Leon Brittan — who needs an apology now?

Tory grandees, former ministers and yesterday’s men queue up to denounce the police for investigating sexual abuse allegations against members of the Tory establishment.

They demand that the Metropolitan police apologise to the widow of Lord Leon Brittan for failing to inform her promptly that her late husband was no longer under investigation for the alleged rape ‘of an adult female’ — indeed some seem to want an apology for investigating in the first place.

But a review, published in February by Dorset Police Deputy Chief Constable John Vaughan, of the Met’s decision to investigate the alleged rape has deemed it ‘proportionate’ and ‘justified’.

It has described the ‘adult female’ — known as ‘Jane’ — as ‘compelling’.

There is no apology, however, to ‘Jane’ who has been traduced by politicians and press for daring to come forward to tell her story.
She says that Lord Leon Brittan raped her in London in 1967 when she was 19 years old.

Dorset’s review should embarrass the Home Affairs Select Committee that last autumn chided the Met and deputy Labour leader Tom Watson, who had prodded the Met on behalf of ‘Jane’.

Tom Watson was to be put in the stocks for writing to the Met about ‘Jane’ after the officer in charge, DCI Paul Settle, had decided in early 2014 not to interview Lord Brittan, and not to take the case any further.

Although it was widely aired that Watson had triggered re-investigation, the Home Affairs Select Committee acknowledged that the Met had already decided two weeks beforehand to review the case and to remove DCI Settle.

This is what DCI Settle told the committee:

‘Despite ‘Jane’ insisting that she’d been raped, in law she hadn’t’; The points to prove rape ‘were not there’; he was ‘not convinced that the offence is made out’; he believed that to interview such an important figure as Lord Brittan — which would have been normal practice — would be not only ‘disproportionate’ but unlawful and a ‘baseless witchhunt’.

There were other allegations against Brittan which could be compromised if it became public knowledge that he’d been investigated for the alleged rape ‘of an adult female’, he said.

But Dorset police did not agree. The investigation was ‘necessary, proportionate and fully justified despite the significant passage of time.’ It was not unlawful.

‘Jane’ the witness was ‘compelling’, she was a ‘competent witness, who displays no malice in her motivation. Her accounts of her
situation in 1967 are corroborated and it is plausible that she was moving in similar social circles to LB.’

Jane went to the police toward the end of 2012 to report that she had been raped in 1967: she had been on a blind date with Leon Brittan, he had suggested dropping by his house on the way to their evening out. There he locked the door, trapped her and raped her.

In September 2013 that DCI Paul Settle abandoned the investigation.

‘Jane’ tells her story to Exaro in 2014:

By 2015 the controversy about the Brittan investigation exploded. See my essay on the case on Andrew Neil’s This Week (starts at 1m40s):

See the ‘heated debate’ on This Week.

It was after this that, disgusted by the press and politicians who so blithely disparaged ‘Jane’, a woman contacted me.

‘Jane’ had been her flatmate in 1967. She’d been contacted by the police a couple of years earlier — ‘Jane’ had remembered her name and passed it to the police; she’d been around at the time of the rape. She was contacted through her medical records.

This is what she had to say about why she had come forward

“I just felt everybody was flooding to Leon Brittan’s defence. She doesn’t have anybody. They’re saying that things she said can’t be corroborated. That’s true insofar as it goes.”

I inferred that there was no evidence to convict, but…

They had shared a flat in 1966-7 when ‘Jane’ was a 19-year-old student, ‘She was really sweet. She looked very young; she was quite naive; we felt very protective of her.’

They belonged to a wide group of friends who’d go to the pub and parties together and they’d take ‘Jane’ with them. Men in their circle knew Leon Brittan, professionally and politically.

She recalled an occasion in the summer of 1987 after one of their parties. She arrived home at the flat and found ‘Jane’ sobbing.

‘We were quite young, she didn’t want to talk about it and we didn’t push it.’

The former flatmate was candid and clear — she was not claiming any more than her own memories of ‘Jane’ and their circle — a network that included Brittan — at the time that ‘Jane’ said she had been raped by Brittan.

“All I can say about her is that she was nice, a sweet kid. I didn’t recognise any mental health problems. I said to the police I had no reason to disbelieve her. In those days a lot of men were out to have you. She’d not have been able to defend herself.”

Furthermore, even if ‘Jane’ had talked about rape, “I would not have recommended that she spoke to the police back then women were often treated badly when they reported rape.”

The controversy about Brittan is also contaminated by a toxic public disagreement between journalists who have pursued sexual abuse allegations.

‘Jane’s’ story has been published by Exaro.

Exaro has been accused of excess and bad judgement in another case.

But Exaro is merely the arena in which ‘Jane’ has told her story. It may never have reached the evidential standards needed to mount a prosecution and it reported that ‘Jane’ understood the difficulty.

So, too, did Dorset’s Deputy Commissioner.

The review by the Deputy Chief Constable of Dorset has been received with predictable disdain by the detractors. Former Minister David Mellor has loyally defended Brittan — he had a Rolls Royce brain, said Mellor, whilst Dorset ‘a small country force is allowed to tell the Met they did a great job.’

That however, is exactly what Dorset didn’t do.

One thought on “Leon Brittan — who needs an apology now?

  1. Nick

    Brittan, Heath, Fatty Cyril Smith, Parkinson. If the witches ducking stool still existed (Parlimant Square would be an excellent place to re-introduce it), I’d have those four up there, stark naked; dunking them up and down until they all drowned.

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.