The ‘Westminster paedophile ring’ is a lesson in how not to carry out a police investigation

A cornerstone of any -functioning democracy is the separation of police and the courts on one hand, and government and parliament on the other. Where the latter are charged with making the law, they should never, ever be allowed to interfere with the enforcement of that law. Politicians have no power to tell the police what to investigate. As Lord Denning once observed, no policeman is subject to orders of the Secretary of State: ‘No minister of the Crown can tell him that he must, or must not, keep observation on this place or that. Or that he must prosecute this man or that one… He is answerable to the law, and to the law alone.’

In Britain, for most of the time, that separation has been respected. Prime ministers, leaders of the opposition and others with political power do not pick up the phone to Scotland Yard and demand that someone — their political opponents, for example — be investigated and prosecuted. But in recent years, we have had a breach between lawmakers and law enforcers. Tom Watson, then a Labour MP, worked out that if you accuse police of a cover-up you can make them panic, and persuade them to investigate your opponents. His first success was over phone hacking. He then moved on to paedophilia.

To no one’s surprise, the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) has found that the ‘Westminster paedophile ring’ that Watson described in the House of Commons did not exist. The ‘clear intelligence’ he referred to turned out to be wild conspiracy theories. The claims that young boys were procured for the gratification of the former prime minister Sir Edward Heath and his colleagues before being strangled or knocked down by cars were concocted.