WHY DID THE POLICE BELIEVE “NICK”?
The conviction of Carl Beech “marks the end of a saga of lies, staggering police incompetence and shocking political gullibility”, said The Daily Telegraph. Beech – known by his pseudonym “Nick” – sparked a moral panic by claiming to have been the victim of an establishment paedophile ring which included a former prime minister, an ex-home secretary and various heads of the intelligence services and the Armed Forces. His tales of murderous orgies in high places launched a £2.5m Metropolitan Police inquiry, Operation Midland, which opened in late 2014 and only closed in 2016, after it had become clear that there was no evidence at all for his claims. Northumbria Police were then brought in to investigate Beech himself. At Newcastle Crown Court on Monday, he was found guilty of 12 charges of perverting the course of justice and one of fraud over a £22,000 compensation payout for his “abuse”.
In court, Beech’s “myriad lies” were easily taken apart, said Sean O’Neill in The Times. It’s quite “astonishing” that this fantasist’s tall tales – of being flown to Paris on a private Boeing 747, bitten by snakes while trapped in a cupboard and having his horse shot and his dog kidnapped by MI5 – were taken seriously. Detective superintendent Kenny McDonald famously declared his claims to be “credible and true”; police, haunted by their failure to bring Jimmy Savile to justice, were looking for high-profile prosecutions and followed a new policy of “always believing the victim”. A judicial inquiry found that they had made 43 separate mistakes: they failed to interview Beech’s former wife; and they failed to look at his computer, which revealed not only that he had researched his made-up stories in great detail, but also that he himself was a paedophile, with 350 indecent images of children. The police were hopeless, but Tom Watson was worse, said Richard Littlejohn in the Daily Mail. Labour’s deputy leader led a long, hysterical campaign to smear Tory politicians and other establishment figures as paedophiles and rapists, without a shred of evidence. Without him, Leon Brittan, the D-Day veteran Lord Bramall and the former MP Harvey Proctor – to name only three of Beech’s blameless victims – would never have had their reputations dragged “through the mud”.
In hindsight, Operation Midland was a moment of “institutional madness”, said Ceri Thomas in The Guardian. After Savile, the police had come “to think that the old ways of investigating didn’t work”. And in many respects they were right. Crimes had gone unpunished and genuine victims had been deterred from coming forward. “But the right diagnosis was followed by a spectacularly wrong prescription.” We like to think the police “have a steady compass”, but they don’t. “They’re twitchy, obsessively concerned with public opinion, easily moved by political pressure.” In “overcompensating for their failings over Savile, they drove a steamroller over the rights of innocent men”.