The Metropolitan police is bracing for fresh criticism in an official report into its response to the disastrous Operation Midland, which investigated innocent people based on the lies of a fantasist, the Guardian has learned.
After Carl Beech falsely claimed to detectives that he was the childhood victim of a fictitious establishment paedophile ring, police raided properties linked to a D-day hero, a former home secretary and another former MP.
The operation collapsed in March 2016 without charges or an arrest being made and Beech was later arrested and convicted of multiple counts of lying and one of fraud and sentenced to 18 years’ imprisonment.
In October last year, the home secretary, Priti Patel, ordered Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary to conduct an inquiry into whether the Met had learned the lessons of the fiasco, and its report is released on Friday.
It follows an investigation by the retired judge Sir Richard Henriques, published in October 2016, that made a series of recommendations designed to avoid a similar disaster.
The HMIC report concludes the Met’s progress since then has been slow and it should have done better. The findings are expected to lead to further criticism of the Met and its commissioner, Cressida Dick, because they come more than three years since the force accepted it had made errors and promised to learn lessons.
Henriques made a string of recommendations in his report, which was ordered by Dick’s predecessor Bernard Hogan-Howe.
Limited extracts of the Henriques report were first released in November 2016, with the Met releasing extended extracts in October last year, sparking a furore that led Patel to order the HMIC inquiry.
The move came amid concern and dissatisfaction in government about the Met leadership’s handling of the fallout of Operation Midland. Patel is aware of the new report’s findings.
Operation Midland began in 2014 to investigate claims a VIP paedophile ring abused children in the 1970s and 1980s and even murdered youngsters. A detective described Beech’s claims as “credible and true”.
Those wrongly targeted by the Met were the former military chief Lord Bramall, former home secretary Leon Brittan and the former Conservative MP Harvey Proctor.
Proctor claimed the Met had made no progress between Henriques delivering his report in October 2016 and when it finally published extended extracts of his findings three years later.
The former MP said the Met would have to be forced into making improvements: “From October 2016, when to October 2019, the learning the Metropolitan Police Service made was zilch. The pressure needs to be kept on. When police officers mess up, they bear a personal responsibility.”
Henriques is known to be particularly aggrieved that officers who gained search warrants from a judge based on incorrect information, and those who supervised them, escaped sanction.
The Guardian also understands that by January 2020 the Met set up Operation Larimar to implement those of the judge’s recommendations it agreed with. It is headed up by deputy assistant commissioner Matt Twist, who reports directly to Dick.
The Met has apologised to those wrongly targeted and paid compensation to them or their families. Brittan died before he was told he had been cleared.
Henriques’s report castigated a police policy of automatically believing all those claiming to have suffered sexual assault and describing them as victims prior to a trial and conviction.
Others in policing believe those coming forward should be believed until evidence to the contrary emerges and should be called victims from the outset, not complainants as the retired judge argues.
