Matthew Parris: On Public Prosecutions

Last weekend my former parliamentary colleague Harvey Proctor published in a Sunday newspaper a moving statement. You may remember that two months ago the police raided his home in Leicestershire, spending 15 hours there and taking away his mobile phone, his laptop and all his personal records. They told him (and still tell him) he is not a suspect in their Operation Midland inquiry into historical child abuse; but they tipped off the media anyway, and a storm broke over Harvey’s head.

Declaring his complete innocence, and ignorance of anything about the fabled “Westminster gay paedophile sex ring” and anxious to put this on the record he has begged for an early interview, but the police keep postponing it. Now he has lost his home and his job. Desperate to resume his life, he challenges the police to “put up or shut up”.

I know Harvey. We talked on Monday. I’m convinced he had nothing to do with any MPs’ paedophile ring and doubt it existed. My guess is that the police have realised this too but won’t climb down and admit that by turning a routine search into a nationally publicised raid they have shattered a life and impugned a reputation. So they leave an innocent man to rot, until the interest they stirred up has faded.

From Matthew Parris' Times Diary.

Mr Parris does not mention this, but in a sympathetic profile in Friday's Independent, Proctor says that a supportive phone call and dinner invitation from Matthew stopped Harvey from killing himself.

Last week, Parris had this to say about Lord Janner...

I have no brief for (Lord) Greville Janner. I found him ingratiating and a bit of a bully. And I haven’t the least idea of the truth of allegations against him, nor any view on whether today he’s fit to plead.

But in attacking the judgment of Alison Saunders as director of public prosecutions, the behaviour of senior politicians, from the PM and home secretary downwards, was disgraceful. As for (Lord) Ken Macdonald, in post as DPP when it was decided not to prosecute Janner — to criticise his successor in print was offside.

DPPs are independent, they make decisions on the information they have, and the whole idea of their office is that they should accept no interference from politicians, peers or newspaper editorials. They must stand outside what some prattling MP has called — in that sinister phrase — “the court of public opinion”. This general election is corroding the judgments of people who ought to (and, worse, do) know better.

How strange so many journalists have remained silent on these two very different, but equally rum cases.

And how sad so many politicians have spoken out for the posturing populism of overturning the DPP's Janner decision.

Harvey Proctor: I Don't Believe It!

In the context of recent speculation and allegations on the internet, I write this to say that I am innocent of the allegations against me and I will maintain this stance until my dying breath.

On Wednesday 4 March 2015, the Metropolitan Police’s Operation Midland Team raided my home and, under a warrant investigating historical child sexual abuse, searched my house for 15 hours. I was told at 11pm that no statement would be issued to the press and my identity would not come out. That was not the case.

If not before, then within eight hours of the police leaving my home, details of the raid were leaked to the national media. ExaroNews – an odd internet news agency – was tipped off before the police left my home. Mark Conrad, a journalist for the agency, was phoning and emailing my office at 9.34pm – at least 90 minutes before the police left my house.

During and immediately after the search, I volunteered to be interviewed by the Metropolitan Police concerning Operation Midland’s investigations relating to allegations from the 1970s and Eighties...

So the “organisation” – strange term for the Metropolitan Police’s Murder Squad – has raided my house, searched it for 15 hours, removed my communications and computer equipment and many boxes of historic documents and other irrelevant material from the 1970s and Eighties, prompted me to retire from my job of 13 years and to leave my home. They have ruined 28 years of my life’s rehabilitation after 1987 and they are not prepared to meet me and interview me. They have said to my solicitors, but not to the media, that I am not a suspect and they merely wish for me to assist the police with their inquiries.

In 1987, Detective Chief Superintendent Drummond Marvin of Scotland Yard’s Serious Crime Squad was the officer in charge of my prosecution. I pleaded guilty to four charges of gross indecency. Offences which, because of the changes in the law regarding the homosexual age of consent, are no longer offences.

The People.

Chief Superintendent Marvin subsequently wrote a book and sold his story to The Sun newspaper. He wrote about three of his cases: Lord Lucan, Russell Harty and myself. In the article about me he stated for the first time, as far as I am aware, the felonious notion that there was a rent-boy ring at Westminster. If there was one, I was not aware of it, it was news to me and I was not part of it. Marvin’s article was wrong on this and on other matters.

I have always tried to protect my privacy – not because I thought I was breaking the law, but because I consider sexual matters to be private, except where they are illegal. Not just for me but for everyone. I refuse to comment on these matters now save to say anything and everything I have done has been consensual. But with alarming frequency, when I was visited by the police in 1987, journalists from the Sunday People were outside my flat.

I have not flaunted my sexuality. It is the press and the police who have time and time again invaded my privacy. In 1987, the press wired a witness for sound and was sent into my apartment. The police trawled the gay bars of London, showing my photograph to all and sundry, asking: “Have you slept with this man?” Today the modern-day equivalent is for senior police officers to go on the airways enticing so called “victims” to come out of the woodwork, telling them, without even speaking to them, that they would be believed.

Now, the guide to misinformation and the oracle of disinformation is the internet. It is a totally impossible media with which to engage, as hundreds of thousands of comments appear daily, with no chance of rebuttal.

At the behest of a weird assortment of alleged victims, ex-police officers, bishops, social workers, attention seekers and “nutters”, former, respected politicians have had their reputations trashed without a shred of evidence – Sir Leon Brittan, Sir Keith Joseph, Dr Rhodes Boyson and Enoch Powell to name but a few. They are dead; they cannot defend themselves. I am alive; I can and I will.

Enough is enough. Someone has to stand up and say the Emperor is wearing no clothes...

From an open letter published in The Independent.

Fagburn's said it before and I'll say it again; just cause Harvey Proctor is an odious far right racist shitbag, it doesn't mean he's guilty of any of these fantastical accusations.

Lord Janner: Justice?

No comment...

PS Oops!

PPS The nation's moral guardians, the Daily Mail, go overboard/sail close to the wind (select most appropriate nautical metaphor).

PPS It's not the evidence, but who you are that matters, the great Neil Clark on RT.com.

PPPPS Double oops! Jay Rayner on media silence on Janner in the 90s.