He wore a designer tracksuit prime, zipped to his throat, and a cautious expression. This was ‘Witness A’, whose id as an alleged sufferer is protected by the Sexual Offences Act.
To breach his anonymity is to ask prosecution and potential imprisonment. You would possibly come to assume that’s what he deserves himself.
For in the midst of a two-hour dialog with the Mail, Witness A made a collection of disturbing and generally sensational allegations. They involved the senior public figures he claimed to have met and had intercourse with whereas working as a teenage prostitute within the Seventies and Nineteen Eighties.
As he talked, his gaze typically slid away from scrutiny. He’s a liar by behavior.
However at the least one among his statements had the ring of authenticity — and it goes to the guts of a scandal that raises profound questions concerning the management and priorities of the Metropolitan Police.
For in the midst of a two-hour dialog with the Mail, Witness A made a collection of disturbing and generally sensational allegations
‘The police needed me to hitch up the dots within the Harvey Proctor case,’ mentioned Witness A, who has by no means spoken publicly earlier than.
‘They realised their investigation [into him] wasn’t going wherever. ‘So . . .they needed me to say Harvey Proctor did this and that, and that I noticed him [do it]. They needed me to implicate him.’
And implicate Proctor — and others — Witness A obligingly did, in interviews with detectives from Operation Midland, the disastrous Metropolitan Police investigation into an alleged VIP paedophile ring.
The extraordinary story of Witness A and one other fraudster referred to as Witness B, which we are able to inform right this moment, suggests they’re someway above the regulation, regardless of a former Excessive Courtroom choose demanding they face prosecution.
For though each witnesses instructed a tissue of lies that would have led to harmless males being jailed for all times, neither of them has been held to account.
In contrast to the fantasist Carl Beech, whose intercourse abuse lies lay on the coronary heart of Operation Midland, neither has been charged with perverting the course of justice.
A choice to not launch a prison investigation into their testimonies was made behind closed doorways by the Met — the identical power that entertained them as witnesses. However it has by no means publicly defined why.
May or not it’s that the Metropolitan Police, ashamed of its personal errors, has been working a two-tier justice system?
Because the Met begins to analyze alleged breaches of Covid rules at No 10, contemporary query marks have emerged over the judgment of the Commissioner who launched the controversial probe.
THE CHARGE SHEET OF COMMISSIONER CALAMITY
Solely 4 months have handed since Dame Cressida Dick was granted a two-year extension to her contract.
Her dedication to hold on had obtained robust backing from London’s Labour Mayor Sadiq Khan and Lord (Ian) Blair, the previous Commissioner and serial bungler who resigned from his publish after disagreements with then London Mayor Boris Johnson in 2008.
However many individuals questioned the extension due to the variety of blunders and scandals which have more and more marked Dick’s profession on the prime.
There have been requires her head in 2005, when she was ‘Gold Commander’ accountable for the disastrous Met operation through which harmless electrician Jean Charles de Menezes was shot useless on a Tube prepare after he was mistaken for a terrorist.
Solely 4 months have handed since Dame Cressida Dick was granted a two-year extension to her contract
Extra not too long ago, as Commissioner, she has been caught up in a string of controversies together with her power’s woeful safety operation on the Euro 2020 remaining, and allegations of a ‘cover-up tradition’ at Scotland Yard.
Final June, an official report branded her power ‘institutionally corrupt’ and accused her of making an attempt to thwart an inquiry into the homicide of personal eye Daniel Morgan. She has rejected the important thing findings.
Final October, she confronted a clamour to resign after she admitted that Sarah Everard’s homicide had corroded belief within the police and introduced ‘disgrace’ on her power.
And in what was described as Scotland Yard’s ‘darkest day’, a string of MPs, together with the chair of the ladies and equalities choose committee, mentioned she ought to go.
They mentioned it was clear she couldn’t restore religion in Britain’s largest police power after one among her officers, Wayne Couzens, was sentenced to a whole-life time period for Miss Everard’s homicide.
However maybe essentially the most egregious blunder on her cost sheet is Operation Midland, which she launched in 2014.
DAMNING DOCUMENT — AND AITKEN LINK
The astonishing tales of Witness A and Witness B’s dealings with the Met are set out in a confidential police report — Doc 1794 — that has been leaked to the Mail.
It was written on the conclusion of Operation Midland in 2016 by then Deputy Assistant Commissioner Steve Rodhouse, the officer in total cost and a key ally of Dame Cressida.
His report units out how Witness A and Witness B mimicked allegations already made by Carl Beech, aka ‘Nick’.
Beech had claimed to have been the kid intercourse sufferer of a number of Institution figures together with the late Prime Minister Sir Edward Heath, former Tory Residence Secretary Lord (Leon) Brittan, former Chief of the Defence Workers Area Marshal Lord Bramall and former Tory MP Harvey Proctor.
In addition they molested and murdered three different boys, he claimed.
In 2019, Beech was jailed for 18 years for perverting the course of justice and paedophile offences
A senior Midland officer went as far as to declare Beech’s testimony ‘credible and true’.
In truth, it was whole fantasy. In 2019, Beech was jailed for 18 years for perverting the course of justice and paedophile offences.
What, then, of Witness A and Witness B, who made detailed abuse and homicide claims towards the identical group of VIPs?
In Saturday’s Mail, we instructed how Witness A additionally made unfounded sexual allegations towards former Tory Cupboard minister Jonathan Aitken, who had beforehand not been linked to Midland.
Witness A mentioned his claims had been ‘supported’ by his possession of plenty of objects stolen from Aitken’s home throughout an underage homosexual intercourse assignation. In truth, they’re believed to have been taken throughout a housebreaking at Aitken’s then constituency house.
Because of Doc 1794 and associated inquiries, the Mail now is aware of the true identities and backgrounds of Witness A and Witness B.
Witness A was and is a persistent intercourse offender — he has been convicted of a intercourse crime as not too long ago as 2017 — and his report consists of offences towards kids.
Doc 1794 additionally reveals that he was given a warning by a provincial police power in November 2015, for having made a false declare of a demise risk towards him. This was solely days earlier than he started actively aiding Operation Midland.
Witness B has critical psychological well being points.
But the half they had been allowed to play in Midland arguably extended that inquiry for a number of months after it ought to have been ended.
COPYCAT CLAIMS AND A HISTORY OF LIES
Witness A got here ahead in September 2015. His testimony would help, even replicate, Beech’s claims, which by then had been on many web websites for all to see — or crib from.
Witness A was interviewed twice in January 2016 by Midland detectives. He made critical allegations towards Proctor, Brittan and Heath, amongst others.
Like Beech, Witness A claimed he attended wicked events at Dolphin Sq., close to the Homes of Parliament.
Like Carl Beech, he mentioned he had witnessed the abuse and attainable homicide scene of a boy named Martin Allen, who had certainly mysteriously disappeared with out hint in London, aged 15, in November 1979.
Rodhouse states that in an earlier interview with the provincial power, Witness A had mentioned that in 1980 ‘Harvey Proctor took him out to a meal to Claridge’s (the five-star Mayfair resort) and throughout the night, Proctor broke down in tears and described how he had strangled ‘this child’ believed referring to Martin Allen’.
Witness A made additional allegations of rape and homicide towards Leon Brittan and mentioned that when he was 13 he was abused by Edward Heath at Dolphin Sq. and on the previous PM’s boat.
However there have been ‘plenty of considerations concerning the reliability of Witness A’s allegations’ that Rodhouse units out within the doc.
No kidding.
Operation Midland officers had — or ought to have had — speedy entry to plenty of sources that rang alarm bells about Witness A’s character. A number of warnings had been made by intercourse offender clinicians and therapists about his ‘false’ claims of intercourse abuse.
Rodhouse tells how, in 1998, the supervisor of a facility for treating intercourse offenders ‘wrote to the Probation Service and said that Witness A had spent a protracted time period giving misinformation’.
A therapist at a clinic for paedophile offenders instructed police that, in 1999, Witness A had ‘admitted giving false data prior to now about being systematically sexually abused over a considerable time period by a paedophile ring’.
Midland detectives had additionally raised ‘considerations’ that Witness A ‘might have carried out vital ranges of web analysis . . . he had spoken ‘about how he had been trawling the web to ‘discover out every thing that I may about Harvey Proctor, the place he lived and what he was doing now and so forth, and nonetheless with that mentality that I will f*** all of them up’.’
The Mail made our personal inquiries and spoke to Witness A’s closest member of the family, a sister.
She mentioned: ‘It is laborious to inform when he’s telling the reality. [Eventually] I did not consider something he mentioned.’
When the Mail met him in particular person, Witness A mentioned he had labored as a ‘lease boy’ within the late Seventies and Nineteen Eighties and had been jailed in 1997 for paedophile offences.
He mentioned that when he spoke to Operation Midland detectives, it was they — not him — who first introduced up the names of Proctor and Brittan. They’d additionally supplied him £75,000 in sufferer compensation.
‘I’m very sorry for Harvey Proctor,’ he mentioned.
‘The police needed me to hitch up the dots within the Proctor case. They realised their investigation [into him] wasn’t going wherever. So . . . they needed me to say Harvey Proctor did this and that, and that I noticed him [do it]. They needed me to implicate him.’
Witness A instructed the Mail that he had met Proctor 3 times and by no means had dinner with him.
‘I used to be a lease boy and knew what I used to be doing,’ he mentioned. ‘I had intercourse with cops and judges. I had intercourse with Edward Heath. [But] I by no means had intercourse with Harvey Proctor or Leon Brittan.’
ENTER WITNESS B — WITH MORE CLAIMS
In keeping with the identical doc, Witness B’s allegations towards VIPs had been first made identified to Midland by a social employee in a psychological well being staff. He ‘instructed police that his affected person had made disclosures about sexual abuse’.
Rodhouse states in his report that Witness B ‘has a variety of convictions from 1981 to 1986 for offences together with theft, fraud and violence.’
Witness B’s household present their very own view of his credibility, as Rodhouse relates in his report. ‘Officers have spoken with one among his brothers, a vicar, who has disclosed that Witness B is understood inside his household as being a prolific liar.’
Two liars, then, and two potential circumstances of perverting the course of justice. So why weren’t they investigated by the Met, not like Carl Beech?
‘I COULD F*** THE POLICE’
In his 2020 memoir, retired Excessive Courtroom Choose Sir Richard Henriques, who delivered a devastating official report on the conduct of Midland, requested this very query.
‘They [Witness A and B] had been apparently making an attempt to do precisely what ‘Nick’ had achieved. The sentence of 18 years imposed on Carl Beech underlines the gravity of this type of conduct. If there exists a sound foundation for taking no motion towards A and B, I’ve but to listen to it.’
Witness A supplied the Mail his personal view on why no judicial motion has or — he boasted — will ever be taken towards him.
‘The police know that in the event that they got here after me I’ve a complete load in my again pocket about what they’ve achieved,’ he mentioned.
‘In the event that they need to f*** me then I can actually f*** them again.’
The Met has repeatedly refused to say why it has not acted towards him or Witness B.
A two-tier system, certainly — and one that doesn’t encourage confidence within the Met and Cressida Dick’s judgment because the ‘Partygate’ probe will get beneath approach.
Particular reporting: Stephanie Condron and Simon Trump