(expanded)
From the Telegraph:
The Metropolitan Police faced fresh questions over the aborted VIP paedophile inquiry last night after “preposterous” evidence from its chief witness was made public.
…A summary of the allegations Nick made against Lord Janner, who he claimed was part of the VIP ring, have been made public by the deceased peer’s family. They describe the supposed evidence as “preposterous”.
…The evidence shows how vague Nick’s claims were and reveals how he only named Lord Janner after being shown his photograph by a journalist working for Exaro, a news website that has been widely discredited for its role in promoting Nick’s false claims. Exaro has since been shut down by its owner.
Daniel Janner QC said in a statement last night “…I believe that Nick should be prosecuted for attempting to pervert the course of justice.”
Nick’s account of Janner was published by Exaro in April 2015:
An abuse survivor, known as “Nick” to protect his identity [see footnote below – RB], said that Janner sexually assaulted him at several unidentified venues in London between 1979 and 1982. Asked how Janner abused him. Nick said: “Everything, including rape.”
The Met’s operation [Operation Midland – RB] has been running in parallel with a police investigation in Leicestershire into allegations that Janner had sexually abused boys at children’s homes in the county.
…Nick said that, as a boy, he did not know Janner’s identity. He identified Janner as one of his abusers in June [2014] after seeing the Labour peer’s picture in a newspaper.
If the Telegraph article is correct, then, Nick saw “the Labour peer’s picture in a newspaper” because Exaro showed it to him. That puts a rather different light on Nick’s identification.
Nick originally made a police complaint in 2012 that he had been sexually abused by his late step-father in the 1970s and 1980s. He was advised that given that the step-father was now deceased, nothing could be done, at which point Nick added that his step-father had handed him around to members of a gang, apparently at a military base but also at other locations.
After allegations against the late Jimmy Savile appeared in the mainstream media, Nick then claimed that he had also been abused by Savile at paedophile orgies. Nick also went on to accuse various politicians, recycling old allegations that had been floating around on the internet for years. The provenance for some of these old claims was not encouraging: we know that in the 1980s anti-Semitic elements in the security services had smeared Leon Brittan, and that a “dossier” of allegations had been prepared by a faction within the right-wing Monday Club to use against internal opponents. Some claims had been published in the 1990s by Scallywag, a scurrilous gossip magazine that had also carried false allegations against Lord McAlpine.
On the other hand, though, some claims have been extrapolated from known facts: in the 1970s it was discovered that the diplomat and MI5 operative Peter Hayman was a member of the notorious Paedophile Information Exchange; in 1987, the MP Harvey Proctor was convicted of gross indecency for sex with male prostitutes who were under the age of 21, in circumstances that involved “spanking” (he was convicted even though he had specifically asked them their ages, and they had told him they were 21); and in 1991 Greville Janner was accused of child sex abuse in Leicester during the Frank Beck trial. Other allegations have since been made against Janner.
Nick brought all these strands together into a unified narrative of “VIP sex abuse” that was gothic in its extravagance: he claimed to have suffered not just sex abuse, but to have been subjected to bizarre and ritualistic forms of torture, and even to have witnessed child murders at the hands of politicians. He also said that a school-friend had been run down by a car in front of him in Kingston-on-Thames, as a warning.
In August 2015, Harvey Proctor gave a press conference in which he revealed that one allegation against him was that he had attempted to castrate Nick at an orgy, but that another orgiast had intervened: none other than former Prime Minister Ted Heath. This detail was so preposterous that it was hard to believe that the police had taken such a claim at face value – and we can only conclude that Exaro had not published it because the site knew that it seriously undermined Nick’s credibility. Then came a Panorama investigation which revealed that there were no records or memories to corroborate the story of the boy being run over in Kingston-on-Thames.
Nick’s allegations caused great harm to innocent people and great expense to the Metropolitan Police, who ended their investigation in March. Proctor, who had been living quietly since the events of 1987, had to resign from his job and he left the country to escape the mob; Lord Bramall, the former head of the British Army, endured a police raid while caring for his wife, who was in the last stages of dementia; and the claims also angered the relatives of Maurice Oldfield, the former head of MI6. Nick’s step-father’s relatives have also protested that Nick’s allegations are untrue, and Nick’s ex-wife has described him as “a fantasist trying to cash in”
Allegations against Janner are currently a strand of the Government’s inquiry into child abuse, as I recently discussed here. However, Nick’s claims will not be considered. Exaro wrote in relation to police investigation into Janner:
Leicestershire Police was aware of Nick’s allegations, but did not include them with Operation Enamel, which already had a lot of witness testimony.
The idea that Nick was excluded because he was surplus to requirements does not convince. We now know that Leicestershire Police took a statement from the historian Gavin Littaur, who says that Janner made a gay pass at him when he was young adult – a claim that is rather more tangential than the sensational allegation that Janner was involved with organised child-sex abuse in London. It seems to me more likely that Leicestershire Police and the inquiry are ignoring Nick because his unique and fantastical claims muddy the water.
Should Nick be prosecuted for attempting to pervert the course of justice? By his own account, he has been under the care a therapist, and it seems to me that he may have been subjected to the same kinds of “recovered memory” techniques that were used on Carol Felstead, with tragic consequences.
However, there is one detail that suggests Nick has been deliberately deceptive. In February, it was reported in the Guardian that
Nick correctly described the interior of a military premises in southern England, where he claimed abuse had taken place. The details he provided were not publicly available, and the premises itself is not open to the public, making it likely he had been there at some stage, police concluded.
The problem here is that Nick used to post details about his alleged abuse and its effects on his later life on a blog, which he took down as his claims came under increasing media scrutiny. That blog included an account of having visited the military premises as a tourist during an open day in 2013. As I wrote in February, it is very difficult to escape the conclusion that Nick impressed the police with a childhood memory of a non-public location that he had actually visited just a year or so before. The very reasonable suspicion that follows from this is that Nick is not just a fantasist, but an actual hoaxer.
Footnote
Nick’s identity is protected by law; the publication of some personal details and a very poor attempt at pixellation by the Daily Mail led to the paper being fined in May.
Exaro alleged that Nick’s name was leaked by the police to Panorama, and it reported in October that
Police are investigating a senior detective who is a confidential source for BBC1’s Panorama over the leaking of secret identities of complainants in abuse cases.
This implies that the the police accept that a leak has indeed occurred, although it seems more accurate to say that the police are investigating an allegation of a leak. However, Nick appeared in silhouette in a documentary about Jimmy Savile before he made contact with Exaro, and so it seems likely that his name is generally known among media professionals. Also, writings by Nick formerly available on the internet have meant that he has to some extent outed himself.
UPDATE 2019: “Nick” has now been revealed to be a man named Carl Beech. His allegations have been comprehensively exposed as lies, and he has been found guilty of perverting the course of justice and fraud. He was also found to be in possession of a collection of child-abuse images, and to have used a hidden camera to film the teenage friend of his son using a toilet. For more, see here.
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This article is complete nonsense. Memories of people you meet while growing up can be difficult, as names are often forgotten, or were not known.
Even buildings seem larger than they are. There may have been some mistaken identities, ‘doppelgangers’ but that is something that is difficult to sort out after such a long time. I believe that ‘Nick’ was telling the truth.
“I believe that ‘Nick’ was telling the truth”
— Really? What evidence do you have for this extraordinary assertion?
The ‘David’ commenting above (@approveds on Twitter) is the same ‘David’ as appears in this article from the discredited Don Hale (interviewer of the deceased, inventor of the non-existent ‘Barbara Castle Dossier’, and the journo who claimed Edward Heath was a regular attendee at P.I.E. meetings):
“He [‘David’] has even handed over a sample of what he thinks is Martin’s hair – which he claims the suspect tried to dispose of after fresh publicity about the case.”
David also claims to be a target of MI6 assassins though they’ve so far failed to stop the dissemination of his, er, ‘investigations’.
http://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/latest-news/436023/Martin-Allen-Witness-comes-forward-in-Martin-Allen-case-Westminster-paedophile-ring
I have said why I believe it. None of the information from Bandini is correct.
P.Z. Temperton, the short answer, I suspect, is that David has none, and neither do the Tweeters of the absurd ‘I believe Nick’ hashtag that they re-activate every so often.
@Bandini Nothing was handed over, Don Hale wrote that article off his own bat, and did not have any of the facts.
Nobody has seen neither hide nor hair of any of your ‘facts’, David!
If you felt Hale had misrepresented your tale you should have complained to IPSO but instead continue communicating with the joker (via the quija board perhaps – Hale’s favourite method of conducting interviews!).
You write: “None of the information from Bandini is correct.” Really!
Thank God I didn’t mention that by your admission the police described you as a “nutter” and that even the brother of the boy whose case you fancy you are ‘investigating’ seems less than convinced by your abilities – “another wanna be sleuth according to Op/Midland” – or this too would have been incorrect!
(Pat me on the back for resisting temptation to mention your pal Molly Parkin again – whoops!)
Your technique seems to consist solely of grabbing facts out of context and combining them together.
You are more like Don Hale, than the man himself.
You must surely be an ex-News of the World employee?
I went to the police way before ‘Nick’, in fact the two Detectives I saw had never heard of the case before.
” I went to the police way before ‘Nick’, in fact the two Detectives I saw had never heard of the case before. ”
If that’s the case, David, why are you giving succour to ‘Nick’/Exaro’s ludicrous bullshit?
Was it those two detectives who referred to you as a “nutter”, David, or some other lucky officers of the law who have had to wade through your big bag of ‘clues’?!?
Sticking two out-of-context facts together? D’you mean like this:
– Goddard went to Australia
– David had sent her some of his ‘clues’ (his famous fossilised leaf, perhaps, or some cruddy hairs plucked from a drain… possibly even his ‘Proctor Triplet Theory’?)
Conclusion (David’s, that is, not mine!): Goddard met the Australian Secret Service who let her know that MI6 (who still haven’t managed to silence you, bloody incompetents!) wouldn’t allow her to investigate the ‘VIP Westminster Paedo Ring’ – so she resigned.
Repeated ad infinitum as though it were a certain fact rather than plucked out of thin air. You do at least highlight the quality of a lead which can land a journo an article in a trashy rag, though.
P.S. I’m not a liar so the accusation of being/being like either a NoTW journo or Don Hale doesn’t quite work & is deeply offensive – watch it!
@Bandini, I doubt if anyone could offend you.
‘it is very difficult to escape the conclusion that Nick impressed the police with a childhood memory of a non-public location…”
Ok. so this is probably one of the factors that led the police to their now rather notorious ‘credible and true’ statement.
Re Bandini’s post referring to Don Hale, Mr Hale also stated on Twitter that he had seen an issue of a Paedophile Information Exchange magazine called ‘Magpie’ featuring an advertisement advertising sailing trips for boys with Ted Heath.
Some months ago, In the comments section on another blog (Anna Raccoon’s blog), I asked Tom O’Carroll, former chairman of PIE, if he had any recollection of such an advertisement – he found the suggestion laughable as, he said, PIE were being watched closely by the media, and if any such advertisement had been published, it would have been picked up by journalists and broadcast far and wide.
Of course, some would not find O’Carroll a credible source due to his criminal convictions and his views, but I see no particular reason why he would tell fibs about something like this.
The idea of Heath advertising “sailing holidays” for anybody on his yacht is doubly ludicrous. All of his five yachts (they were all named Morning Cloud) were small racing yachts, between 35-45 feet long, that only had enough berths for the five- or six-man crew needed to sail them. They weren’t designed to take passengers, especially children.
^ Mrs Grimble, that makes sense.
If you ask me, the conspiracy theory that Heath was being blackmailed to bring the UK into the EEC is, similarly, ludicrous. Everything I’ve read indicates that Heath was a true believer in the European project. There was no reason for anyone to ‘blackmail’ him into supporting it.
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