There are some news reports that not only tug immediately at the heartstrings but ignite flames of righteous anger. The accounts of what the late Leon Brittan and his family have been through is one of these.
Imagine yourself in Diana Brittan’s place. Having fended off slurs and innuendo about your husband for years about allegations you knew were unfounded, you not only have to contend with his being summonsed to a police interview when already gravely ill but you also learn, months later, that the police, having decided not to proceed with the case, could not bestir themselves to inform him.
Of course the police were not to know how little time he had left. But they were surely aware of his state of health, and they had four months – that is more than 17 weeks, more than 100 days – when someone could have lifted the phone or dictated a letter, and his last days would have been that bit easier, as would Lady Brittan’s first months of widowhood.
In her place I would have been round at the police station within hours, refusing to leave before I had seen the top person and received an apology in writing. A formal reprimand to the individual or individuals responsible for such slipshod callousness would also have been on my list. It seems to be a particular shortcoming of many public services that they rarely put themselves in the shoes of those they deal with.
Diana Brittan and her family have wisely shown more dignity. They have made their unhappiness felt largely beneath the radar and finally received a written apology from the Metropolitan police. It almost goes without saying that it is couched in that all too familiar bureaucratic language about any distress that may have been caused, as though it is your own fault if you feel aggrieved. With that caveat, it is recognisably an apology, so hurrah for that.
The pressure to say sorry has now passed to Tom Watson, the Labour MP who has made the pursuit of what is called “historic” child abuse into one of his missions and used his parliamentary privilege to add Leon Brittan to his list of accused. In a blog, Watson has defended his decision to do so as something he felt was his “duty”, but he has not apologised. With the police having belatedly done the decent thing, it does him little credit to have held out for so long. Perhaps his recent elevation to deputy leader of his party somehow makes it more difficult to admit fallibility. But, as a matter at very least of common decency, a written apology should only be a matter of time.
Common decency is one thing, but rather more is at stake here. And the response to the late Jimmy Savile’s life of paedophile crime is to blame for much of it. Savile was able to indulge his proclivities with impunity for a host of reasons – from celebrity, through good works, to the prudish discretion of the times. But the posthumous revelations produced not an acceptance that he got away with it and why, or even any vows to change things in future, but a veritable orgy of retrospective accusations.
It has never been clear to me that there was a great appetite for this on the part of the public. The witch hunt – and it was a Salem-style witchhunt of the sort I had believed was incompatible with British commonsense – was driven by the guilty consciences of the media, the police and politicians, and raised another few notches by single-issue activists.
Additional help came from the reheated allegations of a VIP sex ring – allegedly made up of senior establishment figures who had, like Savile, “got away with it”. In a climate of anti-establishment sentiment, the government had little choice but to react. This is where, age and illness notwithstanding, Leon Brittan came in.
And while the overreaction on the part of politicians and the media was perhaps understandable – the politicians feared accusations of a cover-up, and parts of the British media are hardly averse to overegging – the third foot of the witch’s ducking stool, the police, had no such excuse. I think that’s what this week’s somewhat confused and timid BBC Panorama special was trying to say.
All right, so some officers might have felt they were doing penance for past failure to take child sex abuse seriously – at a time when society was equally naive. But, as an institution, the police seemed to go rapidly from investigators to judge and jury. How else to explain the conclusion that the evidence of a central witness, “Nick”, was not only “credible”, but “true”? How else to explain the tip-off to the BBC that Cliff Richard’s house was to be raided (while he was abroad), or the police officers stationed outside a late prime minister’s former home, or the naming – at the first whiff of an accusation – of those such as Paul Gambaccini?
There is a riposte, which is that Savile was far from the only abuser to get away with it. The police appear to have evidence that justifies bringing Greville Janner to trial, even if he is judged not competent to plead. Above all, there is harrowing testimony from those who were abused as children and how it blighted their lives.
But how does it serve justice to name mere suspects in the hope that other victims will come forward? Or to taint the innocent for fear that a few of the guilty will go free? Or not to tell dying men they have no case to answer? Justice Lowell Goddard may be able to sort some of this out in her inquiry. In the end, though, observing the simplest of judicial norms might be equally, or more, effective: treat child sex abuse as the crime it is, and the accused – however prominent – as innocent until proven guilty.
