Brittan’s widow: Raid sparked by fantasist’s vile lie traumatised me
THE widow of former Home Secretary Lord Brittan has told how she was paralysed by shock and could not move when police raided her home.
Lady Brittan was still grieving the death of her husband when detectives turned up on her doorstep.
They were investigating what turned out to be a tissue of lies from sex abuse fantasist Carl Beech, now in jail for perverting the course of justice. “I was traumatised with shock,” she told BBC documentary maker Vanessa Engle. “I couldn’t move, like a fly stuck to flypaper.”
The raid on Lady Brittan’s home in Pimlico, central London, in January 2015 was just six weeks after her the death of her husband.
The nightmare experience affected her deeply and she told how the support from friends probably saved her from having a nervous breakdown.
Lord Leon Brittan, who served under Margaret Thatcher, was one of a group of high-profile men falsely accused of being members of a fictitiousVIP child sex ring.
Others included former prime minister Sir Edward Heath, ex-head of the Armed Forces Lord Bramall, the one-time chiefs of MI5 and MI6 and former Tory MP Harvey Proctor.
Beech, once an NHS nurse and known as Nick, fabricated a stream of barely credible allegations about the fantasy gang in the 1970s and claimed they murdered three boys.
Lady Brittan said her housekeeper watched in disbelief as police officers searched their second home in Yorkshire.
At one point, they appeared to be looking for signs of “turned earth” as if they might find evidence of child murders supposedly committed four decades earlier.
In the latest edition of Radio Times, Vanessa described the fantasist’s claims as “quite literally incredible”.
Amazingly, Beech, now serving 18 years in jail, was believed by senior Scotland Yard officers who launched the now defunct Operation Midland which ended up costing taxpayers more than £2million.
Lady Brittan told the film-maker: “Life would have been very different if it had never happened. I think if I’d not had a very good set of friends and supporters, you wonder whether you wouldn’t have had a nervous breakdown.”
The Unbelievable Story Of Carl Beech is on BBC2 next Monday.