Police watchdog with no bark and no bite
EVEN though we already knew most of what was contained in the Independent Office for Police Conduct report on Scotland Yard’s role in fuelling the VIP paedophile hoax, the details of this arrant whitewash are still deeply shocking.
Faced with a truly monstrous police miscarriage of justice, the watchdog found no evidence of misconduct, held no one to blame and excused officers’ gross errors by insisting they had acted ‘in good faith’.
The worst admonition the IOPC had to offer was that there had been some ‘organisational failings’ and there was ‘room for improvement’.
Room for improvement! This wasn’t some minor procedural lapse. It was a scandal of hideous proportions.
Based on the raving fantasies of one profoundly disturbed mind, the Yard – driven on by Labour deputy leader Tom Watson – gave flight to grotesque claims of systemic child abuse, rape and murder by figures at the heart of the Establishment.
If true, they would have shattered confidence in politics, the security services and the military, perhaps irreparably.
But they weren’t true. This was a pack of malicious lies apparently believed only by the police, Mr Watson and the complainant Carl Beech, aka ‘Nick’.
Elderly men with exemplary records of public service were persecuted, warrants may have been applied for unlawfully, and £ 4.5million of taxpayers’ money was squandered. Yet this breathtakingly inept inquiry exonerates everyone.
Harvey Proctor, the former Tory MP who lost his job and home after being falsely accused by Beech, called yesterday for the IOPC to be abolished completely and replaced with a new, effective regulator.
It’s hard to disagree. What’s the earthly point of having a watchdog when it doesn’t even have a bark, still less a bite.
This scandal won’t go away. If public trust is to be clawed back, Metropolitan Police Commissioner Dame Cressida Dick (who had a supervisory role), her predecessor Lord Hogan-Howe, and chief investigator Steve Rodhouse must be made answer for their egregious failings. No more cover-up.
Then there’s Mr Watson, who manipulated Beech and his dark fables for cynical political advantage. He has never accepted responsibility for helping Beech to peddle these lies – and never atoned for the damage done. Who will hold him to account?