Cleared hero Lord Bramall attacks police incompetence
BRITAIN’S most senior policeman faced an uncertain future last night after ‘hounded’ war hero Lord Bramall launched a blistering attack on Scotland Yard.
Three weeks after the former head of the Armed Forces was cleared of baseless paedophile allegations, he revealed the incompetence and inhumanity of the Metropolitan Police.
Lord Bramall, 92, said detectives had left him to clear his own name after he was wrongly accused of child- sex offences by a suspected serial fantasist.
Referring to one specific claim of abuse, he added: ‘Hardly, if a man is a Field Marshal, is he likely to choose Remembrance Sunday to have a sex party.’
And he said officers ‘didn’t bother’ to corroborate the claims before launching an inquiry into a supposed VIP child-sex ring, and raiding his home in front of his dying wife.
Lord Bramall’s intervention prompted renewed calls for Met chief Sir Bernard
Hogan-Howe to make a personal apology for his force’s mishandling of the case.
Sir Bernard’s hopes of securing an extension to his five-year contract, which f i nishes in September, are in doubt.
Confirmation that the Met’s multi-million-pound VIP childsex abuse inquiry, Operation Midland, is to close is expected this month. Behind the scenes, Yard chiefs are preparing an ‘exit strategy’ for the inquiry, which has caused the force untold reputational damage.
The Met’s probe into Lord Bramall was dropped last month after an inquiry that saw him publicly named as a suspect.
In an interview with BBC Radio 4, Lord Bramall said officers did not speak to witnesses who cast doubts on the allegations until several months into the investigation.
He said: ‘The allegation was I had abused an under-age male 40 years ago.
‘I just don’t see how a levelheaded policeman could have believed a word of it without corroboration, which he didn’t bother to get. It was I that had to prove I couldn’t have done it. The same with the sex pool parties... absurd business of the policeman saying, “Can you swim?” And I said, “Yes, I can swim.”’
Lord Bramall described seeing the officer’s face ‘light up’ at this information.
He called on the Met to review
‘An absurd business’
the way it handles claims of historical sex abuse.
The D-Day veteran was told by the Met last month that he would face no action in connection with allegations he was part of a VIP paedophile ring which allegedly included former prime minister Edward Heath and former home secretary Leon Brittan.
Scotland Yard launched Operation Midland after hearing claims made by ‘ Nick’, an alleged victim of child abuse.
Nick is at the centre of extraordinary claims that three boys were killed by a VIP paedophile gang operating around Westminster in the 1970s and 1980s.
Detectives now regard him as a ‘Walter Mitty’ fantasist but Yard chiefs are desperate to justify spending so much money investigating his claims.
Thames Valley Police and Crime Commissioner Anthony Stansfeld, who served under Lord Bramall in the Army, said: ‘Why some senior police officers find it so difficult to apologise when clear and unnecessary mistakes have been made... I do not understand.’