Tom Watson must apologise – then resign

Labour’s deputy leader bears much of the blame for the damage to innocent families by fantasist ‘Nick’

For six years, my family has endured a living nightmare. That’s how long it has been since the fantasist Carl Beech concocted his hateful series of lies about my late father, Lord (Greville) Janner, a gentle, kind and loving man who was never convicted of any offence and whose lengthy record of public service has been besmirched in the most evil way.

Beech, who as the witness known as “Nick” sparked a moral panic over establishment paedophiles, was convicted of fraud and perverting the course of justice on Monday. However, far from closing this sorry episode in British legal history, pressing concerns remain – not least why his absurd lies were treated by the police as if they

were, in the words of one senior officer, “credible and true”. Much of the blame for that rests with one man: Labour’s deputy leader Tom Watson.

In October 2012, Watson used parliamentary privilege to say there was “clear intelligence suggesting a powerful paedophile network linked to Parliament and No 10”. In the aftermath of the revelations about Jimmy Savile, this set off a witch-hunt for imaginary paedophiles.

My father was far from the only victim. Field Marshal Lord Bramall had his house ransacked by police to the enormous distress of his wife who was suffering from dementia. Lord Brittan, a former home secretary, died with the appalling allegations of Nick still hanging over him. The DJ Paul Gambaccini was kept on police bail for a year, a hellish experience for an innocent man. Sir Cliff Richard had a police raid on his home filmed by BBC helicopters and won his subsequent privacy case against the corporation and South Yorkshire Police.

All of these men are owed an apology by Watson. Instead he has shown not a glimmer of remorse. When my father died in 2015, Watson used his death as an excuse to further exacerbate our misery, putting out a press release saying that his “thoughts at this time are with the survivors” of abuse – survivors just like Beech.

This heartless reaction is typical of a man who thought he could position himself as the scourge of sexual abuse in order to promote his own profile, whipping up public frenzy as an act of self-aggrandisement. To see him now claiming the moral high ground on Labour anti-semitism is appalling.

What should have been a straightforward police investigation was politicised. Even Inspector Clouseau could have seen that my father, a Labour MP, would have been highly unlikely to abuse children in the Carlton Club, an institution synonymous with the Tory party. This is but one of the holes in Nick’s various stories and police officers should have dismissed him as a fantasist in minutes. Under political pressure, they seemed to think they couldn’t.

That isn’t, of course, to say that Watson should bear the blame for all their failings. In light of evidence from Beech’s trial, the Independent Office for Police Conduct investigation must be reopened to examine whether specific officers were guilty of misconduct. Then there is the wider problem, stemming from Sir Keir Starmer’s time as Director of Public Prosecutions, whereby officers were encouraged to assume that all “victims” (in reality, merely “complainants”) were to be believed.

Meanwhile, the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) rumbles on. Since my father was accused, we have won every civil case that has been brought – yet the Kafka-esque and wholly unjust kangaroo court of IICSA still has a strand devoted to him. Accusers are given anonymity and we have no right to cross-examine them.

Fundamental legal reform is needed to protect innocent men. It is why I founded Falsely Accused Individuals for Reform (FAIR), campaigning for, among other changes, a right to anonymity for people accused of sex crimes. It is simply wrong that Beech, a criminal fantasist, could hide behind the pseudonym “Nick” for so long while innocents were traduced as paedophiles and child murderers.

There are, after all, no worse allegations that can be made against somebody – a fact that apparently wasn’t lost on Watson when he set out to attack my father. Now that the man who first made them languishes in jail, it’s time for Watson to apologise and resign. It is the least he can do.