Showing posts with label Tom Watson. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Tom Watson. Show all posts

Wednesday, August 19, 2020

‘Many People Were Damaged By Carl Beech’




‘Many people were damaged by Carl Beech’

Carl Beech ruined lives with fake accusations of sex abuse. Why? Vanessa Engle, the director of a new film about him, explains


Monday August 17 2020, 12.01am, The Times

Vanessa Engle, director of The Unbelievable Story of Carl Beech


Vanessa Engle has built a reputation on asking straight questions about knotty subjects. Engle’s television documentaries on the art world, Jews, lefties, Harley Street and domestic violence have been marked out by humanity, curiosity and her disarming, direct interviewing style. The British journalist’s new film, though, is perhaps the most disturbing of her 30-year career. The Unbelievable Story of Carl Beech is one of those rare titles that’s not an exaggeration.

In 2012 Beech, a hospital inspector in his forties from Gloucester, claimed to police that he had been abused, raped and tortured as a boy in the late Seventies and early Eighties by a paedophile ring that included the politicians Edward Heath, Leon Brittan and Harvey Proctor and the senior army officer Lord Bramall. Beech, referred to by the police as “Nick” to protect his identity, also said that he witnessed members of that ring murder three boys and that he had been abused by his stepfather. “I had poppies pinned to my chest whilst they did whatever they wanted to do,” he says of the “VIP ring” in a police interview. That would normally begin with him being forced to perform oral sex, he adds, “but would always culminate in being raped”.

As Proctor said in an incendiary press conference at the time, Beech’s claims amounted to “just about the worst allegations anyone can make against another person”. Yet, after an 18-month investigation that cost £2.5 million and put huge stress on the accused men — Proctor lost his job and home — not a single arrest had been made. The allegations were completely fabricated. Last year Beech, who had been awarded more than £20,000 in compensation for non-existent injuries suffered in the alleged abuse, was tried and sentenced to 18 years in prison for offences including fraud and perverting the course of justice.

Carl Beech (left) in Court 2018


And yet his unbelievable story was at first widely believed in a country that was reeling from Jimmy Savile’s crimes. Victims of abuse were being listened to like never before. In the police interviews Beech looks plausibly nervous, vulnerable, damaged. 
“We were at a moment where people would believe literally anything on this subject,” Engle, 57, says by phone from her home in north London. “The press believed it, politicians believed it, police believed it, the public believed it. There are still people saying, ‘Oh, no smoke without fire. It must be true.’ ”
Except in this case it wasn’t. Beech, it is clear now, is a fantasist on a grand scale. If notes read out in the film are anything to go by, he is also a dreadful poet. “Electrocution and drowning were some of the tools/ They used when I broke the rules,” he wrote. “They used snakes and wasps/ Or left me out there to die in the frost.”
“Well he obviously didn’t die, did he, because he’s alive and still in prison, for f***’s sake,” says his ex-wife, Dawn Beech, in the film. She is a peach of an interviewee — candid, courageous and funny — which is extraordinary, given her travails. Her sex life with Beech, she tells Engle, “just wasn’t good at all”. 
Another interviewee is Mark Conrad, a journalist who was taken in by Beech. “Some people have probably assumed that Beech took you for a fool,” Engle says to Conrad. See what I mean about direct? “I’m a very direct person,” she says. “I did ten years of therapy and that gave me the tools to be very aware of what’s happening in the room when I ask questions and what it’s possible to ask. You know you’ve done a good interview if you know you’ve taken a risk in some of your questions.”
Nevertheless, she says she was nervous about making this documentary. “Why would I spend time on somebody who was not a real victim, as far as we know, and who had inflicted so much damage to the real victims? Normally, the more you familiarise yourself with stories, the less strange they become, but with this one Carl’s motivation just seemed stranger and more despicable to me.”
What was that motivation? Engle thinks there may have been a past trauma. “You just have to look at him. He does not look comfortable in his own skin, does he?” When police searched Beech’s home they found substantial amounts of child pornography, the possession of which contributed to his prison sentence. While there is no evidence that Beech was abused, Mike Pierce — an anti-abuse charity worker and survivor of child sexual abuse who appears in the film — met him and felt that he had been. “So, I can’t categorically say that he wasn’t,” Engle says. “I don’t know how bad a thing has to happen to someone to send them off the rails.”
The film ended up becoming an examination of the damage that Beech has done. “There was just wave upon wave,” she says. “We all understood that the falsely accused were very damaged, but I hadn’t really realised that Beech’s own family was damaged too. The family of his step-siblings has been really badly damaged. I hadn’t understood that the journalists [who covered the case] were damaged.”
Conrad talks about the long period of depression he went through when Beech was found to be a liar. “I know that some of the police who were fooled have had breakdowns as well,” Engle says.
She coaxes brilliant details out of people, punctuating the grimness with off-kilter interludes. Brittan’s widow and housekeeper talk about the police searching the house. “The thing that hurt the lady more than anything — they took his slippers,” the housekeeper says. “Were they nice slippers?” Engle asks. “They were pretty awful, to be honest,” Diana Brittan replies. “No monogram.” 
This is ultimately, Engle says, “a film about truth. Which, of course, is very relevant in the post-truth era.” In the age of Trump and Johnson, will fantasists like Beech become more common? “That’s a terrifying thought,” she says. There have always been fantasists, she points out. Her previous film, The $50m Art Swindle, was about Michel Cohen, a Frenchman who made a fortune by selling Picassos and Monets that he didn’t own. “He was a conman and a very deluded person too. We all have a tiny strain of deluded thinking. That’s not always a bad thing. It’s what makes people have dreams and grand ambitions.”
It’s hard to put a positive spin on Beech’s case, though. What’s most heartbreaking is how much damage it has done to the cause of genuine abuse victims. “We just were at a moment where the victims of historic child sexual abuse were coming forward and were being believed,” she says. “What kind of a person would want to get in the way of that?”
Engle asked Beech for an interview, but he refused. “We’d have loved to ask him why he did it. But when you see his extraordinary performance in those police videos, I don’t think you could whip off the mask and the real Carl Beech would step forward.”
Does she think he feels any remorse? “From everything I know and from everything I’ve heard from those closest to him, no, he doesn’t,” Engle says. “He’s never said, ‘I made it up.’ He really does seem to believe what he’s saying.”

The Unbelievable Story of Carl Beech is on BBC Two on August 24 at 9pm


Sunday, January 24, 2016

Westminster Paedophile Ring: How Witch-Hunt Began. Tom Watson (1)



Tom Watson,  Labour Party Deputy Leader - in Attack Mode
A recent article in The Daily Telegraph by their chief reporter Robert Mendick includes a useful summary of the genesis and course-to-date of the lunatic witch-hunt directly (mainly) against Tory grandees in the UK. It follows the police announcement that they have found no evidence to support child abuse allegations against Lord Bramall, former head of the British Army. 

Apologies for poaching most of The Telegraph article here. It has been my experience (in Ireland anyway) that some very interesting articles regarding false allegations seem to become unavailable afterwards online and I certainly would not like it to happen with this one. Also people get confused with the multitude of  allegations and fail to recognise the links between them. The current Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, Tom Watson is the link that unites numerous allegations - nearly all directed against senior Conservatives. Lord Bramall called that development "sinister" and I couldn't agree more. I intend to write more about the role of Tom Watson e.g. in relation to the allegations against former Home Secretary Leon Brittan and former Conservative Party Treasurer (and friend of Margaret Thatcher) Lord McAlpine.

Rory Connor
24 January 2016

Lord Bramall Cleared: How Lurid Allegations Were Wrongly Declared 'Credible and True'

Lord Bramall at his home in Crondall, Hampshire

It seems obvious now. A man – we can only identify him as “Nick” – went to the police some time in 2014 and told them over the course of three interviews, amounting to 70 hours of video-taped testimony, that he had been abused and tortured by a powerful cabal of paedophiles.

They included Sir Edward Heath, the former prime minister, Lord Brittan, the former home secretary, and two generals, one of them Lord Bramall, Britain’s most decorated officer. Two ex-heads of MI5 and MI6 were also implicated.
Nick had witnessed three murders, including the throttling of a boy by Harvey Proctor, a former Tory MP. [My Emphasis]
Nick himself had a lucky escape, he told police. Mr Proctor, he alleged, had attempted to castrate him with a penknife borrowed from Sir Edward, who had then intervened to save his life.
Nick’s allegation may appear ludicrous, but not to Scotland Yard’s finest detectives. “I believe what Nick is saying is credible and true,”
Det Supt Kenny McDonald said on Dec 18, 2014. At the time, he was heading the Metropolitan Police’s inquiry into claims of a VIP paedophile gang operating in Westminster. Overnight, the lurid allegations had become fact.
The police’s belief that Nick was telling the truth would lead detectives to the door of Lord Bramall, a 92-year-old veteran of the Normandy landings and the former head of the Army. Lord Brittan, Sir Edward and Mr Proctor would also have their reputations damaged by claims that began to leak to the media. .........

The failure [to investigate allegations against Jimmy Saville]  heralded a new era in which the police’s starting point when investigating historic abuse was to believe all victims of abuse. Then came the bombshell. Tom Watson, now the deputy leader of the Labour Party, having built his reputation as a campaigner on hacking and child abuse, stood up in the Commons in October 2012 and told David Cameron that he had obtained a file containing evidence of the existence of VIP paedophile ring. [My emphasis]
He said: “I want to ensure that the Metropolitan Police secure the evidence, re-examine it and investigate clear intelligence suggesting a powerful paedophile network linked to Parliament and No 10.
Mr Watson had set the hares running. It may not be a coincidence that the prime suspects in this “witch hunt” were largely senior Conservatives and members of the establishment. Lord Bramall called that development “sinister”. [My emphasis]
Exaro, a news website with close links to Mr Watson, took up the cause. It interviewed two key alleged victims – both of whom claimed they had seen children murdered by the paedophile gang. One was called Darren (not his real name), who claimed he had witnessed a young man with Down’s syndrome being torn apart by paedophiles who had tied him to car bumpers and then reversed. He also claimed he had seen a teenage girl tortured to death at a flat in Dolphin Square, central London.
The Telegraph would later disclose that Darren had been jailed for making hoax bomb calls and had falsely confessed to the murder of a prostitute. Suffolk Police, who investigated the claims in September last year, came to the conclusion there was no evidence to corroborate his lurid allegations. Darren, to their minds, appeared to be a publicity- seeking fantasist.
Questions are now being asked of Nick. Police insist they were doing their duty in investigating his claims and it was not their fault that the identities of his alleged attackers were made public.
Mr Proctor is not convinced. He told The Telegraph that he was convinced police had informed Nick of their plans to raid simultaneously his home and the houses of Lord Brittan and Lord Bramall, and to then conduct interviews under caution.
He is further convinced that Nick told Exaro. Whatever the truth, the reality is a mess.
Post-Savile, the pendulum had swung so far in favour of believing alleged victims that their so-called attackers found themselves in the dock without a shred of evidence against them.
Lord Bramall’s wife died without knowing her husband had been cleared, while Lord Brittan went to his grave unaware that he had been cleared of a historic rape allegation involving a young woman.
Their good names had been tarnished, but now – following the latest developments – it will be the reputation of the Metropolitan Police that takes the biggest hit.