A former Tory MP accused of being a child murder and sadistic sexual predator by a man later charged with inventing the claims said the Metropolitan Police showed "bad faith" over the investigation.
Harvey Proctor, 72, who lost his home and job as a result of the allegations by Gloucester ex-nurse Carl Beech, told Newcastle Crown Court he was suing the force and his accuser for £1 million.
Beech, the son of a vicar, claimed Mr Proctor was part of a powerful paedophile group operating in the 1970s and 1980s, and that the ex-MP for Billericay murdered two boys before his eyes.
During cross-examination by Collingwood Thompson QC, defending, Mr Proctor was told he would be questioned in the witness box on the basis that the allegations were true.
In a clear voice, Mr Proctor replied "no sir" when the details of the "horrendous" accusations were put to him, as alleged to the police by Beech.
In heated exchanges, Mr Proctor said he had every right to be indignant with how the police conducted their inquiry.
Discussing how he was not interviewed until June 2015, despite having his home in the grounds of Belvoir Castle searched three months earlier, he said: "If they genuinely thought that I had murdered anyone, why would they have waited three-and-a-half months to interview me and then interview me on a voluntary interview but not charge?
"They're allowing a murderer to roam the streets of Leicestershire for three-and-a-half months?
"An absurdity, but just another absurdity in the Metropolitan Police's Operation Midland."
He explained he believed the inquiry was conducted in "bad faith", as he had been told by officers searching his home that the media would not be told.
But as it was being carried out, his office received a call from Mark Conrad, a journalist with the internet agency Exaro News, asking whether police were raiding his property, he said.
The witness said Detective Constable Danny Chatfield - Beech's police liaison officer - was a member of the search team, and he told Beech what was happening, who then passed on the information to the reporter.
He described the scenario of Mr Chatfield being on the search as "quite outrageous", and described Exaro as Beech's "support team".
Earlier, Mr Thompson questioned Mr Proctor about a comment made by his partner Terry Woods who turned up drunk during the search of their home.
Mr Proctor said his partner tried to "lighten the mood" by joking that the police should look for bodies by digging up three sites in the garden - places he intended to grow flowers.
When asked why his partner seemed to be aware that officers were investigating three alleged child murders, Mr Proctor said: "It was not beyond the wit of intelligence if they [the officers] were a murder squad that they were looking at murders, or alleged murders or possible murders.
"I can only assume that during the course of his conversations with the police that they had said to him, although it was not in my recollection, three child murders."
Discussing how the allegations against him were once described as "credible and true" by a detective, the witness said Mr Thompson himself would have been "more than irked" if he had been in his shoes.
Mr Proctor said: "Every person in this court would have been upset and outraged by what was being alleged."
Mr Proctor was also asked about a time around when he admitted four counts of gross indecency in 1987, when he was attacked by two men in his home and told he was going to be murdered.
He explained he did not tell the police, despite having an ashtray smashed on his head and being beaten unconscious, because he felt he would not be believed as he was "public enemy number one" in the media at that time.
Beech, known in the media for years as "Nick", denies 12 counts of perverting the course of justice and one of fraud in relation to allegations he invented claims about the existence of a Westminster VIP paedophile ring.
Mr Proctor has completed his evidence and the trial will continue on Tuesday.
Additional reporting by Press Association
