Why isn’t the Nonce Finder General in the dock?
‘Half the Yard’s top brass are up to their necks in this scandal’
THe damning catalogue of police failures in the Paedos in High Places scandal will come as no surprise to readers of this newspaper — or this column in particular.
nor will yesterday’s predictable whitewash from the policing watchdog that concluded no one is to blame. Lives were destroyed, reputations ruined, careers disrupted and, in some cases, ended. But there’s nothing to see here, move along now.
All the senior coppers who were up to their neck in this disgusting miscarriage of ‘justice’ have not only been exonerated, they’ve been promoted or allowed to retire on full, gold-plated pensions. trebles all round! the bombastic, over- promoted provincial Plod, Bernard Hyphen-Howe, Met Commissioner at the time and the man ultimately responsible, has been rewarded with a peerage.
Labour’s disreputable deputy leader tom Watson looks like walking away scot-free and even has the gall to present himself as a ‘victim’. Watson’s fawning apologists, not just in Westminster but in the media, should be ashamed of themselves.
When i read the impeccably independent findings of the former High Court judge Sir Richard Henriques, i simply shrugged and thought: tell us something we don’t know. He could have been reading out loud from my spoof column a couple of weeks ago, which had the BBC’s Line Of Duty team investigating Scotland Yard. Mother of God!
the script will have been familiar to anyone who has followed in the Mail Stephen Wright’s brilliant, forensic investigations of this scandal dating back several years.
Police routinely abused their powers, misled judges to obtain search warrants and dragged the names of distinguished public figures through the sewer.
nobody at the Yard emerges with any credit from this ghastly episode — not least the sainted Cressida, Dick of Dock Green, who has done a passable impersonation of her political sponsor Mother theresa and spent the duration hiding behind the sofa, just as May did during the Brexit referendum.
Shamefully, when she subsequently admitted that officers were wrong to say publicly that the false allegations made by the fantasist known as nick were ‘credible and true’, she made no effort to correct that statement. it was allowed to remain on file for another nine months, by which time the damage had been done.
Understandably, much of the recent media criticism of the police has concentrated on the appalling treatment of war hero Lord Bramall and ex-Home Secretary Leon Brittan.
Some of us have longer memories. Where were the ‘distinguished’ newspaper commentators when the Old Bill were persecuting a random assortment of disc jockeys and tV presenters in the wake of the failure to bring Jimmy Savile to justice?
Where was the outrage when popular newspaper journalists simply doing their job were being treated like terrorists by coppers investigating ‘ misconduct in public office’?
Where were they when a young couple living in the same building as equally innocent ex-tory MP Harvey Proctor were threatened with having their baby taken into care? this was Soviet era Stasistyle treatment straight from the chilling movie about Communist east Berlin, the Lives Of Others.
the monstrous treatment meted out to the Brittan and Bramall families was also visited upon blameless entertainers including Jimmy tarbuck, Jim Davidson and Paul Gambaccini, to name but three.
it took me about ten minutes and a couple of phone calls to confirm that tarby and Davidson couldn’t possibly be guilty of the ‘ historic’ crimes of which they were accused.
But Plod couldn’t even be bothered to check out the facts and a kept them dangling in a hell on o earth for months on end.
Hyphen- Howe was getting measured for ermine, his reward for doing the bidding of his political paymasters.
Dick of Dock Green was keeping her head down at the Foreign Office, waiting for Bernardo to swan off to the LordsL before assuming her rightful position as First Lady of the Met.
the appalling Deputy Assistant Assistant Deputy And One For Yourself Or Whatever Ridiculous title He Had At the time Steve Plodhouse was polishing his buttons in anticipation of a lucrative new gig running ‘Britain’s FBi’. We’re not talking J. edgar Hoover here, are we?
Dick’s successor as head of the witch-hunt, ‘Fat Pat’ Gallan, was allowed to slink away with a full pension before the solids hit the air conditioning.
the fact of the matter is — and i mean no disrespect to the proper coppers trying to keep us safe every day — Scotland Yard is no longer fit for purpose. i’ve long since given up on the Mind How You Go files, as the conduct of those who run our police forces is simply beyond parody.
Only yesterday we learned that, in concert with London’s two-bob spiv of a mayor, that preening selfpublicist Sadiq Khan, the Met has blown the thick end of two million smackeroonies on an investigation into internet trolls — resulting in just half a dozen convictions.
Just as well there’s no knife crime in London, eh?
FOR years, the Yard has been making wrongful arrests, illegally ransacking homes, terrifying innocent men, women and children, in pursuit of alleged ‘misconduct in public office’ and ‘ historic sex crimes’ based on nothing more than the crazed imaginings of a known fantasist.
Yet no one at the top of the Yard, or anywhere else, is being brought to book. Which brings me to tommy Watson, the wicked, politically motivated orchestrator of so much misery over the past few years. At one stage, the Yard seemed to be taking their marching orders directly from him.
Prior to writing this column, i checked the cuttings library. it was back in november 2012 — seven years ago — that i first dubbed him the nonce Finder General. On that same page, i wrote about Barack Obama’s second election victory. that’s how long ago it was.
Watson abused Parliamentary privilege to falsely accuse leading Conservatives of being child molesters, and worse. His wild, unsubstantiated allegations emboldened soppy Speaker’s wife Sally Bercow to identify the blameless Lord McAlpine as one of the guilty men.
i have maintained all along that, at the very least, Watson should be collared by the highest authority for his role in perpetuating injustice and placed in the public dock. the lies and filth he peddled, along with his tame fantasist paedophile and a Left-wing ‘news agency’ intent on smearing tories, continue to reverberate.
His recent, self-pitying pretence, claiming to be a ‘victim’ of all this, is vomit-inducing. From where i’m sitting, Watson — to adapt an outrageous jibe he directed at Leon Brittan — is as close to evil as any politician can get.
Come to that, half the top brass at Scotland Yard over the past few years should be in the dock alongside him.
Meanwhile, Jimmy Savile . . . well, you know the rest.
confused about the timings and was dating the Townsend affair from much later, after the Coronation in 1953.
In the turbulent two years that followed, the Princess, unable to marry without the consent of the Sovereign or MPs, was forced to choose between Townsend and her right to succession. That the Princess chose to retain her royal status is well known, and remained a topic of heated debate in the country throughout her life.
Mark Bonham Carter, meanwhile, had fallen in love with an American divorcée, Leslie, Lady St Just. The 25-year-old motherof-one was the daughter of Condé Nast, the U.S. magazine owner and founder of Vogue.
In 1958, as the Liberal candidate, Bonham Carter won the Torrington by-election only to lose his seat 18 months later. He went on to become first chairman of the Race Relations Board and vice chairman of the BBC, before being made a life peer in 1986.
Yet his friendship with the Queen’s sister persisted over the years. At his memorial service in 1994, only one member of the Royal Family attended: Princess Margaret.