“INSTITUTIONAL stupidity”? This description by a top QC barely does justice to Scotland Yard’s deluded probe into alleged child rape and murder by a phantom Westminster paedophile gang.
The Met’s Operation Midland was bungled from start to finish by clod-hopping cops determined to believe any dodgy tale of child abuse without question.
Heads must roll if anything is to be done to salvage the Yard’s shattered reputation.
Midland looks like a political stitch-up, a grotesque abuse of power and, incidentally, the second time police have been led up the garden path by wannabe Labour leaders.
The car-crash inquiry into the ravings of Carl Beech — codename “Nick” — was driven by Labour smear specialist Tom Watson.
Watson shamefully abused his protection under Parliamentary privilege to launch baseless allegations against leading political, military and intelligence figures — most of them Tory.
Police sources say Watson rode shotgun on “Nick’s” false claims of rampant child sex abuse, torture and murder, putting the Met in a “panic” as they struggled to prove the unprovable.
In the process, he helped destroy the twilight years of former Home Secretary Leon Brittan, Field Marshal Lord Bramall and ex-Tory MP Harvey Proctor, who lost his home and his livelihood.
Without a shred of supporting evidence, Watson stood up in the Commons and labelled Lord Brittan, “as close to evil as a human being could get”.
Since this innocent man had died just four days earlier, unaware that he was to be cleared of preposterous rape allegations, it was a tag Watson might have hung round his own neck.
Operation Midland crumbled when Beech ended up in jail for 18 years as a serial liar and paedophile.
It was the most catastrophic failure in the history of the Yard — bar one.
Barely four years earlier, the Met was roundly humiliated by another shocking miscarriage of justice.
In 2015, Operation Elveden, Scotland Yard’s biggest and costliest investigation, put 24 innocent Sun journalists in the dock on trumped-up, 13th-Century conspiracy charges.
The £30million fiasco, which led to Old Bailey trials, was triggered by Director of Public Prosecutions Keir Starmer. They ended without a single conviction of a Sun journalist after the Appeal Court raised questions about Press freedom.
Starmer, who never said sorry, was rewarded with a knighthood, a safe Labour seat and a place in the Shadow Cabinet as Brexit supremo.
Today, Watson and Starmer are vying with each other for Jeremy Corbyn’s job as Labour leader and potential Prime Minister of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
Together, they have inflicted grave damage on Britain’s once revered system of justice, its police and prosecutors.
Far from expressing regret, Watson bizarrely describes himself as one of “Nick’s” dupes — just another victim.
Yesterday, Shadow Attorney General Shami Chakrabarti — author of Labour’s anti-semitism whitewash — rode to his rescue, shrugging off his obsessive vendetta as “overly enthusiastic”. But the botched Midland and Elveden operations cannot be shrugged off.
They raise serious questions about the impartiality of our police and prosecutors, some of whom have been accused of breaking the law.
It is not good enough to leave further disciplinary action to other police forces.
Judge Richard Henriques’ sensational report last week exposed a catalogue of Met failures, some perhaps criminal, which Home Secretary Priti Patel insists, “cannot be left to lie”.
This shambles deserves nothing less than an independent inquiry, with power to clean out the stables and bring senior culprits to book. Ex-police chief Steve Rodhouse, who disgracefully authorised the description of “Nick’s” fairytales as “credible and true”, cannot remain at the top of the National Crime Agency.
EVERYONE’S asking how Boris can both obey the law AND refuse to send a surrender letter to the EU begging for extended negotiations, as he is bound to do by October 31.
The answer is that he can use the widely loathed supremacy of European law over the laws of nation states such as Britain.
It was under European law that Theresa May secured her six-month extension from March 31, which expires on Halloween.
Brussels set the deadline, not the UK.
This trumps Hilary Benn’s capitulation law. Hoist by their own petard.
Towering failures such as ex-Met boss Bernard Hogan-Howe, who presided over both calamities and is now in the House of Lords, should be hauled in for questioning — perhaps after a dawn raid on his luxury home.
His successor, Cressida Dick, needs to explain why she knew it was a mistake to say “Nick’s” claims were NOT credible and true — and why she did nothing.
And voters need to know why Watson and Starmer will never be suitable candidates for the highest office in the land.
