Was there any way not to traduce Cliff Richard?

Sir Cliff Richard will not be charged with historic sex offences, say the police and Crown Prosecution Service. There is ‘insufficient evidence’.

You, reader — yes, you: I cannot reveal your name because I’m making this up, but let’s call you Alan, and let’s suppose my reader-ship know very well who you are… you, Alan, respectable, hitherto-well-regarded Alan, are not going to be charged with smuggling into Britain a stash of sadomasochistic scatological pornography as a young man in 1983 because there is ‘insufficient evidence’.

How do you feel about that announcement, Alan? How do you feel after more than two years of sniggering and media speculation and an £800,000 investigation, since the police raided your house while you were away, with a BBC TV helicopter hovering above after the corporation had been tipped off about the imminent raid, and had done a deal with the police? Happy now? Your name cleared? Your reputation restored?

You feel pretty sick, don’t you? Because for the rest of your life, you’re the Alan who in the end wasn’t brought to court for a lot of disgustingly unmentionable stuff because there was insufficient evidence. You feel, I imagine, a bit like the acquitted defendant to whom the judge remarked: ‘Mr Jones, you walk free from this court with no other stain on your character.’

Nobody, I suppose, thinks the way Cliff Richard has been treated has been fair. He says he was ‘hung out like live bait’ in order to attract further allegations, and we can see exactly what he means. Indeed the police (who called a press conference in front of Sir Edward Heath’s house to announce similar allegations against the late Prime Minister) rather boast about what another victim, the broadcaster Paul Gambaccini, called their ‘flypaper strategy’.