Lady Brittan, the widow of the former Home Secretary and European Commissioner Lord Leon Brittan who was falsely accused of having been a part of a paedophile ring based in Westminster, has spoken about her ‘disappointment’ in the decision to drop disciplinary proceedings against the officer who had led the inquiry into the false claims.
The Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) announced it had ended the investigation into former Metropolitan Police deputy assistant commissioner Steve Rodhouse after a ‘large volume of relevant material was recently disclosed to the IOPC by the Metropolitan Police’.
Rodhouse was due to face a disciplinary hearing on 16th June for allegedly breaching police professional standards of behaviour for honesty and integrity and discreditable conduct in relation to his role in Operation Midland, which cost over £2.5 million and lasted over 2 years. The decision to withdraw the case against Mr Rodhouse means that no police officer has been held to account for their role in the scandal.
The allegations against Leon Brittan had been made by Carl Beech, currently serving an 18 year prison sentence for 12 counts of perverting the course of justice, one of fraud and child sex offences. The politician died of cancer in January 2015 without ever learning that he had been completely exonerated of the false allegations made against him.
Lady Brittan, speaking to the BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, expressed her disappointment with the conduct of the matter given the last minute disclosure of material which the IOPC had initially requested three years ago from the Met has meant that the case was quietly dropped at the last minute without the benefit of a public hearing:
‘I am concerned that this particular episode that I have been involved with did not perhaps show the professionalism or the hard hitting investigation which I perhaps would have expected of a regulator or the impartiality.’
The IOPC told the BBC it was ‘highly regrettable that they had received the materials so late in the process’ and stressed that the decision to drop the proceedings ‘doesn’t change its finding that the Met’s handling of Operation Midland was unacceptable.’
Leon Brittan’s widow expressed her concerns over the implications for other falsely accused persons facing wrongful allegations of historic sexual abuse given the lack of any accountability for anyone involved in the shambolic investigation of the false claims made by Beech.
‘I am looking perhaps at how you avoid this happening again …to other people. My husband was a high profile individual but equally at every level in society there are people who are falsely accused and for them it is the ruining of reputation, it’s the anxiety that goes with it and I feel that it very much would at least have put a closure… on the whole episode if someone had been held to account either for misconduct or even for incompetence.’
Lady Brittan
Lady Brittan said there had been a ‘tsunami of publicity’ after the false allegations were made against her husband. Even after her husband’s death, she said she was ‘treated as an accessory to a crime’. ‘I was in the middle of trying to answer condolence letters. I was on my own, I was trying to grieve. I was sitting here actually rooted to the spot while police officers searched the house – including [going through] my condolence letters,’ she said. ‘I wasn’t treated even remotely near a vulnerable human being. I was quite vulnerable because there I was, on my own, newly widowed.’
