HOW CAN THEIR VOICE BE IGNORED?
From Baroness Lawrence to the wife of Leon Brittan and the son of war hero Lord Bramall, our distinguished panel – all betrayed by police failures
FURY OF HOME SECRETARY’S WIFE
Lady Brittan’s husband Leon was falsely accused of rape and murder by serial fantasists. Her two homes were raided by the Met’s Operation Midland detectives over the lies of Carl ‘Nick’ Beech, six weeks after her husband, a Tory former home secretary, died in 2015.
‘I’m actually quite interested in leadership and I think there is a difference between the way women lead and the way men lead organisations,’ she said. ‘But nonetheless, the principles are the same. Firstly, you cannot seek popularity. You have to have integrity. You have to have clarity of vision and if there’s anything wrong with your organisation, you have to do your best to put it right.
‘The thing I would say about the police is that they are essentially an arm of our legal system. Therefore that standard should be even higher, even less corrupt, with greater integrity and we come back also to the fact they’re unaccountable. You have to have a leader in these circumstances, particularly where we’re looking at a number of what we think to be miscarriages of justice. The current commissioner is probably part of the problem and not necessarily the solution. I just don’t think she has the correct set of skills to do what is needed to do with the senior police force for us to have a great, respected reputation around the world.
‘I’m sure it still thinks it has but they are the example bearers to the members of the public, who have to believe in trust in the police because they have so much power. And therefore, when you have a lot of power, you have to be doubly sensitive about how you exercise that power. And all we see is this culture of cover-up. They put their personal and organisational objectives before the pursuit of justice and the protection of the public.’
BBC STAR WHO WON £250K PAYOUT
Paul Gambaccini was arrested over false sex abuse allegations in 2013 and spent a year on bail before the case was dropped by then Met assistant commissioner Dick’s Yewtree detectives. In an out-of-court settlement last year, the Met agreed to pay him £250,000 over privacy breaches.
‘The contract of Dame Cressida Dick must not be renewed,’ he said. ‘I do hope that the Prime Minister and the Home Secretary would show the courage of their predecessor Theresa May in dealing with the bully. She’s the only politician of either party this century who’s disciplined the police. And it is up to Boris Johnson and Priti Patel to show that they have the courage of Theresa May.
‘How can Dame Cressida say she is “a woman of honour” when she was gold commander for Jean Charles de Menezes? You would have thought that would be a promotion-preventing debacle. For most people the past catches up with them. She is long past the point where her past should have caught up with her.
‘Operations Midland and most of Yewtree are a complete sadistic and stupid fiasco. So we must ask the Prime Minister and Home Secretary to reform the police because it refuses to reform itself.
‘And we must ask them to not renew the contract of Cressida Dick. Both the Prime Minister and the Home Secretary know about my feelings because I’ve spoken to them about it in their previous jobs. They can’t plead ignorance. They must act.’
SON OF A WRONGED D-DAY VETERAN
Nick Bramall’s father, Lord Bramall, a D-Day hero and former head of the armed forces, was in his 90s when his home was raided by 20 Met detectives investigating Carl Beech’s VIP abuse lies. The field marshal was later twice interviewed under caution by a detective, who asked him ridiculous questions. Dame Cressida sanctioned the launch of Operation Midland in 2014 when an assistant commissioner and has been widely criticised over her response to an inquiry into the ‘Nick’ scandal.
‘Most people are responsible for their actions,’ he said. ‘Operation Midland was a complete fiasco and my biggest complaint is that nobody has been held responsible at all, not even a smack on the wrist. And that cannot be right. I mean, this was a disaster. It put good people through a very severe ordeal, you know, to be accused of child abuse, rape – in Harvey Proctor’s case, murder – I mean, it’s outrageous. And you know, no one’s put their hands up and they bloody well should have done.
‘Cressida Dick’s name seems to crop up with every sort of disaster that happens, so she’s very much at the forefront of this. Someone should be bought to book and they should come clean. They had an internal investigation whitewashed the whole thing, it’s not good enough.
‘I often said to Dad ‘What would you have done in this situation? And he said “I would have made it my business, if I was head of the Met, to get to grips with this. I would have asked all the right questions, I would have made it my business properly to come down and see those people involved, on the quiet”. I think he would have been much more proactive.
‘His overriding impression of the police was he couldn’t really believe that they had been quite so stupid. Whether they were also corrupt is another matter. This was a really appalling thing to put people through. You can’t be accused of anything worse in life really, than being accused of abuse, murder, rape, buggery. I mean, it’s terrible.
‘If my dad had overseen this as Met chief he would definitely have resigned. He was a man of honour. If he’d been shown to be incompetent or falling down on the job he would have put his hands up because he was of that generation.’
THE CAMPAIGNING PEER AND MOTHER
Baroness Lawrence’s son Stephen, 18, was murdered by racist thugs in south-east London in 1993. Despite the initial police investigation being riddled with allegations of serious misconduct and gross incompetence – and a public inquiry branding Scotland Yard ‘institutionally racist’ – not one officer has been held to account. Baroness Lawrence is unhappy that Dame Cressida closed her son’s murder inquiry last summer and is also critical of the Met’s stop and search strategies.
‘If you were to look at where we are now, nothing much has
changed,’ she said. ‘We sit around the table talking about individual cases, what people have gone through and it’s like they have never learned their lessons. It continues to happen and it will continue to happen. It’s like we’re seen as – I wouldn’t say pawns – but we’re irrelevant in the whole thing. The police decide they have a line that they’re going to go down or not go down and then that’s it, and we all should accept it. The difficulty is that they don’t accept responsibility when something goes wrong. And I think if you can accept responsibility, then you stand a greater chance of not doing it again, or even trying to put it right. But they never accept responsibility, always blame the victims, for whatever wrong has happened.
‘Back in Stephen’s case they talk about one bad apple. It’s more than one bad apple in the barrel.
And there’s nobody holding them to account. Accountability: that is what needs to happen and until we have that we’re going to continue having the same thing as around Stephen’s case.
It’s been going on for 28 years and there’s still more that could come out but will it ever? I don’t know if it’s the Mayor of London – whoever it is that needs to look seriously around Cressida Dick. I just think there’s been too many mistakes that she has made in her tenure as commissioner. And even going back. There’s so many mistakes. She’s the first woman commissioner. That’s good for diversity, but if you’re not doing your job properly then that should make no difference whatsoever.’
BROTHER OF AXE MURDER VICTIM
Alastair Morgan has fought a marathon battle for police accountability since his private eye brother Daniel Morgan was murdered with an axe in 1987. The unsolved case has been engulfed with allegations of police malpractice and coverups. A £20 million report damned the Metropolitan Police and Cressida Dick. She rejected its findings of institutional corruption.
‘Many people in authority are very, very naïve about the police,’ he said. ‘Unless you’ve actually dealt with them yourself you just cannot believe how stupid they can be, or how obstructive, or how pigheaded. There’s a kind of gruesome idiocy in their manner and the way they do things. It’s just so patently idiotic.
‘You wonder what the point of the report was if it’s going to have that reaction? And then what about the next report? And the next one? It’s just undermining the foundations of our society to rubbish it like that.
‘That took eight years to produce that report against all opposition from the Metropolitan Police who were putting obstacles in its way at every step.
‘I don’t think Cressida Dick is in a position of any kind of credibility. It’s got to go to the Prime Minister. Whether there is the will to do anything about this is another matter.’
AIDE TO ‘VILIFIED’ FORMER TORY PM
Michael McManus worked as a parliamentary private secretary to Ted Heath and has written a respected biography of the Tory prime minister. He has been an outspoken critic of Scotland Yard’s Operation Midland and Wiltshire Police’s Operation Conifer, which investigated false allegations of VIP abuse and murder against Heath.
‘There was this unilateral change of the fundamental principle of innocent until proven guilty,’ he said. ‘It began badly with an appeal for victims outside Ted Heath’s house. He was dead. He had no family and it was up to us, those of us who had known him. What was being said about him wasn’t even possible in terms of his diary, the way he lived and there was absolutely no evidence. But you had a campaign by the police – it wasn’t an investigation – it was a campaign to vilify him, actively vilify him, led by the chief constable.
‘It’s about accountability. If you’re not allowed to open the windows, fresh air will never get in. I see no reason why we should accept that the Met is forever going to be lions led by donkeys because that’s what it is at the moment and there’s no reason to accept that. To my mind, nothing has changed.’