Leon Brittan widow ‘may sue the Met for £1m over search’
THE widow of former Cabinet Minister Leon Brittan could sue police for £1million over the bungled police investigation into claims that her husband was in a Westminster paedophile ring.
Well-placed sources claim the warrant used last year to search Lord Brittan’s homes in London and Yorkshire – six weeks after his death – was ‘invalid’ because it named him, but not the owner, Lady Brittan.
The Brittans’ homes were searched along with those of former head of the Army, Lord Bramall, and former Tory MP Harvey Proctor in the Metropolitan Police’s Operation Midland. This newspaper has been told police rifled through sock drawers, dug up gardens and leafed through every single page of entire collections of books in a fruitless search for incriminating photos and other evidence.
The £2million Operation Midland was abandoned in March after police admitted there was no evidence to support astonishing claims that a network of Establishment figures were responsible for killing three boys in the 1970s and 1980s.
Metropolitan Police Commissioner Bernard Hogan-Howe was forced to launch a separate investigation by retired judge Sir Richard Henriques into the bungled VIP paedophile ring hunt.
The police plan to publish a summary of the inquiry – but friends of Lady Brittan are demanding it is released in full to avoid a ‘cover-up’.
And they are urging her to sue the police over claims that the warrant used to search the couple’s family home in Pimlico, Central London, and country home in Wensleydale, North Yorkshire, was flawed.
This newspaper has been told the warrant named Lord Brittan, 75, who had died nearly two months earlier, but not his wife.
‘You cannot serve a search warrant on a dead man, it must name the homeowner and there was no mention of Lady Brittan,’ said a source. ‘It shows what a disgraceful farce the police operation was. It is essential that the Henriques report is published in full to avoid a repeat of this scandalous waste of public funds.’
POLICE treatment of the late Lord Brittan’s widow was among the most shocking aspects of the frenzy set off by recent allegations of long-ago child abuse.
While Lady Brittan was still mourning her husband, she was subjected to a humiliating, intrusive early-morning search of the family home as part of the grandly named ‘Operation Midland’.
Police officers reportedly dug up gardens and thumbed through hundreds of books in their searches. It is hard to imagine what they expected to find, but all too easy to imagine how upsetting it was and still is.
This heavy-handed expedition was launched on the basis of uncorroborated claims by an anonymous accuser. Now we have learned there may be questions about the legality of the search warrant.
They are not the only questions that need to be answered about what looks very much like an abuse of power. Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe has made partial amends to Lady Brittan. He needs to do much more.
A good start would be a readiness to share the coming Henriques Report into Operation Midland with Lady Brittan, and to publish as much of it as possible as a warning of what can happen when authority loses all sense of proportion.