Leon Brittan’s widow breaks silence over Met’s ‘moral failure’ in child sex abuse probe

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Leon Brittan’s widow speaks out today to attack a ‘culture of cover-up’ at Scotland Yard.

In a bombshell Mail interview, Lady Brittan breaks her silence to accuse the leaders of Britain’s biggest police force of lacking a ‘moral spine’.

She points out that no officers have been punished over the Yard’s shambolic VIP paedophile inquiry. And she describes the shattering impact of police raids on her home in the aftermath of the death of her husband.

The former home secretary was among notable figures falsely accused of child sexual abuse and murder.

Lady Brittan also says Tom Watson, the former Labour deputy leader, carried out ‘the most despicable thing a human being could do’ by joining the accusers.

Her damning testimony is set to plunge Scotland Yard into its biggest crisis since the Stephen Lawrence case a quarter of a century ago. Her husband was accused by Carl Beech – aka ‘Nick’ – whose ludicrous allegations were deemed ‘credible and true’ by the Metropolitan Police.

The fiasco not only cost the taxpayer millions of pounds but also severely damaged the reputations of other innocent public figures, including Field Marshal Lord Bramall, Edward Heath and former Tory MP Harvey Proctor.

Lady Brittan decided to give her first interview on the Nick scandal to the Mail after submitting evidence about her experience of the Independent Office for Police Conduct to the Commons home affairs committee, which is investigating the watchdog. The committee is due to review the case at a hearing soon.

Her submission includes expert legal analysis of the watchdog’s ‘whitewash’ report on the bungled police probe, Operation Midland.

Lady Brittan, who sat as a magistrate for 26 years, says: ‘Not a single person in this case has resigned, lost their job, been fired, demoted or disciplined. Nobody whatsoever.

‘There has been a little bit of hand-wringing which does not amount to a row of beans. If, in a case like this, accountability does not involve firings or resignations at the point of responsibility, what then is accountability?’

Her forthright comments about the ‘culture of cover-up’ in the Metropolitan Police feature in a major six-part True Crime podcast series on Mail+, A Very British Witch hunt, which explores how the Yard hounded her husband in life and death over false murder and abuse claims.

In the exclusive series, Lady Brittan also:

• Accuses Mr Watson of being a ‘coward’ for making false sex abuse allegations against her husband, based on the unchallenged testimony of Beech;
• Reveals she was made to feel ‘more like a complicit criminal than an innocent person’ when detectives raided her two homes;
• Says Operation Midland officers rifled through hundreds of condolence cards, including those from Boris Johnson, David Cameron and Gordon Brown;
• Tells how the wife of a judge, who comforted her during the London raid, overheard one of the detectives saying she [Lady Brittan] ‘hadn’t had time to hide anything’;
• Claims officers conducted a fingertip search of her garden, looking for a shallow grave;
• Says BBC journalists, who made Beech’s allegations primetime news, thought ‘they had a golden goose’ with the Nick story;
• Discloses that then-home secretary Theresa May failed to send her a condolence card or a representative to her husband’s funeral or memorial service;
• Brands the police watchdog inquiry that cleared five Midland officers of wrongdoing ‘as good as a whitewash’.

Failings by Operation Midland police have already been highlighted by retired High Court judge, Sir Richard Henriques. He identified 43 major blunders and accused officers of misleading a judge to obtain warrants to raid the homes of Lord Brittan, Lord Bramall and Mr Proctor.

Sir Richard’s bombshell 2016 report called for five Midland detectives – including controversial ‘gold commander’ Steve Rodhouse – to be investigated for misconduct.

But following what he has termed a ‘lamentable’ inquiry by the police watchdog, not one of the officers faced any sanction.

Mr Rodhouse, since promoted to deputy head of Britain’s version of the FBI, the National Crime Agency, on a salary package of around £300,000, was cleared of wrongdoing after just four months without even being interviewed.

Lady Brittan’s fierce condemnation of the moral standards at Scotland Yard and her claims about the ineptitude of the IOPC watchdog, under ex-council chief Michael Lockwood, will reignite the Nick scandal and cause alarm at the Home Office.

Britain’s two top police officers, Scotland Yard Commissioner Dame Cressida Dick and her former Metropolitan Police colleague Dame Lynne Owens, head of the National Crime Agency, are facing serious questions about their judgment over their lavish, public praise of Mr Rodhouse –despite his shocking track record in high-profile cases.

In addition to running Operation Midland, widely regarded as one of the worst police investigations in the UK ever, he also bungled a parallel rape inquiry into Lord Brittan following false allegations made by a mentally ill Labour activist, and was in charge of a disastrous inquiry into Jimmy Savile earlier in his career in Surrey Police.

Dame Cressida, who sanctioned the setting up of Operation Midland, described Mr Rodhouse when he landed his NCA job as a ‘great professional – hardworking, determined and a thoroughly decent and compassionate leader and colleague’.

At the time, NCA boss Dame Lynne stunned colleagues with her effusive praise of his professional capabilities.

She said: ‘He brings a wealth of knowledge and practical skills that further strengthen our response to fighting serious and organised crime in the UK.’

Lady Brittan, 80, tells the Mail today: ‘I suppose as a former magistrate, indeed the wife of an ex-home secretary, I’ve always believed that a strong moral compass is essential to every public body and especially to police forces, and above all, to its leadership. I think it’s very important.

‘However, it just seems to me the Metropolitan Police has preferred its corporate or personal ambitions to a strong moral compass. I suppose the question I must ask myself, and maybe I ask publicly, is when and how is the corporate culture going to change?’

In a thinly veiled reference to Mr Rodhouse, she adds: ‘Well, I find it quite extraordinary that anyone who is referred for misconduct is not interviewed. I mean, that’s number one. But also, I think my view about misconduct is if some of this case was not misconduct, what is misconduct? That’s one of the questions that I raised when I went to see the IOPC report. What is misconduct? There appears to be no definitions whatsoever.’

She says elements of Operation Vincente, the rape inquiry into her husband headed by Mr Rodhouse, again seemed ‘not part of a strong moral compass’.

Asked who takes ultimate responsibility for that failure, she says: ‘In the end, it’s the leadership of any police force. That’s where the buck stops.

‘But I think a lot of this comes down to culture. And one of the things that interests me is as an outcome is the police appear to have a culture, which is cover up and flick away.’ In March last year, a devastating report by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary said Scotland Yard chiefs were more concerned with restricting access to the damning judge-led inquiry into the VIP child abuse scandal, than in learning lessons from it.

It said Dame Cressida’s officers did little to improve practices for nearly three years, training regimes were outdated and nearly half of officers polled in a survey had received no training on how to apply for search warrants.

Operation Midland ran for 16 months from November 2014 to March 2016, and closed without any arrests or charges.

Then-Metropolitan Police chief Sir Bernard (now Lord) Hogan-Howe announced his surprise retirement in September that year, weeks before the Henriques report threw the book at the force.

Beech was jailed for 18 years for perverting the course of justice and other offences, including child sex crimes, in July 2019.