STEPHEN GLOVER

EMINENT former High Court judges do not normally challenge Establishment thinking. It is virtually unprecedented for one of their number to step forward and allege police incompetence, and possibly illegality, on a vast scale.

So we owe Sir Richard Henriques a great debt for his breathtaking revelations published in today’s Mail. It can’t have been easy for this one-time pillar of the judiciary to blow the gaff on the forces of law and order in such a public way.

No one can plausibly question the veracity or accuracy of his disturbing, and entirely convincing, claims. For he is a highly respected senior ex-judge of great experience and profound legal knowledge.

He also wrote in 2016 an official report about Operation Midland — the Metropolitan Police Service’s cack-handed inquiry into sex allegations against prominent supposed offenders, which cost £2.5 million.

There can be little doubt that Sir Richard has considered this lamentable and illconceived investigation more painstakingly than any other person alive.

The nub of his complaint — which was redacted from his published, highly critical report — is that the police ‘unlawfully’ searched the homes of Lord Bramall, Lady Brittan and Harvey Proctor as part of Operation Midland.

These unfortunate victims, along with several others, were targeted by police after baseless falsehoods had been circulated by Carl Beech, once known as ‘Nick’. The 51year- old fantasist was jailed for 18 years last week for his ‘hideous and repugnant’ lies about alleged VIP sex abuse.

What is so deeply worrying about Sir Richard’s allegations is not only that the police credulously went along with Beech’s absurd stories, with one senior officer, Superintendent Kenny McDonald, idiotically describing them as ‘credible and true’ during the investigation.

More pertinently, the worry is that in making applications to search the houses of Lord Bramall, Lady Brittan and Harvey Proctor, police officers made statements that ignored the many inconsistencies in Carl Beech’s testimony.

FOR example, Beech told Wiltshire Police he was first raped by an unnamed lieutenant- colonel. But he informed the Metropolitan Police he was first raped by his stepfather.

Many other glaring inconsistencies were also withheld from the district judge, whose approval was needed before warrants could be granted to carry out searches.

These highly intrusive procedures, which of course turned up nothing, were upsetting in the extreme to the wholly innocent, and also elderly, people involved.

One such case involved Lord Bramall, a World War II hero and former Chief of the Defence Staff. In 2015, 20 police mounted a dawn raid on his Hampshire home and stayed for ten hours. This left his wife, who suffered from Alzheimer’s, bewildered and confused.

Tragically for Lord Bramall, his wife died before he could finally clear his name. His identity had already been leaked to the media, prompting a disgusting campaign against him on the internet.

Sir Richard Henriques is clear that senior police officers must have been aware of the inconsistencies in Beech’s evidence, and would surely have known there was no legal basis for ransacking people’s private homes.

He even goes further, and asks whether the police were guilty of ‘knowingly misleading a district

judge’, which in Sir Richard’s reasonable estimation would amount to a misdemeanour ‘far more serious than mere misconduct’. There is, he declares, reason to believe that ‘the course of justice was perverted, with shocking consequences’.

And yet, so far, not one police officer has been officially reprimanded for behaviour one might usually associate with a former East European communist state rather than a mature democracy in which the police are enjoined to respect the rule of law.

Last week, the Independent Office for Police Conduct finally published its findings — after nearly three years of deliberations, which is surely an inexcusable length of time for such an inquiry to have taken.

This grandiloquent body came to the unpersuasive conclusion that officers investigating Beech’s allegations acted ‘with due diligence and good faith at the time’.

Such a whitewash is totally at variance with Sir Richard’s revelations in today’s Mail. I can’t imagine that even one person in a hundred will side with the Independent Office for Police Conduct rather than a former judge whose only interest lies in disclosing the truth.

It seems outrageous than no senior police officer has been

Incompetence is one thing. But any policeman who appears to have broken the law should face a criminal investigation

properly held to account while, as Sir Richard rightly remarks, the lives of several innocent people have been ‘blighted’.

Lady Brittan’s husband, ex-Home Secretary Leon Brittan, died with Beech’s false allegations hanging over him, not knowing that his name would be cleared. Months after his death, police were still trawling through Lady Brittan’s garden.

Meanwhile, former Deputy Assistant Commissioner Steve Rodhouse, who was in charge of Operation Midland, is now a £175,000-a-year director general at the National Crime Agency. Superintendent Kenny McDonald, the investigating officer who thought Beech was a model of credibility, retired weeks before the fantasist’s trial began with a £250,000 pension pot.

Incompetence is one thing, and we certainly don’t know whether these particular officers were guilty of anything worse. But any policeman who appears to have broken the law should face a criminal investigation, as Sir Richard suggests.

The question remains why the boys in blue may have been prepared to bend the rules. Sympathetic souls may say in their defence that after the scandal of Jimmy Savile, whose epic sexual abuse was overlooked by the authorities over many years, the police were overzealous. If true, that is no justification.

OTHERS point with good cause to the figure of Tom Watson, Labour’s deputy leader, who met Beech in his Westminster office before he made his ludicrous claims to the Metropolitan Police. He publicly urged officers to pursue these, and no doubt they felt under pressure to do so.

Mr Watson still has not apologised for his unhappy role in this affair, and if he had a modicum of humility or decency this selfsatisfied man would admit he made a serious error of judgment.

For all that, the ramifications of Sir Richard’s revelations go far deeper. They raise questions about police conduct and accountability.

I am afraid I no longer have as much faith in their good sense and fairness, in particular of the most senior officers, as I once did.

A big shock for me came with Operation Elveden in 2012, when police made dawn raids on the homes of journalists accused of making payments to public officials. That did not seem consonant with a free society.

Needless to say, what happened to Carl Beech’s victims as a result of the inhumane and ill- considered behaviour of the police was very much worse. Those charged with enforcing the law might as well have been living in a different moral universe to the rest of us.

Lord Bramall has said that what was done to him was more painful than any experience he had ever undergone serving Queen and country. This from a very brave man who won the Military Cross.

The terrifying lesson I draw is that if the police can treat such eminent people as Lord Bramall, Leon Brittan, Harvey Proctor and the rest of them in such a brutal way, then none of us is safe.