Ex-Labour deputy Tom Watson blames police as he defends his role in bungled Nick the fantasist VIP sex abuse probe and maintains that ‘good came from that inquiry’
- Tom Watson insisted it wasn’t his job to say if Beech’s claims were ‘true or not’
- Ex-Labour MP ‘very sorry’ for falsely accused but insists police ‘influenced’ him
- He said: ‘I did my very best. The police asked me to reassure potential victims that they would be believed’
- But he added: ‘I am very sorry’ – ‘I ask people to look at the wider picture’
Tom Watson today blamed police for his decision to back convicted child abuse fantasist Carl Beech and denied he was an ‘irresponsible politician’ who helped spread his lies and smear his famous victims.
Labour’s former deputy leader has insisted it wasn’t his job to say if Beech’s claims were ‘true or not’ and claimed his campaigning had also helped genuine child abuse victims.
Mr Watson, who is promoting his new weightloss book, was grilled about the scandal on Good Morning Britain by Piers Morgan and then by Kay Burley on Sky News where he asked if he felt guilty for helping ‘trash’ the reputations of those falsely accused by liar Carl Beech, nicknamed ‘Nick’ by detectives.
He famously called former home secretary Leon Brittan ‘evil’ based on Beech’s cooked-up claims, but asked critics to look at the ‘wider picture’.
Pointing the finger at the Met, he said: ‘I did my very best – I was influenced by the police. The police asked me to reassure potential victims that they would be believed.
‘I feel very, very sorry [for those smeared by Beech] but in my defence a number of very serious and predatory child abusers went to jail because of the instances raised during that inquiry. I ask people to look at the wider picture’.
Tom Watson defended his conduct in a series of TV interviews today and insisted it was the police who encouraged him to publicly back ‘Nick’ and later call Lord Brittan ‘evil’
Mr Watson was asked by Piers Morgan whether he felt guilty about his involvement in the scandal – he said that he had done some good by speaking out but also made mistakes
But he added: ‘I am very sorry, I’m very sorry on many levels. I did get too close to the whole child abuse inquiry’.
Beech was jailed for 18 years for falsely accusing household names including Lord Brittan, war hero Lord Bramall, ex-PM Ted Heath and former Tory MP Harvey Proctor of being part of a murderous paedophile ring who ritually abused him.
The Met spent £2.5million looking into Beech’s allegations that he had been sadistically raped in the 1970s and 1980s and even held a press conference where an officer described the allegations as ‘credible and true’ without properly testing the evidence.
Operation Midland has been branded ‘the worst police investigation in history by critics, including Mr Proctor.
Today Mr Watson said Scotland Yard’s intervention that led to his backing of Beech and his own incorrect assertion that Leon Brittan was an ‘evil’ paedophile.
He said: ‘By the time I’d done that the police had done a press conference and said they believed him’.
He added: ‘I’ve never named Leon Brittan under privilege except after he died – never in Parliament’.
Lady Proctor (pictured with her husband) has never accepted Watson’s apology, which the former MP said he accepts
Lord Bramall (pictured left) and Tory MP Harvey Proctor were falsely accused by Carl Beech in an operation which cost the Met £2.5m – Mr Watson said he felt ‘very sorry’ for their ordeals but denied he was responsible in any way
Carl Beech’s victims
Lord Bramall
Edwin Bramall joined the Army in 1943 and stormed the beaches of Normandy as a 2nd Lieutenant. He fought until the end of the war and was awarded a Military Cross. He rose steadily through the ranks and became a general in 1972. From 1979-82 he was Chief of the General staff, head of the Army, and from 1982-85 he was Chief of the Defence Staff, head of Britain’s armed forces.
Sir Michael Hanley
Michael Hanley was the head of MI5 from 1972-1978 after serving in the Army in the Second World War. He died in 2001.
Sir Maurice Oldfield
Maurice Oldfield was the head of MI6 from 1973-1978. He served in Egypt, Singapore and Washington. He died in 1981.
Lord Brittan
Leon Brittan became a Conservative MP in 1974 and was appointed Margaret Thatcher’s Home Secretary in 1983. He was appointed a commissioner at the EU in 1989 and served until 1999. He was made a Lord in 2000 and was vice chairman of UBS AG investment bank. He died in 2015 under a cloud of suspicion.
Ted Heath
Was prime minister from 1970 to 1974, and a Conservative MP from 1950 to 2001. He died aged 87 in 2003.
Harvey Proctor
Harvey Proctor was a Tory MP from 1979-1987. In 1986 a newspaper reported that he had sexual relationships with men under 21, which was then the age of consent for homosexual relationships. He resigned and started a shirt company.
Greville Janner
Greville Janner was a Labour MP from 1970 until 1997, when he became a Lord.
He died in 2015 before the investigation into Nick’s claims was dropped
Mr Watson was accused of ‘whipping up a moral panic’ using Beech’s false claims and Lord Brittan’s widow has never accepted his apology.
He said today: ‘I did get too close to the whole child abuse inquiry. The emotional turmoil obviously clouds your judgement. I’m on public record, and I said very early on, it wasn’t my job to say whether it’s true or not. And I said he [Beech] is either a hoaxer or the real deal. You would never imagine that a person would behave like that’.
Kay Burley asked about those who were damaged by false claims, he said: ‘Yeah, in this one case [Brittan] – to imagine that another human being would create such a cruel and elaborate hoax, which damages the lives of innocent people and undermines real victims of child abuse – you don’t iumaging that people would behave like that.
‘Maybe that’s one of the lessons of Carl Beech – but the thing with Carl Beech is that we also lose sight of what has been brought out of the [wider] inquiry’.
A senior police officer should be quizzed by MPs over the investigation of a baseless rape claim against Leon Brittan, a former top detective said last week.
Paul Settle said James Vaughan, chief constable of Dorset Police, must be questioned by the home affairs committee over his support of senior Scotland Yard officers accused of hounding the terminally ill Tory peer to his grave.
In a controversial review of the case, Mr Vaughan backed the Yard’s decision to interview the former home secretary under caution about sex claims previously dismissed by prosecutors.
The rape accusations against Lord Brittan were made by a mentally ill Labour activist with a history of making bogus allegations. As a detective chief inspector in the Met, Mr Settle spent several months investigating her claims in 2013 before concluding there was no evidence that the offence of rape had been ‘made out’.
He ruled there was no need to interview Lord Brittan and shut down the probe, codenamed Operation Vincente.
But after former deputy Labour leader Tom Watson intervened on behalf of the accuser in 2014, Met chiefs hurriedly reopened the inquiry and called the gravely ill peer on his mobile phone as he lay in his hospital bed to demand he be interviewed under caution.
Under pressure from the MP, officers continued investigating Lord Brittan even after he died of cancer aged 75 in January 2015.
In October 2015, the home affairs committee criticised the Met’s treatment of Lord Brittan and praised Mr Settle, who gave evidence before it, for his conduct in the case. He told MPs he had been sidelined by superiors after speaking out in defence of the peer and said he was the victim of a ‘witch-hunt’.
Now, on the fifth anniversary of Lord Brittan’s death, the scandal of the bogus rape claims that dogged his last months has been reignited amid questions over the findings of Mr Vaughan’s review in 2016.
The recent publication of a previously suppressed report into the case by ex-High Court judge Sir Richard Henriques has raised serious questions about the chief constable’s findings.
Sir Richard, who praised Mr Settle’s decision to close the inquiry without interviewing the Tory peer, said in his report published in October: ‘I do not agree with significant parts of the Dorset review… I do not consider that interviewing Lord Brittan could conceivably have advanced the investigation.’
Sir Richard also backed the suggestion that the offence of rape had not been ‘made out’. He added that the ‘prolonged extension’ of the inquiry into Lord Brittan was ‘unjustifiable’ and ‘most unfair’ to the late peer’s family.
Met chiefs hurriedly reopened the inquiry after former deputy Labour leader Tom Watson, pictured, intervened on behalf of the accuser in 2014
Timeline of Beech’s falsehoods and the investigations they launched
2011: Beech downloads a criminal injuries compensation form later found on his PC
2012: Carl Beech gives his first interview, to Wiltshire Police, in which he claims to have been abused by his step-father and Jimmy Savile. The enquiry was classified ‘undetected’ and taken no further.
October 22, 2014: Carl Beech begins to make his accusations to the Met Police in the first of five interviews between October and April. Over more than 20 hours of recorded police interviews, he makes lurid allegations of child rape and murder against senior Establishment figures including Ted Heath and Lord Brammall.
November 2014: Operation Midland launched with a dramatic appeal for witnesses in which Detective Superintendent Kenny McDonald describes Beech’s allegations of years of abuse at the hands of VIPs in Westminster as ‘credible and true’.
March 2015: Twenty officers search the home of D-Day hero and former army chief Lord Bramall and his dying wife. The homes of Harvey Proctor, the former Tory MP, and of the late home secretary Leon Brittan are also searched.
April 2015: D-Day veteran and former Army chief Lord Brammal has his home raided by a large team of police officers, and is interviewed.
June 2015: Former Tory MP Harvey Proctor, whom Beech accused of child murder, has his home raided by and is interviewed under caution.
August 2015: Harvey Proctor holds a press conference revealing he has been accused of murder, child abuse and torture and denying all allegations. He accuses the Met of running a ‘gay witchhunt’.
September 2015: Commissioner Bernard Hogan-Howe admits the Met was wrong to describe claims as ‘credible and true’.
October 2015: Kenny McDonald replaced as head of Operation Midland
January 2016: Lord Bramall is told he will face no further action.
February 2016: Hogan-Howe announces an independent inquiry of Midland by Sir Richard Henriques, a retired high court judge.
March 2016: Harvey Proctor is told he will face no further action. Midland is wound up.
June 16, 2016: Beech is charged with five counts of making indecent images and one charge of voyeurism, which involved rigging up a camera to film a boy using a toilet
October 2016: Hogan-Howe apologises to Lord Bramall.
November 2016: The Henriques review concludes Operation Midland was ‘riddled with errors’, that the judge who approved search warrants was wrongly told Beech had been consistent in his testimony, that police seemed to set aside the presumption of innocence and that the reputations of the accused were traduced.
2016: Northumbria Police conclude Beech’s claims are ‘totally unfounded, hopelessly compromised, and irredeemably contradicted by other testimony’.
November 2, 2016: Police arrive to raid Beech’s home in Gloucester.
March 2017: Deputy Assistant Commissioner Steve Rodhouse and Detective Superintendent Kenny McDonald are cleared of misconduct by an IOPC investigation into Operation Midland following the Henriques review.
September 2017: The Met pays Lord Bramall and Lady Brittan compensation understood to be around £100,000.
January 23, 2018: Beech gets £60,000 as an early pension from the NHS
February 6, 2018: He travels to Calais preparing to flee to Sweden, where he buys a cabin in the woods and lives under a series of assumed identities, travelling hundreds of miles from city to city to stay on the run
May 2018: Harvey Proctor sues Scotland Yard and Beech for £1million.
Beech fled to a remote cabin in wooded northern Sweden (pictured) and lived under several false names as he tried to evade capture
October 1, 2018: He was tracked down by Swedish and British police and arrested in advance of a 20-hour train journey to Gothenburg booked in the name of ‘Samuel Karlsson’.
2018: A highly critical review of Operation Midland reports police ‘acted like they were searching for bodies’ during raids on homes.
December 2018: restriction on reporting of Carl Beech’s real identity lifted.
January 2019: Beech pleads guilty to possessing child pornography, in a separate trial.
May 2019: Beech goes on trial for perverting the course of justice and fraud
July 2019: Beech found guilty of perverting the course of justice and fraud – and jailed for 18 years.
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