‘Nick’: the damning document
A FILE showing police should never have raided the home of Britain’s greatest living soldier can be revealed today.
Detectives claimed in a secret search warrant application that they had no reason to doubt VIP child abuse and murder claims made by the fantasist ‘Nick’.
Signed by a detective sergeant, the document was presented to a judge who approved the raid in March 2015 on the home of Lord Bramall, a D-Day veteran and former head of the Armed Forces.
But an investigation by this newspaper has established that police were aware of at least eight factors that raised serious questions about the outlandish claims made by
Nick, whose real name is Carl Beech. A key factor was that despite extensive efforts police found no evidence to back up Beech’s claim to have suffered physical abuse and injury and to have been absent from school.
Yet officers told district judge Howard Riddle that the 51-year-old former nurse was a ‘consistent’ and ‘credible’ witness.
In the document, which has been seen by the Daily Mail, Judge Riddle wrote that he was assured the implications for the application for the proposed raid had been ‘considered at DAC level’.
This was a reference to Steve Rodhouse, a deputy assistant commissioner with Metropolitan Police and ‘gold commander’ of the bungled £2.5million investigation.
The revelations about the warrants for raids on the homes of Lord Bramall, former home secretary Lord Brittan and ex Tory MP Harvey Proctor, will pile pressure on Home Secretary Priti Patel to order a fresh inquiry into the fiasco.
Last week she demanded a full explanation of the police watchdog’s decision to clear three Operation Midland officers.
Two more senior officers – including Mr Rodhouse – were controversially exonerated two years ago.
Victims of Beech’s lies, and their families, are furious that no police officer has been held to account over the Met’s disastrous investigation.
Today the Daily Mail can also reveal that a rookie worker at the Independent Office for Police Conduct, who was in her late 20s, was the ‘lead investigator’ during the two-year probe that cleared the three officers of misconduct last month.
The latest developments come a week after a former High Court judge said that police broke the law with Operation Midland.
In an astonishing intervention, Sir Richard Henriques told the Daily Mail that officers used false evidence to obtain the search warrants and should now face a criminal investigation.
He said that detectives did not have the right to search the properties because their description of Beech as a consistent witness was false, effectively fooling a judge into granting the warrants.
He also alleged that the ‘course of justice was perverted with shocking consequences’, saying he found it astonishing that no officer has been brought to book.
In 2016 Sir Richard wrote a scathing report for Scotland Yard about Operation Midland. It identified 43 blunders, was heavily redacted and has never been fully made public.
In the wake of the Mail’s revelations last week, a string of distinguished law enforcement figures – including former Met chief Lord Stedophile vens, and former director of public prosecutions Lord Macdonald, have called for an unredacted version of the dossier to be released.
Sir Richard’s broadside at the Met and police watchdogs came days after vicar’s son Beech was jailed for 18 years for telling a string of lies about alleged VIP child sex abuse and serial murder.
At his ten-week trial, jurors heard the fantasist told officers that he was used as a human dartboard by the former heads of MI5 and MI6, that his dog was kidnapped by a spy chief, and that the paefound ring shot dead his horse. The court also heard that Beech is now a convicted paedophile after child porn offences came to light when an independent police force, at Sir Richard’s behest, started investigating him on suspicion of making false claims about a deadly Establishment paedophile ring.
In the wake of his convictions, Scotland Yard chiefs faced intense criticism over staggering incompetence in 16-month investigation launched on the word of a pathological liar.
But shortly after Beech was guilty, the Independent Office for Police Conduct announced the three officers accused of misconduct over search warrant applications had been cleared.
The watchdog said the officers, led by senior investigating officer detective chief inspector Diane Tudway, acted ‘with due diligence and in good faith at the time’.
But Sir Richard told this newspaper the finding was ‘in conflict’ with his review of Operation Midland in 2016.
Following Beech’s convictions, Met Deputy Commissioner Sir Stephen House said he believed all five officers probed by police watchdogs over Operation Midland ‘worked in good faith’.
They cooperated fully with both the Henriques Review and the Independent Office for Police Conduct investigations, he added.
The inquiry into allegations of a VIP sex abuse ring codenamed Operation Midland ranks as the most disgraceful episode in the recent history of the Metropolitan Police. A scandal suggesting something rotten in the state of our law-enforcement system.
Duped by malicious fantasist Carl Beech – the infamous ‘Nick’ – supposedly competent Scotland Yard detectives rampaged through the private lives of innocent people, invading their homes and rifling through intimate family records in a vain attempt to substantiate this man’s warped and fantastical claims. The reputations of one of Britain’s most gallant and distinguished fighting men, Field Marshal Lord Bramall, and a former home Secretary, the late Lord Brittan, lay strewn in their wake.
The life of former MP harvey Proctor was up-ended also, his livelihood and home sacrificed in a deranged witch-hunt masquerading as a responsible criminal investigation. A garden was searched for human remains – of Lord Brittan’s recently widowed wife. her husband did not live to see his name cleared.
All at the behest of a grandstanding Walter Mitty whose accounts of devilish sex parties involving establishment figures torturing and murdering boys was riddled with inconsistencies and strained credulity.
Now we learn (thanks to the Mail’s inquiries) that when officers applied in court for search warrants, they knew that no witnesses had come forward to verify Beech’s wild imaginings, despite extensive media coverage.
They knew, also, that his mother could recollect nothing that supported her son’s claims regarding his supposed ordeal.
Yet they knowingly concealed these facts from the judge who authorised the raids. This grievous misconduct is there in black and white – in the applications for search warrants submitted in court. These require police to disclose anything that might reasonably undermine their request. In the case of Lord Bramall, this ‘duty of disclosure’ clause was answered with ‘N/A’ – not applicable – a straightforward lie.
Incompetence on a heroic scale is clearly a major ingredient of this fiasco. But there is something much worse: a concerted attempt by officers to conceal the flimsiness of their inquiry and secure warrants in the vague hope of ‘turning something up’. The misery this would inflict on those whose homes were violated was of no consequence.
The retired high Court judge who reviewed Operation Midland following its implosion, Sir Richard henriques, believes some of the police officers involved should face criminal investigation for their misconduct. Amazingly, his full findings are still unavailable to the public.
In a weasel-worded statement, the Met admits it ‘did not get everything right’ but implores us to remember Midland was conducted under ‘intense scrutiny’ amid claims that the force had ‘covered up allegations against prominent people’.
The answer to which is, so what? Did this allow officers to ride roughshod over the judicial safeguards meant to protect the individual from harassment by the state?
An outside police force must be brought in to investigate wrongdoing and the currently redacted henriques report published in full. Only then can the Met begin to rebuild its shattered reputation.