Bramall blunders

The police have been swept up in national hysteria

About 25 years ago, when I wrote a column in our sister newspaper, I recall commenting in mild terms on an incident involving the police. I cannot remember, after all this time, why: just that the police had behaved badly, and I criticised those responsible for bringing the good name of the force into disrepute. What I vividly remember is that, for my trouble, I received one of the biggest hostile mailbags I have ever had.

Readers reminded me – justifiably – that the police were the defenders of decent people against the criminal classes. They were the essential agents of the rule of law. Some died in the course of their duty. Without them, we had had it. To say I felt chastened was an understatement.

But when one looks at the shocking treatment of Field Marshal Lord Bramall, now no longer under investigation for paedophilia following accusations by an apparently unreliable witness in a child abuse inquiry, one wonders what has happened to our police, to their judgment, their discretion, their sense of perspective and their common sense. Just because Lord Bramall is 92, a soldier of distinction and a great public servant does not, I concede, disqualify him from being a paedophile: but it should have been blindingly obvious to the police, after the slightest reflection, that he most certainly is not.

There has been a national hysteria, whipped up by the tabloid press, about child abuse. Child abuse is an immensely serious thing: as a parent, I know that all too well, and my feelings about its perpetrators are medieval. However, after the Jimmy Savile scandal some people took leave of their senses about it. The witch-hunt that ensued provided golden opportunities for the self-righteous, the grandstanders, the manipulative, the rabble-rousers and the downright mischievous. The climate of irresponsibility this created was shocking.

There have always been child molesters. Indeed, until 1885 heterosexual child molestation was legal, since the age of consent was just 13. The public school system teemed with it. It is outrageous that only in recent years have men in a position of trust been brought to justice for their flagrant exploitation of their charges. However, those convicted of this crime – and there are distressingly many of them – have inevitably been condemned on the testimony of numerous grown and sensible men, years after the event, the nature of whose evidence leaves little or no room for doubt.

Something similar is true of the victims of Savile, and of others caught up in the ghastly world of Seventies and Eighties celebrity. But once hysteria broke out in that context, it allowed for the attention-seeking and the grasping to engage in their own acts of downright wickedness. Rolf Harris, Stuart Hall and Max Clifford were certainly rightly convicted: but William Roache, the Coronation

Street actor, had to endure a trial before his name was cleared, and Paul Gambaccini, the disc jockey, had to see his reputation trashed because the police determined he had to be investigated – and that his name had to be put in the public domain as a possible sex offender.

The police have become the tools, either witting or unwitting, of this hysteria. The fear of allowing a genuine criminal to elude justice, and of senior officers having their careers damaged as a result, is paramount. But so is a political consideration, which touches on the new, unpleasant role of the police as social engineers. The police used to search out muggers, burglars, rapists and murderers. Now they give the impression that their main priority is pursuing those who might have committed whatever crime is the fashion of the moment.

For years, the obsession was with what is now called “hate crime”. A student on a protest who told a policeman that his horse was “gay” was arrested for homophobia, an act that gives you a measure of the lunacy of modern policing. Tony Blair was investigated when it was alleged that he had said something nasty about the Welsh. The police, absurdly, fear attacks by those who claim to represent minorities if they do not act swiftly in such cases, irrespective of their merit. Now they go into overdrive at the slightest whiff of a sex crime, treating every idiotic allegation with the same seriousness as those that clearly merit thorough inquiry.

The police are not alone in this, nor in self-righteously broadcasting suspects’ names to the world. Last year the testimony of various crackpots prompted the Church of England to announce it had heard that Enoch Powell had haunted South Wales to engage in Satanic child abuse. It clearly delighted the Church that they, by reporting this falsehood, could smear Powell, given the equally bogus reputation he had as a racist. More worrying is their apparent delight in smearing the late Bishop Bell of Chichester on flimsy evidence. For the record the same church official, the Rev Arun Arora, was involved in both cases, and only he knows his motivation.

Then, of course, there was the evil conduct of Tom Watson, Labour’s deputy leader, who for nakedly political reasons decided to vilify the late Leon Brittan. It is a sign of the moral degeneracy of our society and our public life that Watson is still not just in his office, but in Parliament at all. It is also a sign that to call anyone a paedophile is, in the name of some undefined higher good, defensible.

Lord Bramall shows the other side of that coin. Entirely innocent, he has suffered the needless indignity of a smear and an inquiry. There is no point wasting public money on an inquiry into why the police allowed this wicked travesty to happen. But there is plenty of point in sacking, with equal indignity, those responsible for deciding to investigate him. The police should realise that their reckless witchhunting has now gone far enough. The real perverts are easy enough to find without having to invent them.

‘The police have become the tools, either witting or unwitting, of this national hysteria about child abuse’