We’ve made morons of our police force

I never believed Carl Beech’s allegations that he had suffered multiple depravities, including sexual abuse, at the hands of various very prominent members of the old conservative establishment. As a young journalist during the 1980s, I came into contact with many of the people named in Beech’s supposed evidence and on not a single occasion did one of them try to coerce me into sexual intercourse. That they would have done so, had they been inclined, is beyond doubt, as I was sexually irresistible back then. Further, I met Sir Edward Heath and at no time did he try to lock me in a room full of ‘mad’ wasps, nor did anyone ever attempt to empty a box of spiders over my shaking body.

Those were just some of the accusations made by Beech, along with the minor matter of these eminent people murdering three children in front of him. You read this stuff and begin to wonder at the intelligence levels within the police working on Operation Midland. Surely ten minutes of listening to Beech would have convinced even the dimmest officer that they were dealing with a vexatious mental case?

But this is the problem, I suppose. It is not so much that the police are thick, it is that they have had credulity imposed upon them for reasons of political correctness and are no longer allowed to apply that dated and tainted old thing, common sense. This was true of Operation Midland, just as it is true of the police approach to rape — the woman must be believed — and accusations of hate crime — if you think it was a hate crime, it was, and that’s the end of it.

This injunction was made perfectly explicit during the time Beech was making his ludicrous allegations.