Labour No 2 told: Quit as MP for your smearing of the innocent
TOM Watson was last night told to quit as an MP as he was accused of fuelling a ‘moral panic’ and a climate of establishment hysteria over child sex abuse.
The Labour deputy leader met Carl Beech in his Westminster office just months before he made his outlandish claims to Scotland Yard in late 2014.
The following year Mr Watson personally met a Metropolitan Police detective sergeant to discuss Beech’s fantastical claims following an initial phone discussion, it can now be revealed.
Last night, Mr Watson was slammed by victims of Beech’s lies and accused of furthering his own career by making political capital out of their misery.
Daniel Janner QC, son of the late Labour peer Greville Janner, called on Mr Watson to resign and criticised him for taking the ‘moral high ground’ against anti-Semitism in the Labour Party, having helped smear innocent men as paedophiles.
Former MP Harvey Proctor, who Beech accused of murdering a child, called on Mr Watson to apologise.
But, in a 1,400 word statement last night, Mr Watson refused to apologise to victims of Beech’s allegations and sought to defend himself, saying it was not his role to judge whether victims’ stories were true. Referring to Beech by the pseudonym he was using at the time of their meeting, he said: ‘I encouraged every person that came to me to take their story to the police and that is what I did with nick.’
Mr Watson’s direct role in the Beech case began in 2014 when he welcomed the former health worker to Westminster, knowing he had made allegations, including the murder of a child by members of an establishment paedophile ring.
The pair spoke ‘at length’. Mr Watson would later be described by Beech as being part of a ‘little group’, alongside a journalist from the now-disgraced investigative news website exaro and
‘Whipped up a public frenzy’
a retired social worker, who helped him ‘put my information out there’.
Shortly after this, Beech contacted the Metropolitan Police with his lurid claims.
The MP initially retained a degree of scepticism. He said: ‘What I’m certain of is that he’s not delusional. He is either telling the truth, or he’s made up a meticulous and elaborate story. It’s not for me to judge.’
His role, he would later say, was to offer ‘nick’ ‘a degree of protection’ to make his allegations. Mr Watson had been basking in the praise he received for helping to expose the tabloid phone-hacking scandal which ultimately led to the closure of the news of the World. In 2012, as the row over the late Jimmy Savile’s paedophile crimes raged, he intervened during Prime Minister’s Questions with the headline- grabbing statement that there is ‘clear intelligence suggesting a powerful paedophile network linked to Parliament and no 10’.
Mr Watson had been contacted by self- styled abuse ‘whistleblower’ Peter McKelvie – also part of Beech’s ‘ little group’ – who said he had evidence of a paedophile ring.
On his own admission, the Labour MP now found himself receiving an ‘avalanche’ of historic child sex abuse complaints from alleged victims.
Months before meeting Beech, Mr Watson spoke to a woman who said she had been abused by the former home secretary Lord Brittan. Mr Watson wrote to Alison Saunders, the Director of Public Prosecutions, complaining that the peer had not been interviewed by Scotland Yard over an alleged 1967 attack. In fact, police had already concluded there were no substance to the allegations made by a woman known as ‘Jane’, a Labour activist suffering from mental health issues.
When Lord Brittan died in early 2015 under a cloud of accusations, Mr Watson traduced the former peer when he could no longer defend himself.
Repeating an unsubstantiated quote from a ‘survivor’, he wrote that Lord Brittan was ‘as close to evil as a human being could get in my view’.
There was never any evidence to back up the claims and Mr Watson apologised to Lady Brittan in late 2015. He later admitted he had let his self-appointed status as child abuse campaigner take over his life.
Last night barrister Mr Janner, added: ‘His motive was personal political advancement riding on a bandwagon of public frenzy which he had whipped up.’