None of the bungling police officers who spent 18 months and £2.5million investigating Carl Beech’s dreamt-up VIP paedophile ring will face any disciplinary action, it emerged today.
Metropolitan Police officers swallowed his lies and raided the homes of elderly suspects including Leon Brittan and Lord Bramall while giving their deceitful accuser anonymity and insisting his fabricated evidence was ‘credible and true’.
MailOnline can reveal three officers helping run Operation Midland have been allowed to leave the force on full pensions while being probed by the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) for alleged misconduct.
Detective Sergeant Eric Sword retired in 2017 at the age of 49 and his boss DCI Diane Tudway, who was promoted after Midland was shut down, retired last year. The third officer has not been identified.
They are in addition to Detective Superintendent Kenny McDonald – who branded Beech’s incredible claims ‘credible and true’ – and Deputy Assistant Commissioner Steve Rodhouse.
The three officers’ search warrant applications declared that Beech was ‘felt to be a credible witness who is telling the truth’ and said his account had remained consistent.
Nonetheless today after Beech was convicted, the watchdog and the Met said the three-year IOPC probe had concluded there was no case to answer.
Det Supt Kenny McDonald, L, and Deputy Assistant Commissioner Steve Rodhouse, R, were cleared by the IOPC investigation despite a judge-led inquiry saying Operation Midland
Both were cleared by the police watchdog and Det Supt McDonald retired from the force on the eve of Beech’s trial, while Mr Rodhouse has been rewarded with one of the top jobs in the National Crime Agency.
The Met Commissioner at the time of the investigation, Bernard Hogan-Howe, was knighted in 2013 for services to policing.
This was despite judge Sir Richard Henriques saying in his 2016 report into the handling of Operation Midland that it was ‘riddled’ with errors and found 43 serious blunders in total after an eight-month inquiry.
Today IOPC Interim Director General Jonathan Green said: ‘While it was clear the Metropolitan Police had information to show a number of inconsistencies between the accounts provided to Wiltshire Police when Nick originally made the allegations and the accounts subsequently provided to the MPS, we found no evidence that any of the three officers we investigated knowingly or deliberately withheld evidence in order to mislead the district judge.
‘Our investigation has been unable to establish with any certainty to the required standard, impacted by the passage of time, to justify the bringing of misconduct proceedings which specific documents each subject officer had sight and knowledge of at what time.
‘However, some of the documents raise questions regarding the credibility of Nick’s account, and all three applications refer to the absence of evidence relating to Nick’s allegations of murder. This points away from any deliberate attempt to skew the evidence in favour of obtaining the warrants.’
Those who fell victim to VIP paedophile hysteria have blasted he Met today as Beech was found guilty of 12 counts of perverting the course of justice.
Harvey Proctor, one of those falsely accused by Beech, branded the investigation a ‘truly disgraceful chapter in the history of British policing’, which was allowed to happen by ‘internal failings at the highest level’ of the Met Police.
Daniel Janner QC, whose father Lord Greville Janner was falsely accused of sexual abuse by Beech, said today that the police officers who believed ‘Nick’ and gave him credibility should face arrest.
He told MailOnline: ‘Even Inspector Clouseau would have realised that Beech was a manipulative liar. But the senior officers responsible for the scandal of Operation Midland should now be investigated with a view to being prosecuted for misfeasance in a public office’.
Officers from the Met accepted Beech’s allegations that a gang of VIPs had killed three boys in the 1970s and 1980s as ‘credible and true’ – despite having no shred of corroborating evidence.
By believing his lies the Met spent £2.5million on their Operation Midland investigation that produced zero prosecutions.
Officers questioned more than 1,000 people and raided the homes of the living and dead elderly suspects Beech had falsely accused of child abuse and murder.
Labour MP Sir Keir Starmer is also in the firing line today, because he changed the CPS’ guidance having claimed too many alleged victims of sexual abuse were first asked: ‘Are you telling the truth?’.
In the wake of the Jimmy Savile scandal in 2013, Sir Keir, who was then Director of Public Prosecutions, claimed that police aggressively grilling people to root out liars meant ‘many victims didn’t have the confidence to come forward’.
Detectives investigating claims of a VIP paedophile ring were accused of ‘going rogue’ in the wake of interviewing Carl Beech for 20 hours at the end of 2014.
Lord Brittan’s family said the Met had hounded him in life and death after a woman accused him of rape and then Beech named him as a kingpin in a VIP paedophile ring he had made up.
Teams of police searched Lord Brittan’s homes in central London and North Yorkshire in early March 2015 – six weeks after he died aged 75 and more than 18 months after prosecutors told them to drop a rape case against him.
Officers, including at least one in body armour, also searched the home of the 95-year-old former head of the Armed Forces, Lord Bramall, and ex-Tory MP Harvey Proctor’s home.
The raids were considered so heavy handed that Leon Brittan’s widow Diana and Edwin Bramall received about £100,000 in compensation payouts.
Plain-clothes detectives had first examined Lord Brittan’s home in Pimlico, central London, and his North Yorkshire country retreat.
The rural property, near the picturesque town of Leyburn, is in the Richmond constituency which he once represented as an MP.
In a co-ordinated swoop on his homes they also rummaged through his clothes, diaries, personal effects and family albums, removing items for further analysis.
The searches came just six weeks after the former home secretary died aged 75 with his family still deep in grief.
Officers also attended the home of Lord Bramall, chief of defence staff until 1985, who was then 91.
The Second World War hero won the Military Cross for bravery and rose to be Britain’s top-ranking Army officer.
The team of police, including at least one in body armour, were seen at his £750,000 stone detached property in Crondall, Hampshire, near the Army town of Aldershot.
Lord Brittan died before his name was cleared and police searched his home and rummaged through his clothes, diaries, personal effects and family albums, removing items for further analysis
Lord Bramall, pictured with his late wife Lady Avril, described how the police turned up as he ate breakfast with his seriously ill wife upstairs
Fantasist: Carl Beech claimed that he saw a Tory MP murder a young boy and said the head of MI5 kidnapped his dog
Lord Bramall recalled how police raided his home early one day and said: ‘I was having breakfast and they said, ‘Oh, we’re the police’ and I said, ‘Oh, how nice to see you. Come along in.’ They came into the drawing room and I said, ‘What can I do for you?’ And they said, ‘Well, allegations have been made.’ I said, ‘Really, against whom?’ And they said, ‘Against you.’ They said, ‘We’ve got a warrant to search the house.’ They told me the allegation was that I had abused an under-aged male 40 years ago.’
More than 20 officers were involved in the search of his home – which lasted most of the day.
Lord Bramall said: ‘They were all over the house and they were in the kitchen. They had a special officer who had dealt with paedophile cases asking my daughter questions and so on.
‘My wife was seriously ill, but she was downstairs and on a walker. And I had to move her from room to room and she kept on saying, ‘What are they all doing here?’ And I couldn’t really explain it, because she had Alzheimer’s.
‘They didn’t tell me anything, nothing… except what the allegations were… oh, and that it was part of a wider allegation, but they didn’t precisely say what.’
The searches took place on the same day as officers searched the Leicestershire home of ex-Tory MP Harvey Proctor, 68, prompting him to publicly deny any wrongdoing.
Proctor, whose Parliamentary career ended in a rent boy ‘spanking’ scandal, said he was trapped in a ‘Kafka-esque fantasy’.
At least six spin-off inquiries were also launched, with the most high-profile one investigating claims a VIP sex ring operated out of the exclusive Dolphin Square apartment complex in Pimlico.
One line of inquiry was supposedly a boy who was stabbed to death with a penknife ‘over a period of 40 minutes’ during a sex party at Dolphin Square, a block of luxury flats near Parliament.
Another young boy was mowed down by a car in broad daylight during a hit-and-run attack in Kingston upon Thames, between May and July 1979. A third was supposedly killed during a depraved assault at a different sex party.
But Beech, known was ‘Nick’ then, was unable to provide even the slightest piece of corroborating evidence to support his outlandish claims.
Strangely unbothered by this fact, then Commissioner Bernard Hogan-Howe’s Scotland Yard decided, in December 2014, to authorise Operation Midland’s lead detective, Kenny McDonald, to give a TV interview describing ‘Nick’s’ testimony as ‘credible and true’.
Then, over the ensuing months, his officers conducted highly publicised raids on the homes of Lord Brittan, Lord Bramall and Harvey Proctor. They interviewed the latter two under caution.
But as the months went by Midland creaked and supporters of the accused men insisted they had been wrongly smeared by association with the operation.
Then, in September 2015, Hogan-Howe’s force issued a 1,200-word statement admitting it had been wrong to describe the unsupported allegations as ‘credible and true’.
Officers close to the inquiry had started having ‘grave doubts’ about ‘Nick’ and believed him to be a Walter Mitty fantasist who had made up his story of abuse and murder – but it had taken more than a year to realise it.
The following month, the force released another lengthy statement saying it had ‘serious concerns’ about a Panorama documentary which shed further light on the outlandish nature of Nick’s claims. This statement failed to prevent the programme from being aired.
On the eve of its broadcast, Scotland Yard grudgingly admitted that Leon Brittan had been exonerated of a separate rape claim made by another suspected fantasist called ‘Jane’.
The news came too late for Lord Brittan. He had died nine months earlier without that shadow being lifted from him or his family.
And the Met also announced that Detective Superintendent Kenny McDonald, who once described Nick’s claims as ‘credible and true’, had been removed from his job.
Three Metropolitan Police officers are still the subjects of a three-year probe by the Independent Office of Police Conduct over the quality of their work.
The officers are believed to have applied for search warrants falsely claiming that testimony from alleged victim ‘Nick’ had been consistent throughout his police interviews, when they knew it had not been.
Shadow Brexit secretary Keir Starmer was accused of changing CPS guidelines to avoid grilling people who claim they were abused because ‘many victims didn’t have the confidence to come forward’.
The Met has refused to reveal their names, to say when they retired, or to confirm whether they will keep their taxpayer-funded pensions.
The IPCC was accused of a whitewash when it absolved Deputy Assistant Commissioner Steve Rodhouse and Detective Superintendent Kenny McDonald of any wrongdoing, in March 2017.
Det Supt McDonald was the first officer to be in charge of Operation Midland, and it was he who announced Beech’s extraordinary claims were ‘credible and true’ in December 2014.
He was replaced the following summer amid growing criticism, and retired on the eve of Beech’s trial.
However the IOPC investigation into three more junior officers – the DCI, DI and DS – rumbled on and all three officers remain under investigation.
MailOnline understands the IOPC has concluded its report and sent it to the Met for comment and reply, and will publish its recommendations once it has received and amalgamated the Met’s feedback.
It will then be for the Met and the CPS to decide whether to investigate and prosecute the officers, based on the IOPC’s findings.
They are accused of lying to a judge in order to obtain search warrants in the case, telling the judge that Beech’s testimony had been consistent when they knew it had not.
The Met Police said today that Eric Sword retired before the IOPC began their investigation, while Diane Tudway retired two years after the matter was downgraded to misconduct.
They said the Met Police had no powers to stop officers retiring and has no power in law to prevent ex-officers claiming their pensions or reducing their pensions, except for in cases of serious criminality.