Met chief denies incompetence over Operation Midland failures

ONE of Scotland Yard’s most senior figures has defended the officers involved in the disastrous Operation Midland investigation, denying they were incompetent.

Assistant Commissioner Sir Steve House said while the detectives who investigated fantasist Carl Beech’s lies had made errors, they had not broken the law or acted maliciously.

But he accepted officers had been willing to believe Beech’s lies because of mistakes they had made in the past when they had failed to listen to genuine victims of child abuse.

Beech, who was jailed for 18 years in July after being found guilty of lying about being the victim of a VIP paedophile ring, was described by Scotland Yard as credible and true.

As a result of his lies, the homes of Lord Brittan, Lord Bramall and Harvey Proctor were raided and their reputations tarnished during a multi-million pound 18 month-long investigation. An inquiry into the scandal, which was carried out by retired High Court judge Sir Richard Henriques, concluded that the Met had made 43 mistakes, including possibly carrying out the raids illegally.

But grilled about the shambolic police actions by the Mayor of London’s police and crime committee, Sir Steve rejected accusations of incompetence.

He said: “Mistakes were made in the investigation – we should have been more questioning of the allegations that were made. As a result, the lives of a number of important and very dedicated public servants were very badly damaged.

“But a number of people looked at the investigation as it was progressing and I believe if they thought the investigation was incompetent it would have been stopped at an earlier point. Incompetent is not the word I would use... I don’t accept that the officers were incompetent.”

He added: “I do have to go back to the point that we were working at a particular time... was there an overcompensation because of previous errors? I think that is a fairly good way of looking at it.”

Sir Richard’s initial findings were published in November 2016 in a heavily redacted form and the Met has since pledged to publish a fuller version of the report in the coming weeks. Questioned by the committee about what redactions might remain, he said virtually everything would be put into the public domain.

“We are going to not publish graphic sexual violence, in detail where it is horrific, we are not going to publish some addresses that will identify locations that have nothing to do with the situation and we are not going to publish some names of people who have nothing to do with the case, apart from that everything will be published,” he said.

‘ Mistakes were made… we should have been more questioning of the allegations that were made’