The heavily “redacted” Operation Conifer Report into Sir Edward Heath consists of 109 pages of self-justification and virtually no evidence of any kind. It is a document that is as empty as it is verbose. Its central conclusion, that were he still alive he would be interviewed under caution, tells us almost nothing.
It fails to make any sort of case against the former Prime Minister, but equally fails to lift the miasma of suspicion that will probably now surround him for all time. Speaking last December Wiltshire Chief Constable Mike Veale said he hoped that the inquiry would “contribute to the wider picture of truth seeking and reconciliation.” If that was indeed the purpose, it will certainly not succeed. Those who already believed that Heath was a villain will claim that the Report lends them support. Those who were sceptical will point to the fact that the vast majority of allegations have been judged so weak that they could be dismissed without even troubling to ask Heath about them, had he still been alive. The idea that the truth can be divined from the report, or that its publication will do anything to reconcile anybody to anything is risible.
The full version will now be supplied to the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse. Who knows what its fate will be there: perhaps some of the undermined allegations will find their way into the weirdly named “truth project” where anonymous accusations can be levelled without fear of challenge or contradiction.
Despite the emptiness of the document, it is possible to hack through the repetitious verbiage and see some themes.
First, the Report cheerfully describes anyone who claims to have been abused by Sir Edward as a “victim.” Thus, the Report has sections entitled “victim strategy,” “victim categorisation approach,” and “victim exit strategy.” It also repeatedly uses the cant word “disclosure” to refer to unproven, unsubstantiated and very probably entirely false, allegations. It is deeply depressing that it still needs to be said, but “victims” are only victims if they have been abused, and “disclosures” are only disclosures if they reveal something that actually happened.
The decision to use this loaded terminology suffuses the report, embodying as it does undisguised – one could reasonably say “institutional” – prejudice against Sir Edward from the outset. “The starting point,” says the Report, “is that the police should believe the account given.” It is exactly the same approach that the retired High Court Judge Sir Richard Henriques so strongly warned against in his 2016 report into Operation Midland, the Met’s bungled investigation into “Nick’s” false allegations against Harvey Proctor, Leon Brittan, Lord Bramall and indeed Heath himself. “The policy of ‘believe victims’,” wrote Henriques, “strikes at the very core of the criminal justice process.” Yet here is Wiltshire Police ignoring the judge’s advice in one of the most high profile and controversial investigations it has ever undertaken.
Secondly, again and again the Report seeks to justify its own existence by reference to “Human Rights Law” or the “need for proportionality” or its own “objectivity.” It is self-congratulatory legalese deployed to disguise humbug. All “disclosures” are treated as genuine and all “victims” are to be believed unless their disclosures are positively undermined – a massively difficult task – in which case they stop being “victims” and become instead, not “liars,” “fantasists” or “chancers” but “people who have reported alleged abuse by Sir Edward Heath … where undermining evidence exists.” Nothing in human rights law, “proportionality” or “objectivity” requires such an approach.
Thirdly, the Report makes great play of the fact that it was overseen by an “Independent Scrutiny Panel,” which comprised a QC from Matrix Chambers, a surgeon, a “Wiltshire resident” and a psychologist. One of the stated “strategic objectives” of the panel was that “scrutineers shall remain independent of the investigation.” The psychologist scrutineer, Elly Hanson, is a specialist in Dissociative Identity Disorder, a controversial condition which (if it exists at all) is often said to be particularly associated with ritual or Satanic sexual abuse. She spoke at the opening of something called the Wall of Silence Exhibition in Bristol in January 2016. The exhibition was closely associated with, indeed was partly the idea of, a “survivor” of sexual abuse, “Nick”, formerly known on twitter as @carl_survivor, who had himself made an allegation against Sir Edward. It is right to say that Dr Hanson has since made it clear that she received no money for doing so, although that does not altogether explain why she thought it seensible to appear at the event at all.
Earlier this year she had also attracted controversy when it was revealed that she had accepted payment of just over £2,000 for advising the Wiltshire Police about two of the Heath complainants in the Conifer inquiry, although she has dismissed the suggestion that this created any conflict of interest.
As for corroboration of the allegations: there is none so far as we can tell, apart from the existence of multiple complaints, the vast majority of which even the institutionally credulous Wiltshire Police accept do not give rise even to “reasonable suspicion.” In the frantic leaking and spinning in the weeks leading up to the report it was reported that Police considered these complainants “independent” of one another. For some reason “sources close to Mike Veale” appear to have leaked a lot to Mark Watts, former boss of Exaro News, the defunct and unlamented organisation that gambled and lost all respectability through its reporting of Operation Midland.
In fact the report does not even say that the witnesses were independent of one another. It mentions the possibility that the fathers of three “victims” worked together, and then devotes a single bland sentence to the critical question of collusion:
The investigation did not establish any evidence to suggest that any of the victims who reported alleged abuse to Operation Conifer had colluded. It is accepted that it is possible that some of the victims may have associated prior to making disclosures of abuse.
If anything this seems to be a grudging acceptance that some form of collusion could indeed have occurred.
There is no mention anywhere in the report of the internet or of social media, and not even a hint that the police have investigated any of the torrents of online allegation and rumour that have swirled around Heath for years. It would be almost inconceivable that anybody with access to a computer would not have been aware of it. Nor is there a mention of David Icke, the superficially funny but actually repulsive conspiracy theorist who has promoted the idea of Heath’s infamy to his hundreds of thousands of online followers for years.
Nothing is said about the widely publicised witterings of Michael Shrimpton, the disgraced (and imprisoned) barrister who has promoted the idea that Heath used his yacht to abuse boys from the Channel Islands.
Where there has been an attempt to find proper corroboration it has in every respect drawn a blank.
With a brief interlude between March 1974 and late 1975, when terrorists tried to assassinate him, Sir Edward was entitled to a police guard from the Metropolitan Police, “Close Protection Officers,” from when he became Prime Minister up to the time of his death. Whilst he did not always have officers present, not one of the 28 officers interviewed provided “any information that linked Sir Edward to sexual abuse.”
Security at his Salisbury house, Arundells, was provided by Wiltshire Police. Officers were interviewed: they were aware of nothing to substantiate the claims.
None of his many official drivers reported anything untoward.
His private office staff, his domestic staff and even the nurses who cared for him as he lay dying were spoken to; none provided the slightest support for the allegations.
The “intelligence agencies” (presumably MI5, MI6, GCHQ and Special Branch) were spoken to: none provided any support for the allegations.
As for the most lurid accusations, that Heath had taken boys onto Morning Cloud in order to abuse them before throwing the bodies overboard, the report debunks the possibility:
“There is no indication from former crew members that children were ever taken aboard the different Morning Cloud yachts.”
Nor was there any evidence that children had gone missing in the circumstances alleged.
Nevertheless, the Report concludes that were he alive Sir Edward would have been interviewed under caution in relation to just 7 of the original 40 complainants. None of the complaints were made to the Police before April 2015, and all but one were made after the appeal for “victims to come forward” was made in Salisbury Cathedral Close in August 2015.
Three of the complaints related to indecent assaults of boys “during chance encounters” in respectively (1962) a “public place in Kent” (1967) a “public building in Guernsey” and (1990 – 92) “private gardens in Wiltshire.”
Two related to alleged indecent assaults on adult men, one (1976) during another of those “chance encounters” at a public event, and another in 1992 during a “paid consensual sexual encounter” in a Wiltshire hotel.
One related to three separate indecent assaults on boys during “paid sexual encounters” in London in about 1964. In fact we know – because he has revealed it on twitter – that a man called James Reeves has accused Heath of paying for sex with underage boys on Hampstead Heath. He has also, perhaps even more implausibly given their political differences, claimed to have seen Heath at South End Green on the edge of Hampstead Heath, in the company of Michael Foot, although in fairness I do not think he suggests that Foot was also a paedophile.
The final, and most serious allegation, is of rape of a boy during a “paid sexual encounter” in London in 1961. Who the boy was, how he encountered Heath and why he waited until 2015 to report the matter to the police is unexplained in the Conifer report, although it has since turned out that the allegation was made by a convicted child abuser, and was investigated by the Metropolitan Police in 2015 who decided not to pursue it further.
The Report tells us almost nothing about the accounts that the various complainants gave. We are told nothing of the trustworthiness of the “victims,” and nor do we have any information upon which to make such an assessment. We are told nothing of how decades later most of these complainants – assuming they are truthful in the first place – have been able to make a safe identification of Heath as their abuser. We know nothing of the seemingly bizarre process by which three “chance encounters” in public places – including one while Heath was the leader of Her Majesty’s opposition – somehow led to sexual assaults. There is no indication that there is any corroboration for a single one of these allegations. Presumably they have survived scrutiny simply because, unlike in the majority of cases, there is nothing actually to disprove them. Given its decision to “believe the victim,” as far as these allegations are concerned the Wiltshire Police is thus unable to do anything other than have “reasonable suspicion.”
Members of the public are under no such obligation. We do not have automatically to believe the victim, or even to believe that there are victims. We are entitled to remain deeply sceptical about any allegations against a public figure against whom – by inference – numerous other false allegations have been made, and against whom a vile internet campaign has been waged.
We are not required to accept at face value that “reasonable suspicion” exists when we are supplied with only the blandest of summaries about what is actually alleged. The Police say they are obliged to believe that Heath was a paedophile and anyone else is at liberty to believe it; but this report does nothing to persuade any fair-minded person that he in fact was. It is a shame that Wiltshire Police does not seem to have taken on board the central lesson of Henriques, that if you want to avoid the appearance of prejudice you should not appear to prejudge the veracity of the witnesses.
We are not required to accept the assurances of the Wiltshire Police that their inquiry has been fair and objective, and especially not if, in another tactic reminiscent of Operation Midland and condemned by Henriques, figures close to the inquiry were spinning its contents to favourably inclined journalists and MPs before its official publication. Why, for instance, was the report seemingly leaked to Andrew Bridgen MP? One reason could be that Mr Bridgen was happy to tell the Guardian that Mr Veale was:
“a public servant of high integrity, conducting a high-profile and difficult investigation, being hammered in the press with no ability to defend himself.”
I wouldn’t dream of questioning Mr Veale’s integrity, but this does not mean he is beyond criticism. He himself called for people not to comment on the investigation, yet here was his own Wiltshire Police Force, giving “confidential briefings” to “a number of different stakeholders.” Why the sycophantic Mr Bridgen, representing a constituency about 120 miles north of Wiltshire, should be considered a relevant “stakeholder” for this purpose is not clear.
The tactic seems to have continued after publication. The first published interview Mr Veale gave after its publication was with none other than Mark Watts.
Was it worth it? It has certainly failed to achieve the “truth and reconciliation” that Veale hoped for. Heath’s accusers may feel vindicated that at least some of their claims have not been dismissed. Heath’s supporters will feel that his name has been tarnished by an inconclusive report whose caveats and warnings are already being ignored by the unscrupulous. It seems a disappointing return for the £1.4M and thousands of hours of police time spent on the investigation over the last two years.
This blog originally appeared in a slightly different form in the Daily Telegraph 6th October 2017
Isn’t it about time we had a statute of limitations in these things. Sir Edward Heath is dead,Sir Jimmy Savile is there with him, there is no evidence on either man ,it’s just ridiculous, where are these investigations going? Are we all under suspicion,it would seem so.
In answer to your comment ‘Are we all under suspicion, it would seem so’, it is simple “Yes”.
My true account of an encounter with the Police, who visited my home earlier in this year. 4th Paragraph – https://www.withoutdoubt.co.uk/index.php?id=blog&post=the-inspector-calls
Can you or anyone give me the link for the full report? I can’t make any sense of the official site?
Also, can anyone supply me with the sentencing remarks in the Jemma Beale case or
R v MC [2015] EWCA Crim 1335 (possibly R v C [2015] EWCA Crim 1335]; this bloke was one of her victims.
Thanks
Congratulations again Matthew on dealing with this ludicrous attempt to justify a multi million pound investigation based on gossip, innuendo and bile.
The state of our police forces is beyond a joke. Where on earth can a start be made to return them to their proper purposes?
I think the police forces of England need to reacquaint themselves with the old Jesuit concept of the “mental reservation”. It’s arguable that the policy of treating complainants as trustworthy and truthful was justifiable, insofar as it related to the way the police treated complainants: there are people with horrible and personally embarrassing stories to tell, and it’s right that the police should give them a listening ear. But it should be possible for the police to undertake to interact with all complainants in the same way that they would with someone who they believed was telling the truth, without also committing to the proposition that all complainants are telling the truth, if only because the latter would drive a coach and horses through the presumption of innocence.
Barrister, no doubt you can enlighten us all: have there not been actual cases where the corpses of the accused have been dug up post-mortem, tried, condemned, and hung out to dry in full public view, in our glorious history?
I know you probably prefer contemporary cases, rather than historic ones, but what was the legal justification for this at the time and how was it defended?
Oliver Cromwell & 2 of the regicides were exhumed, publicly hanged & dismembered.
https://www.westminster-abbey.org/our-history/people/oliver-cromwell
Harold Harefoot was also exhumed & thrown into a sewer on the orders of his brother Harthacanute.
So post mortem punishment has a history in this country, if not a terribly respectable one. However, in neither case were the “defendants” actually tried in court (Cromwell & the regicides were exhumed on the orders of Parliament).
There may have been cases of dead people being tried in other countries, but not in Britain.
Pope Formosus was tried in 896 after his death. He lost.
Thank you Justin. What was his crime?
Perjury, violating the canons rev the translation of bishops and coveting the Papcy. The last charge related to when he was a mere Archbishop.
And his sentence?
He has the papal robes his corpse had been dressed in torn off, the three fingers of his right hand cut off and the corpse was thrown in the Tiber. It was later retrieved (but not for a re-trial).
Given that he was dead, he should have been given credit for a G plea. I’d say the court adopted too high a starting point. It should have been only 2 fingers.
Not even 9th century Rome viewed silence as an admission of guilt, so no credit would be allowed. Three fingers would have to be removed as they are used for Papal absolution. Effectively it was retrospectively removing all pronouncements of forgiveness that were made. 2 fingers would just be silly.
But how can you plead guilty if you’re dead? Seems very unfair not to have allowed full credit, at any rate if he died before the PTPH.
He may have been subjected to a second posthumous trial (historians are divided). Presumably there was legal argument as to whether the double jeopardy rule applied to the deceased.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Formosus
Interestingly (well interestingly to me) I am reading the Pope Formosus thread whilst in Veranasi, a City that knows a thing or two about chucking bodies into rivers.
We live in very strange times. What on earth is a police force doing spending £1.4M on an investigation where there is no possibility of any arrest, prosecution or conviction. |Call me stupid, but I always thought the job of the police was nicking, prosecuting and convicting (live) criminals.
Insofar as there is any political point to this whole circus, it’s a matter for the politicians. They can set up a public inquiry to examine what happened (or not) in the past (as indeed they have done).
If I were a Wiltshire Council Tax payer, I would be asking some serious questions about how my local constabulary sees fit to spend its policing budget.
There’s a whole Ph.D thesis to be written on the moral panic around paedophilia in high places – the fact that self evidently ludicrous allegations are taken seriously and investigated at much expense in time and money.
In 100 years’ time, people will look at this as we look at the Salem witch trials.
“The starting point is that the police should believe the account given.”
This strikes me as a well-meant, but over-zealous, swing from disbelief of assault victims.
The starting point should be that the police should take the account given seriously.
Yes, I agree that all accusations should be taken seriously, but why don’t we have some kind of Statute of Limitations in these cases where the case has gone cold and the alleged perpetrator(s) are either dead and buried or so senile that they are incapable of giving evidence in their own defence?
I don’t know enough to be sure – provided the senility is properly proven it sounds sensible. The other thing to take account of is the ‘closure’ for victims, but that’s not the purpose of a criminal investigation, so I think I’ve argued myself round to thinking a Statute of Limitations is a good idea.
I cite the case of ‘Deadly’ Ernest Saunders, m’Lud.
I know, I know .. but still, to a man like that the loss of public reputation and credibility was – and still is – probably a form of life sentence.
I am not always convinced that we need to send white-collar crooks to prison, when we can still sneer at them for the rest of their miserable and tortured lives.
Concur. Then at the very least find a scintilla of supporting evidence to support the account given, before winging it with the CPS to force a case into court…
From Henriques. FFS. It’s policing as therapy.
Concur. And in a recent case flung from court, after senior CPS were left aghast at the fabricated witness statements made in support of an obsessive serial liar and renowned professional victim, police were discovered to have not only worked in a therapeutic capacity, but also nurtured the complainant and colluded with her and her camp followers in their various vendettas, by further assisting in harassing and abusing her victims and their Human Rights.
When police are found to have colluded with hackers and other criminals, leaving trails of reports, emails, texts and letters, and having made the most astonishing threats to the victims of said false allegations, one would not expect apologies in the first instance. However, one would expect a thorough investigation into how it could possibly have been allowed to happen and continue for five years, without any investigation into the complainant’s own criminal behaviour. Quite one of the most extraordinary cases of inter-divisional police investigations seen to date.
That only a small number of police involved in the case are under investigation since June, and few of the said false allegators cautioned or convicted to date, is not inspiring confidence in those who were repeatedly falsely accused by the complainant and her camp followers – who had spent years making repeated wildly false allegations to several police divisions, in anticipation of eventually making tv programmes and selling stories of their ‘victimisation’ in trying to bring us ‘the troof’.
All in the name of bringing the plight of historical and current sexual abuse victims to the attention of the general public, you understand. They were not attention-seeking or wishing to make money from their endeavours in coaxing the most lurid stories from CSA victims, and on occasion accompanying CSA victims to police stations wishing to make statements. They were not briefed by police officers in the art of making their statements for the good of their own health. Their projects was not carried out to pay their the rent or enhance their careers. And let it be understood, they will sue or find and destroy anyone who says otherwise. Apparently. Or so the latest story goes…
“We live in very strange times….”
Reading some of the erudite comments left on this thread by my Learned and Most Reverend Friends, concerning the harsh contemporary judgements of the recently deceased (and doubtless flawed) erstwhile leaders of both the Church and the State, I do wonder whether we merely live to repeat the follies of our forebears.
Well, I guess if you cannot be bothered to study your history, you are forced to repeat it…
Although Matthew touches on this a bit, in all the debate over Operation Conifer one point not much commented on is that (if I understand correctly) of the 40 complaints made 33 had ‘undermining evidence’, in other words were shown to be untrue.
It often seems to be said that false complaints are rare, but in this case we have almost a controlled experiment showing that if you ask for complaints of sexual abuse against a public figure a significant number of false complainants will come forward. We should not close our minds to the possibility that one or more of the seven cases under which Heath would apparently have been interviewed under caution had he been alive might actually be true. But it isn’t stretching a point too far to hypothesise that they might be just as false as the other 33, just lacking clear evidence to prove them so.
One wonders that whether if the police solemnly stood outside the home of any prominent figure (perhaps even those who are apologists for Midland, Conifer etc.) asking for complaints of sexual abuse against them that within Britain’s 66 million population there might be a few among the ranks of the dishonest, confused, attention-seeking and vulnerable (overlapping categories) who will come forward with allegations. Indeed the same might be the case if it was done to an ordinary person.
Some of those complaints might be demonstrably false, but others harder to disprove, even if objectively untrue. It becomes easy to see how these kind of fishing expeditions will produce miscarriages of justice. If still alive Heath could now be facing seven separate allegations against him, all in the distant past, where evidence to disprove them would be hard to find. With the resources at Heath’s disposal, he might be hire lawyers, investigators etc. to cast doubt on the remaining seven allegations. A less wealthy person would have more trouble.
If a case got to court with as many as seven separate complaints against a defendant it’s easy to see how the public and/or a jury might feel they can’t all be groundless and a wrongful conviction would follow. This despite the fact that there were many more provably false allegations.
Operation Conifer demonstrates how trawling for victims can produce false allegations and destroy someone’s reputation. Could anyone be totally confident that if they got the same treatment that Heath has had by Wiltshire police that it would not produce a similar result? It should be remembered that at the time of the Arundells press conference, Wiltshire police hadn’t actually received any complaints about Heath, merely a quickly-disproved suggestion that a trial had been halted many years ago because someone might have been going to make allegations against him.
The criticism needs to go beyond this allegation and the actions of this chief constable to a wider consideration of the capacity for miscarriages of justice inherent in the practice of naming supposed perpetrators and appealing for people to accuse them of something.
Sorry, Matthew, for writing such a long post and doing so pseudonymously. On the rare occasions I’ve raised my head above the parapet on this issue under my own name, enough people have tracked me down on the web and sent offensive messages to make me feel it’s something best avoided.
Concur. However, forethinking, cunning germalists set up websites, encouraging people to contact them anonymously. Thus Exaro was born. Pay to view, and leave your account of abuse anonymously. If your account names a VIP or household name, you would be contacted and nurtured to supply more detailed information. The more detailed the better. The more lurid, the more press inches. To describe the inside of an apartment in Dolphin Square would enhance the prospects of a story being told far more than only describing the lobby, or knowing the name of a concierge.
And on it went. Until the point came where those with more cunning than integrity, played Lady Bountiful and opened up their doors to people who had previously refused to pay, or who could ill afford the extortionate Exaro pay-to-view entrance fee. Genuine CSA complainants queued together with the fantasists, waiting for responses to their emailed accounts of CSA.
Many were left disappointed because their account of CSA was not as newsworthy as others. Other accounts were so newsworthy, great effort was made to accompany the complainants to police stations, to get their account onto paper and make it offishul, so twitter readers could be regaled with tweets of, ‘Coming soon!’ and ‘Copper eats helmet after learning Westminster is nothing more than a boy brothel for the Brotherhood.’
And thus it was demonstrated the police were no longer needed to investigate CSA. The germalists were in town, and taking no prisoners. Mainly because almost everyone they were investigating were already dead…
Is the falsely accused ‘a victim’? According to ‘Victim Support’, they are not. Because no crime has been perpetrated on another person by an accuser.
The legalities, from my understanding as a lay person (and there are many persons on this forum who will put me on the right path), is that a person making an accusation is not committing an offence. It is assumed by many that the accuser, even when defined as ‘non credible’ witnesses, especially in accusing someone of a serious sexual offence, will be subject to a prosecution of ‘wasting police time’. This is not the case.
The real world favours and allows the grace to the accuser of slipping out of view and no challenge of their accusation. Too often this seems that the CPS view is that it of ‘no public interest’ to pursue a prosecution, even in the most obvious cases of malicious lies.
Careers, status, honour, dignity, lives, families are all trashed and support from professionals is very weak. There is a complete corruption of the English language and legal terms when the falsely accusing ‘complainant’ is frequently described in terms of being a ‘victim’. Currently there is no word (in law, street language or otherwise) that delineates a person who is falsely accused.
The problem with prosecuting people who may have made false allegations is that you would have to prove, beyond reasonable doubt, that the allegations were false AND that the person making them knew they were false. The first is difficult enough to prove, but the second is a very high barrier indeed absent some sort of confession from the alligator* – even excluding those who genuinely do believe their allegation to be true (fantasists, people with mental health issues etc), its very easy to rely on “mistake” – I was abused, but I must have misidentified my abuser.
* Not a word for people making false allegations, but it should be…..
The CPS would also have to be convinced that prosecution would be in the public interest. The guidance to charging such cases makes it clear that there will be many cases where it would not be considered in the public interest to charge, even if the evidence that an offence had taken place was strong. For the avoidance of doubt, I am not saying that there is anything wrong with the CPS guidance, simply pointing out what it says.
I am not sure whether Matthew’s blog allows hyperlinks, but the relevant CPS guidelines are here
https://www.cps.gov.uk/legal/p_to_r/perverting_the_course_of_justice_-_rape_and_dv_allegations/#a11
Those riding the tiger of hearsay from dubious and already discredited sources, are now unable to stop fighting and threatening those who quote the law re historical allegations of CSA, and who also use proven records to dispel the myths. Having seen enough evidence of Sarah Phillimore’s risible porkies, I salivate in anticipation of Barbara Hewson’s said discovered evidence of alleged fraud.
Surely it couldn’t be anything like adapting documents and text to pervert and obstruct the course of justice which has already wasted hundreds of hours of police and court time in one malicious case recently wrought and brought to court by the London Met police on behalf of liar and false allegator Sonia Poulton and her dangerous gang of liars, false allegators, con men, con women, stalkers and malicious callers. (In fact those very same individuals whom Ms Phillimore is currently cavorting with, and whom she will be wholly reliant upon to help prove her own case.)
Ms Phillimore should familiarise herself with Poulton & co’s material on Ken Clarke and other VIPs, that she may gain a more rounded understanding of the company she is currently keeping, before making further rash comments. Tarry awhile… No rush.
*Stores up plenty of popcorn in anticipation of the next hysterical episode .*
https://twitter.com/mummywriter/status/918049321135861760
this age of sexual hysteria and paranoia has gone too far.
The case of Mark Pearson, the man who for half a second`might just possibly`have brushed passed a radio actor in her 60s, while he was carrying a coffee in one hand, newspaper in the other,
all caught on cctv,
impossibly put his hand down her knickers and put 2 fingers inside.
and yet the Crown persecution service charged him with what was IMPOSSIBLE!
the CPS got someone to slow down the cctv frames to make it look like he had longer (2 seconds) to do what was alleged, the ` VICTIM` Mark Pearson had to hire a camera expert to prove to the jury what
was always impossible for him to have done. absurd!
he is now being helped by a freind crowdfunder to sue CPS for this outrageous injustice
he says this could happen to anyone and wants CPS to change its anti male agenda
i am not exagerating when i say this makes me nervous to travel on London transport.
ive read other false cases on London Transport
1 incident of rape of a male 16;
3 incidents of indecent assault on a male under 16;
4 indecent assaults on a male under 14;
2 indecent assaults on a male over 16.
https://villagemagazine.ie/index.php/2017/10/not-just-ted-heath-british-establishment-paedophilia-and-its-links-to-ireland/
I’ve been looking at that website, and tried very hard not to giggle, not because of the very serious allegations, but simply because I am trying to explore the practical logistical implications of , e.g.:
“Heath obviously received a lot of help in procuring his victims. One obvious candidate is his friend Jimmy Savile. Savile frequented the horrific Elm Guest House child brothel in London along with other VIP abusers such as Sir Cyril Smith MP. The links between Elm Guest House and a paedophile network which operated on both sides of the Irish Sea have been placed under the microscope by this magazine during the last year. At least one boy from Kincora – Richard Kerr – was later abused at Elm Guest House.”
OK, let’s try really hard to imagine (in our wildest fantasies) that Sir Ted was picking up the phone to Cyril Smith, and asking him: “I say, Cyril, old chap, do you thing that Jimmy Saville is up for a bit of underage nooky tonight at Kincora? I’m sure the RAF can supply a chopper and we can all nip over for some jolly rogering, what”?
Well, what WERE the supposed logistics exactly?
The lonely and sad celebrity kiddy-fiddler (Saville and maybe his dodgy roadie, operating from his sleazy caravan) are not exactly in the same social league as the snooty and elitist choirmaster Ted Heath, nor would either of them have much time for the grotesque and devious Cyril Smith … I would imagine. Someone (or several ) is putting one and one together and coming up with 538 and three quarters. This probably says more about their own feverish obsessions than it does about their (recently deceased) targets.
“At least one boy from Kincora – Richard Kerr – was later abused at Elm Guest House”. – an outright falsehood. Richard Kerr was “R20” in The Hughes report, wherein it was documented that Kerr entered Kincora at age 14 in 1975. Aged 14 in 1975. In multiple news reports from 2015, Kerr claimed to have been “trafficked” to England with two other boys in 1977. Aged 16 in 1977. And during this abuse tour of England in 1977, Kerr claims he was abused at Elm Guest House.
But Elm Guest House OPENED in 1979, when Kerr was 18.
Someone above likened the Heath investigation to a controlled experiment for revealing false accusation prevalence.
What if…. someone in police uniform gave a press briefing outside a large house in an expensive area. The spokesman would say that the police have received several credible and true accounts of sexual abuse perpetrated by wealthy 70s theatre impresario Herbert G. Applejack. He would appeal for other victims to come forward and assure them that they will be believed.
Herbert G. Applejack doesn’t exist: I just made him up. The police spokesman is an actor in costume. How many people would bravely come forward, I wonder?
I think that would be a marvellously spiffing wheeze.
Just published my correspondence with the Home Office about this subject:
https://www.infotextmanuscripts.org/djetc/other_amber_rudd.html
and for those of you who have a sense of humour:
https://www.infotextmanuscripts.org/arrest_at_dawn_short_story.html