It has been quite a week. According to several of my social media correspondents I have variously been part of an establishment plot to cover up child abuse or to damage Tom Watson, or both. I have had it seriously suggested to me (by a man who writes plays and books and who prides himself on his rationality) that when I warned Watson back in 2012 that I thought his “paedophiles at the heart of government” claim might come back to bite him, that this was some kind of threat and that now I had followed through on my wicked plan.
I have enjoyed a small deluge of big claims and bigger assertions about the Lord Brittan case, all of them (and I mean all of them) notable by their failure to contradict what the BBC’s Panorama showed and I repeated. To recap: what was revealed last week was that the last days of the former home secretary were made even worse by police actions based on entirely uncorroborated claims from deeply unreliable sources.
Then yesterday it seemed Mr Watson was off the hook. His letter
to the DPP urging the police to reopen their inquiry into allegations against Lord Brittan, was not seen by Scotland Yard until two days after officers interviewed the dying peer. So, it was argued, his intervention was not to blame for his ordeal, even if that was his intention.
This is not a column about Tom Watson. He is the symptom, not the malady. It’s a column about how we got into this mess. The thing you need to understand is that the Met will certainly have known about the Watson letter before they got it, and you need to know why.
Just as big a player in what can only be called the persecution of Lord Brittan was a news agency called Exaro, which was set up to sell stories and information in the internet age. In the past three years Exaro has specialised in the Westminster paedophile story, and it was Exaro that published details of the Watson letter before the Met received it.
Advertisement
The supposed victim of the rape, “Jane”, had given the letter to them, they said. In all, they published three stories relating to Jane and the Watson letter, castigating the police until officers interviewed Lord Brittan.
The object of this exercise seems to have been to pressurise the police into interviewing Lord Brittan about the historical rape claim in the knowledge that this would have meant (as it did) that he could be named. With Brittan in the headlines other alleged victims might come forward. When eventually they did, a composite case could be made in court and the most substantial figure ever to be charged with historic child abuse would be in the dock. And they would have put him there.
Back in February 2013 the Exaro journalist David Hencke told readers that he had “a story that I always wanted the public to know.” Part of this story — the most incredible part — concerned a guest house in which, it was alleged, famous people had had sex with children. This part of the story had been around for years, largely created and reiterated by a former Labour councillor and convicted fraudster, Chris Fay.
For two years — until Lord Brittan died — Exaro, Tom Watson, various MPs and others acted as a kind of tag team keeping the Elm Guest House narrative alive in stories and statements full of dark hints and furrowed brows.
Neither was this a partisan exercise, as demonstrated by the intervention of Conservative MP Zac Goldsmith. He claimed in the Commons last year that a former cabinet minister had been photographed with a naked boy in the sauna at Elm Guest House, but the pictures had mysteriously gone missing after a police raid. All this was based on information from Fay.
Advertisement
In 2013 Exaro proclaimed, sensationally, that the Met paedophile unit was preparing to arrest an “ex-Tory cabinet minister”. A meeting of senior police officers was apparently “stunned as the senior detective outlined his intention to arrest and charge” this person. Connecting the dots and the online rumours it was evident that this person was Lord Brittan.
Months went past and there was no arrest because, it now transpires, the “Jane” case was evaporating. But in the same period “Nick” appeared with his lurid stories of murders in Dolphin Square involving (as we now know) Sir Edward Heath, Harvey Proctor and Lord Brittan.
Exaro was once again at the forefront, publishing interviews with Nick, without ever managing to get around to checking the veracity of his claims. Such was their determination and their certainty.
It is easy to buckle under the weight of the detail generated by this saga. But the detail matters because this whole business should have been about evidence and instead it came to be about belief.
I would not accuse Exaro, appallingly though they have behaved, of deliberately lying. Very early on they decided that when it came to Lord Brittan there was no smoke without fire. And they built, brick by plausible brick, an edifice that was mortared together with conjecture.
Advertisement
If it was in their interests to do it, well, what of that? Whose side were you going to be on, the survivors or the abusers? If you didn’t automatically believe that the allegations made by people coming forward was “credible and true” then you were adding to the catalogue of horror suffered by countless victims from Rochdale to Stoke Mandeville.
This polarisation was to be heard in the Commons this week. Mr Watson, asked to apologise to the family of Lord Brittan, replied pugnaciously that it was instead the victims of child abuse who should be apologised to. You could almost hear the applause going on inside his head.
People’s lives and reputations are at stake. A victim of false accusation is also a victim. It was always going to be more essential in this than in almost any other situation to clear our heads of bias and prior assumption and ask only: “What is the evidence?”
But for too many — politicians, campaigners and journalists — their animal spirits, their own interests, their sense of their own missions and their bias got in the way of asking the hardest questions of all — the ones you ask yourself. Why am I doing this? And am I sure I’ve got this right?