Many have rightly attacked the police for their handling of the demented accusations against Field Marshal Lord Bramall, now at last dropped. They ostentatiously descended on his village in huge numbers, chatted about the case in the pub and pointlessly searched his house for ten hours. But one needs to understand that their pursuit of Lord Bramall — though not their exact methods — is the result of the system. Because the doctrine has now been established that all ‘victims’ must be ‘believed’, the police must take seriously every sex abuse accusation made and record the accusation as a reported crime (hence the huge increase in sex abuse figures). Even if you walked in off the street and told the police that you had been sexually abused by the Met Commissioner Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe, or Sir David Attenborough or the late Mother Teresa of Calcutta (the criminal law seems now to be reaching beyond the grave), they would have to pursue the claim, and would be open to disciplinary action and media obloquy if they did not. This happens, in fact, every day, when people make malicious or insane accusations against people who are not famous and whose lives are duly ruined.
At least in a criminal case, the evidence must eventually be publicly heard. This is not true, obviously, of civil child abuse cases, and it is doubly untrue when they are settled against people who are dead. The more I look at how the late Bishop George Bell of Chichester has been pronounced by his own diocese to have abused a child roughly 65 years ago, the less can I see that any proper process was followed. No defence of Bell was offered. No corroboration of the one accuser’s claim was produced.
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