From the Daily Mail:
A former MP has launched a scathing attack on ‘politically correct’ police after they ruled a woman who made false child sex allegations against him should not be prosecuted for perverting the course of justice.
John Hemming said their refusal to seek charges against his accuser Esther Baker undermined the criminal justice system and would encourage ‘other fantasists’ to make bogus paedophile claims.
He hit out after Staffordshire Police informed him via email that following a ‘review’ of his allegations, it had decided there was ‘insufficient evidence’ to proceed with the case and no further action would be taken.
Hemming spent more than a year under police investigation; his name was not reported in the media until he chose to speak out afterwards, although it was bandied about in the meantime – including by a speaker who made extravagant claims about “VIP abuse” to an angry crowd at an anti-abuse rally opposite Downing Street in 2015.
Baker alleges that she was subjected to ritualistic abuse in a woodland setting when she was a child: she claims that police officers stood guard, and that her abusers included someone who addressed as a “lord”. Some adults present were unknown to her, but she says that she remembered Hemming as having been one of them after she encountered him an event in Parliament in late 2014.
In due course, Staffordshire Police passed a file to the Crown Prosecution Service, which declined to proceed to prosecution on the grounds that Baker’s identification of Hemming could be a case of mistaken identity. For Baker and her supporters on social media, this implies that Hemming escaped prosecution on a technicality; in contrast, the very fact that Staffordshire Police interviewed Hemming under caution and made a submission to the CPS supposedly indicates a strong case to answer, if not outright guilt.
However, while Baker is vocal on social media about her own allegations and those of others (in particular, she remains a strong supporter of Operation Midland’s “Nick” [UPDATE 2019: aka Carl Beech]), she has also said that there are details that she is currently unable to go into, for legal reasons. Thus she declines to explain how her claims might be substantiated, while citing the police referral to the CPS as evidence that such substantiation exists. The outcome of Hemming’s complaint is now taken to be a new confirmation of this.
A further complication is that Baker has also made other allegations that relate to other situations (such as underage sex with a former employer), so that when she writes of ongoing police investigations or her status in police eyes as a “victim” it is difficult to tell how these might relate to her sensational ritual abuse claims. There seems to be little desire for clarity: she recently suggested a previous post of mine amounted to “talking bollocks”, but no corrective has been forthcoming.
Hemming’s complaint was always a long-shot. In general, a police force will be resistant to re-assessing a complainant in whom it has already invested, because it is difficult to do so without admitting to having made mistakes. And in this case, Baker is protected by the same possibility of mistaken identity that led to her own complaint failing.
Presumably, Hemming would have presented police with a possible motive for Baker to have falsely, rather than just mistakenly, accused him: in particular, it seems that the allegation came shortly after Hemming had argued with an associate of hers. However, Baker says that police were provided with “full permission from me to access to any of my online communications in any form they wished to investigate”, and that “they have found exactly zero evidence and not even a suggestion that I or others have been involved in an attempt to pervert the course of justice”.
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