Fantasist whose lies should never have been believed
Tom Watson and Scotland Yard face serious questions as paedophile’s deception and manipulation exposed
A FANTASIST who accused some of the country’s most high-profile figures of child torture, rape and murder was yesterday found guilty of inventing the Westminster VIP paedophile ring amid serious questions over the roles of both Scotland Yard and Labour MP Tom Watson in his deceit.
Carl Beech, 51, a highly manipulative paedophile, was found guilty of 12 counts of perverting the course of justice and one count of fraud by a jury at Newcastle Crown Court, following a three-month trial.
Beech now faces a lengthy prison sentence after prosecutors proved he had repeatedly lied to police, who had fallen for his claims.
The conviction of Beech prompted calls last night for Scotland Yard – which spent 18 months and £4million investigating the allegations – to be placed in the dock, after it emerged that all of the officers involved in the debacle had been formally cleared of wrongdoing by the police watchdog.
Mr Watson’s role in fuelling the “witch hunt” is also under intense scrutiny and he is even under pressure to resign after it emerged the deputy Labour leader urged Beech to take his allegations to the police after meeting him in July 2014.
Beech, a former paediatric nurse, told detectives he and other boys had been raped and abused by an organised gang that included Sir Edward Heath, the former prime minister, Lord Brittan, the former home secretary, Harvey Proctor, the former Tory MP, Field Marshal Lord Bramall, the former head of the Army, Lord Janner, the former Labour MP, Sir Maurice Oldfield, the former head of MI6, Sir Michael Hanley, the former director of MI5, General Sir Hugh Beach and Field Marshal Sir Roland Gibbs.
Swallowing his lies, the Metropolitan Police launched the disastrous Operation Midland, which saw the homes of some of those accused raided and their reputations left in tatters.
Speaking after yesterday’s verdict – which took the jury just four hours of deliberations – Lord Bramall, 95, castigated the Metropolitan Police.
The D-day veteran said: “I am naturally delighted that after four years someone has at last been brought to book for the appalling travesty of justice which I and my whole family and others have had to endure.
“It is of course not only the outrageous, totally untruthful allegations by Carl Beech which perverted the course of justice but also the incompetent and improper way the Metropolitan Police Service handled them at their unquestioned face value which lent them unwarranted credibility.”
Mr Proctor, who lost his home and job as a result of the false accusations, said Mr Watson also had questions to answer. He said: “The Metropolitan Police were lapdogs to Mr Watson’s crude dog whistle. It’s time for the torchlight to take a closer look at Mr Watson. It is time for an apology from him to me and everyone named or implicated in this truly disgraceful chapter in the history of British policing.
“All he had to do was lie. Mr Beech lied, lied and lied again, and his breathtaking lies were facilitated, enhanced and given credibility by the Met Police without corroboration.”
Joan Harborne, the ex-wife of Major Raymond Beech – Beech’s late stepfather who was the first person falsely accused – said: “We tried to give them evidence that would prove what Carl was saying was not true, but it was as if they did not want to listen.”
Sir Richard Henriques, a retired High Court judge, found more than 40 mistakes in the way the force had handled the inquiry. Sir Richard told The Daily Telegraph yesterday: “Within a very few days of receiving all the documents … I concluded that the allegations were fabricated, incredible and untrue.”
Five officers were referred to the Independent Office for Police Conduct for potential misconduct. None of the officers involved has been sanctioned.
Lord Hogan-howe, the then Met Commissioner, retired from the force in February 2017 and was elevated to the House of Lords as a cross-bencher.
Deputy Assistant Commissioner Steve Rodhouse, who had overall responsibility for the investigation, left the Met in May 2018 to take up a £214,722-a-year job as director-general of operations at the National Crime Agency. Det Supt Kenny Mcdonald, who was head of Operation Midland, retired in August 2017 on full pension.
Lincoln Seligman, the godson of Sir Edward Heath, said: “Those who were being investigated by the police watchdog have been let off scot-free.”
The trial heard how as Beech was lying to police, he was also committing his own paedophilia offences, downloading appalling child abuse images and filming a young boy urinating.
Mr Watson said he only met Beech once and added: “During that meeting ‘Nick’ said very little and did not name any of his alleged abusers. I reassured Nick that the police had made clear that all allegations of historic sex abuse would be taken seriously and treated sensitively. It was not my role to judge whether victims’ stories were true. I encouraged every person that came to me to take their story to the police and that is what I did with Nick.”
CARL BEECH, a narcissist, fantasist and now a convicted paedophile, must have been cock-a-hoop. Tom Watson, then a backbench MP and soon to be elected the Labour Party’s deputy leader, had granted Beech an audience.
This was Beech’s opportunity to tell Mr Watson of the sexual abuse he had suffered at the hands of a murderous paedophile gang that had operated from the Palace of Westminster.
The meeting would set in chain the perfect storm. Scotland Yard’s finest detectives would believe every word Beech told them of three murders and unimaginably depraved child sexual abuse committed by a gang that included a former prime minister and a home secretary, the ex-chiefs of MI5 and MI6, the former head of the Army, numerous MPS and Jimmy Savile.
It didn’t matter that there wasn’t a shred of evidence to back up Beech’s crazy claims. Mr Watson had already stood up in Parliament and said a powerful Westminster paedophile ring needed investigating while police were stuck on a mantra that “victims must be believed”.
Yesterday, victims of Beech turned on not just the police but also Mr Watson for his part in their hell. Harvey Proctor, the former Conservative MP falsely accused by Beech of murder, torture and rape, said: “The Metropolitan Police were lapdogs to Mr Watson’s crude dog whistle. It is now beyond doubt that all of these allegations could never have been true and only someone with spectacular bad judgment could think that they might be.”
He called on Mr Watson to apologise.
Field Marshal Lord Bramall, 95, a D-day veteran, said: “It is of course, not only the outrageous, totally untruthful allegations by Carl Beech which perverted the course of justice but also the incompetent and improper way the Metropolitan Police Service handled them at their unquestioned face value which lent them unwarranted credibility.”
Lincoln Seligman, godson of Sir Edward Heath, said: “What I find astonishing is that senior police officers in the Metropolitan Police and politicians like Tom Watson, and some elements of media, believed Beech and made frequent public statements to that effect.”
Andi Lavery, 47, a genuine victim of abuse who was raped as a five-year-old child by a Catholic priest and some of whose own account Beech had stolen, was scathing. “Tom Watson weaponised child abuse,” he said, adding: “Beech is a psychopath, he reminds me of Harold Shipman – he is so mundane, yet there within Beech is the banality of evil.”
Daniel Janner QC, whose father Lord Janner was also accused of abuse by Beech, said: “Watson had politicised a police inquiry. He showed no regard for the presumption of innocence. He hounded Lord Brittan, a dying man, to his grave.”
Beech, now aged 51, spoke to Watson “at some length” in his private office at that fateful meeting in July 2014. Beech would later tell police that “Mr Watson formed part of the little group supporting me and putting my information out there to encourage other people to come forward”.
Mr Watson was a powerful ally for Beech. The MP had previously taken on the police and newspapers, pursuing the News of the World for its systemic phone hacking and holding the Met to account over its failure to investigate fully the extent of journalists’ crimes.
Here was a new crusade for Mr Watson: the pursuit of VIP child abusers. In October 2012, two years before his meeting with Beech, Mr Watson had stood up in Parliament and declared the existence of “clear intelligence suggesting a powerful paedophile network linked to Parliament and No10”.
The claims, in the wake of the furore over the failure of police to bring to justice Jimmy Savile, the BBC broadcaster and serial paedophile, had a devastating effect: Scotland Yard devoted millions of pounds to hunting gangs that didn’t exist and Theresa May, as home secretary, was bounced into setting up the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse that will cost the taxpayer north of £200 million.
Against this background, Beech was desperate to be listened to. In the same month as Mr Watson was making that claim, Beech, a middle-class, middleaged professional working in the NHS, had contacted Wiltshire Police.
He told detectives that for several years when he was a young boy, his stepfather, a major in the Army, had taken him to Wilton barracks, where he and other men had raped and abused him. He also claimed to have been one of Savile’s many victims.
Wiltshire Police interviewed Beech but with his stepfather, Raymond Beech, having died in 1995, and Savile long gone, it was decided little more could be done. Sources have told The Daily Telegraph that detectives thought Beech’s story implausible.
Beech began a blog, detailing his supposed ordeal. He stole the accounts of genuine survivors of abuse and added his own from the depths of his twisted imagination.
Exaro, a controversial news agency that later closed down, spotted Beech’s blog and one of its journalists, Mark Conrad, made contact. Exaro began publishing Beech’s increasingly lurid claims, giving him the pseudonym “Nick” to preserve his anonymity. It also peddled Nick’s ever more extreme stories to tabloid newspapers for cash.
The meeting between Beech and Watson was set up for July 8 2014. Mr Conrad and a social worker, Peter Mckelvie, who was a member of a victims’ panel with the national child abuse inquiry, accompanied Beech.
Over the course of two hours, Beech laid out his story of how he had been abused by the gang. Mr Watson was impressed. “It was a very, very traumatic and difficult conversation, as you would imagine,” Mr Watson told The Guardian a month later, “He only told me about one murder. He spoke very slowly, very intermittently, and I didn’t need to hear any more.”
Yesterday in a statement, Mr Watson said he only met Beech once and at that meeting “Nick said very little and did not name any of his alleged abusers”. Mr Watson added: “It was not my role to judge whether victims’ stories were true. 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 said in his Guardian interview, “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.”
In November 2014, Beech gave an interview to Tom Symonds, the BBC’S home affairs correspondent, which made headline news. “They had no fear at all of being caught, it didn’t cross their mind,” Beech unchallenged told the BBC, adding: “[The gang] created fear that penetrated every part of me, day in day out.”
The Met bought Beech’s story hook, line and sinker. Det Sgt James Townly interviewed Beech initially and in all he was questioned for 20 hours. Operation Midland, a homicide inquiry, was launched, based solely on Beech’s unsubstantiated testimony of witnessing three child murders.
Nobody at Scotland Yard would bother to check if the claims could possibly be true. His mother, for example – a Church of England vicar
‘Watson had politicised a police inquiry. He showed no regard for the presumption of innocence. He hounded Lord Brittan, a dying man, to his grave’
who would have known if her son was picked up weekly by the gang and returned after being raped – was not interviewed for at least six months. Beech’s wife was also not approached.
Checks would have shown that children he claimed had been murdered were still alive. Officers flew to Australia to see if a former classmate of Beech’s was alive. He was.
Beech had claimed that Sir Michael Hanley, then the head of MI5, had on one occasion arrived at his school and told him his dog had been kidnapped as a warning. Beech also told police that he had witnessed the gang – he called them The Group – shoot his horse Sam, although he had no idea what happened to the body, or what his mother, who was paying for its stabling, thought.
On Dec 18 2014, Det Supt Kenny Mcdonald declared at a press briefing: “Nick has been spoken to by experienced officers from the child abuse team and from the murder investigation team and they and I believe what Nick is saying is credible and true.”
Just over a month later, Brittan, who had been terminally ill with cancer, died at the age of 75. Although while alive he had not been named in connection with Beech’s allegations, he knew full well he was at the centre of the false claims. Brittan, once the leading libel QC in the country, also knew that as soon as he died, he would be outed as a member of the fictitious paedophile gang because the dead cannot sue for defamation.
Mr Watson had already been in pursuit of Brittan over another false claim, this one an allegation of rape dating back to 1967 made by a woman known only as “Jane”.
Her claims had been investigated by a team led by Det Chief Insp Paul Settle, head of the Met’s paedophile squad, who had concluded that her story was fantasy and closed the case in 2013. Mr Watson intervened, writing to Alison Saunders, the Director of Public Prosecutions, to complain that the case had been closed without Brittan being questioned.
Police caved in and Brittan, while dying, was interviewed under caution. The case was dropped a second time but police never bothered to tell Brittan before his death. Mr Settle, the one police officer who would have exposed Beech’s lies, was put on effective gardening leave, his career over. Mr Settle told The Telegraph: “The reason I have nothing but contempt for Tom Watson is that he presented himself as an honest broker. But he wasn’t anything like that.”
Four days after Brittan died, and with his widow and family still
‘The reason I have nothing but contempt for Tom Watson is that he presented himself as an honest broker. But he wasn’t anything like that’
grieving, Mr Watson twisted the knife. Brittan was, he said quoting a “survivor” of child abuse, “as close to evil as a human being could get”. His spokesman last night declined to say if he was quoting Beech.
Mr Watson didn’t stop there. “Former home secretary Leon Brittan stands accused of multiple child rape. Many others knew of these allegations and chose to remain silent. I will not. The police,” he concluded in the article published in the Sunday Mirror, “must continue their investigations.”
The Met duly obliged – despite the absence of any corroboration, including actual murder victims. Officers sought a private hearing at Westminster magistrates’ court where they obtained search warrants, insisting Beech’s testimony was consistent. It had in fact been anything but.
Shortly after dawn on March 4 2015, Lord Bramall, then 92, was woken at his home in Crondall, Hants. His wife, suffering from dementia, was terrified. She would die a few months later without ever knowing Beech’s claims were lies. He was greeted by around 20 officers who told him they had a search warrant. He would remain under suspicion for another 10 months.
At around the same time, 150 miles away at Belvoir Castle, Leics, a similar number of officers were raiding the
apartment of former Tory MP Harvey Proctor, whom Beech had named as one of Lord Bramall’s co-conspirators.
Officers also raided the London and North Yorkshire homes of Lady Brittan, shortly after her husband’s funeral and while she was still in deep grief. Van loads of personal possessions were taken and police absurdly asked if soil in her garden in Yorkshire had been recently disturbed.
During the search of Mr Proctor’s home, Beech was telephoned by police and told the raid was taking place. Beech called Exaro and the details were published on its website that day.
Lord Bramall was asked by detectives if he could swim, as if this might prove his involvement in a pool sex party. On Aug 24 2015, Mr Proctor was questioned under caution, during which the full extent of the allegations against him were set out.
Beech had told police that in 1980, at a property in central London, he had witnessed Mr Proctor raping a 12-year-old boy before strangling him to death. On another occasion he claimed he had seen a boy beaten to death during a sex game, and told officers he had also seen Heath physically restrain Mr Proctor in order to prevent him cutting the genitals off a young boy with a penknife.
He had also claimed a boy in his school called Scott had been run over and killed by the gang. Police failed to check if any child called Scott had ever turned up dead or reported missing. He hadn’t.
Mr Settle, by now persona non grata, said the detectives had lost sight of what they were supposed to be doing. “The policy of believing victims meant they were only interested in finding evidence that supported his claims,” he said. “Anything that did not fit that narrative was discounted, which is no way to run an investigation.”
By January 2016, after almost a year under investigation, Lord Bramall was informed by the police that he would face no further action. He was told there was “insufficient evidence” to proceed, rather than explicitly being cleared of any wrongdoing.
Two months later, Mr Proctor was formally cleared of any wrongdoing, and the Met Commissioner asked retired High Court judge Sir Richard Henriques to carry out a review into Operation Midland.
His findings – while heavily redacted – were scathing. Sir Richard identified 43 separate mistakes by the Met, including misleading a judge when applying for a warrant to search the suspects’ homes. It had taken Sir Richard “a matter of days” to realise Beech was a fantasist. Sir Richard said officers had searched Lady Brittan’s home in North Yorkshire “as if they were looking for bodies or body parts”.
Following the publication of the damning Henriques report, the Met confirmed it had passed the case to another force and Northumbria Police began investigating Beech for perverting the course of justice. Scrutiny had finally turned to Beech.
As part of that investigation, detectives seized a number of computers and other devices from Beech.
It was during these searches that they discovered more than 350 indecent images of children, including 36 of the most serious category A. One device also contained a video of a young boy urinating.
In July 2017, Beech was charged with five counts of possessing indecent images and one count of voyeurism and summoned to appear before Worcester Crown Court.
But because he had claimed to have suffered sex abuse himself, he retained his right to anonymity.
In July last year, just weeks before his trial was about to get going, the Crown Prosecution Service, which had been examining a file of evidence from Northumbria Police, announced he was also to be charged with 12 counts of perverting the course of justice.
He was also charged with one count of fraud in relation to the £22,000 he had received from the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority for the abuse that had never taken place.
Northumbria Police had also discovered that Beech had used an encrypted email address to create a fake profile for a witness called “Fred” in an attempt to corroborate his claims.
This was something their colleagues in the Met had clearly failed to spot.
Beech’s trial for possessing indecent images had been due to begin on July 30 last year, but he was nowhere to be seen. He had gone on the run. A warrant was issued for his arrest and an international manhunt begun.
Beech had fled to Sweden, planning a new life in a small village in the Arctic Circle, using the false name Stephen Anderson. He bought a house in Overkalix with a plan to open a bed and breakfast business.
He skipped town, travelling through Sweden under a variety of aliases, staying at hostels or sleeping on trains.
Acting on a European Arrest Warrant, Swedish police tracked Beech through his mobile phone to Gothenburg station, where he was finally apprehended on Oct 1 2018.
On Jan 21, 18 months after he was first charged, Beech finally appeared at Hereford Crown Court, charged with four counts of making indecent images, one of possessing indecent images and one of voyeurism.
Hidden behind a fake calculator app on his computer were pictures of young boys, some of them undressed, one of whom was lying face down on a bed, blindfolded and handcuffed.
A camera belonging to Beech contained photographs of young boys playing football with their shirts off, which he had taken surreptitiously from a window of his Gloucester home. There was also evidence that he had been watching appalling child abuse videos online, including ones featuring the rape of babies.
Beech pleaded guilty and was remanded in custody and ordered to immediately sign the sex offenders’ register. The man who had spread so many lies about being a victim of abuse had finally admitted to being a paedophile himself.
Beech’s trial for perverting the course of justice and fraud began at Newcastle Crown Court on May 7, with him pleading not guilty to all charges.
With astonishing arrogance and cruelty he kept up his lies, meaning the true victims in the case – those he had falsely accused, including Mr Proctor and another military figure, 96-year-old Gen Sir Hugh Beach – were forced to give evidence and undergo painful cross-examination.
When Beech entered the witness box, during three days of cross-examination, prosecutor Tony Badenoch QC systematically exposed every lie he had told the police.
The jury was told that the day Beech’s £22,000 criminal injuries compensation claim was approved, he put down a £10,000 deposit for a white Ford Mustang convertible.
It was also revealed that Beech had been penning a so-called “misery memoir”, which he no doubt hoped would make him rich. Entitled “Too Many Secrets: Surviving a Child Sex Ring”, it contained a series of wild allegations of sexual abuse relating to himself and his “best friend”, John.
At one point Beech claimed to have been beaten so badly that he had been hospitalised. However, there were no medical records to support this.
Among the more outlandish claims Beech made during his evidence were that he had been subjected to a series of cruel punishments by his abusers, which included being bitten by a snake, stung by angry wasps and electrocuted. He drew a body map that purported to accurately chart the many scars and wounds that he bore as a result of his years abuse.
The only problem was that when a doctor examined him before the trial, there were no marks on his body.
He also told the jury that he had been left with a lifelong fear of water after having his head shoved under it as he was raped over the bath as a boy.
But the prosecution exposed the lie with holiday snaps that showed Beech swimming and even snorkelling.
He told police he was removed from school every Friday by his abusers, but his records showed him to have had an excellent attendance.
Beech handed police a penknife that he claimed he had kept from the time when Mr Proctor had threatened to cut off his genitals. But Beech’s ex-wife told the jury that the penknife had actually belonged to his grandmother.
They were all claims that could easily have been checked by the Met.
Summing up the prosecution case, Mr Badenoch described Beech as a “sophisticated paedophile” for whom lying was as natural as having a morning cup of tea.
The jury was also told that his story bore many similarities to child abuse memoirs written by the author Timmy Fielding.
Mr Badenoch suggested that there may have been a financial motive behind Beech’s lies, but the real reason he decided to destroy the lives and reputations of so many innocent men may never be fully known. But there’s no question Beech enjoyed the attention afforded him by Tom Watson, a questionable news website and some overeager Scotland Yard detectives who had forgotten to bother with the truth.
The prosecution case described Beech as a sophisticated paedophile for whom lying was as natural as having a morning cup of tea