of the two [Meighan and the detective],’ said Rees
She went on to say that ‘perhaps unsurprisingly’ Meighan ‘exercised his right to silence’ when he was interviewed under caution. While Meighan made a full confession, she added, it was done so ‘outside the protection afforded by the Police and Criminal Evidence Act’ which prevents police interviewing suspects without reading them their rights.
‘Unfortunately there is no independent witness or evidence to support Mr Meighan’s account. Newton who named him as the person who supplied him with the gun never implicated him in anything more than that at the time… and of course police are unable to question him [Newton] now as he is deceased.’
Rees added: ‘In the absence of any corroborative evidence to support Mr Meighan’s account any arguments to admit his account in an interview not carried out under police caution is bound to fail…’
She later explains that there was no other evidence to suggest that the statement made by Meighan in the trial was false [when Meighan said he had simply supplied the gun used to kill Norman Scott’s dog].