19 hours ago
Wrongly accused of child murder, he's still seeking justice 10 years on
While Harvey Proctor is trying not to cry, I'm trying not to be sick. The 78-year-old former Conservative MP is driving us, very jerkily, down winding country lanes to his home on the Belvoir Castle estate in Leicestershire and recalling how he was falsely accused of child murder and sex abuse ten years ago. 'Please ignore me if I get emotional,' he says, welcoming me into the cottage he shares with his partner, Terry. The house comes with the job: Proctor is private secretary to the Duke of Rutland, who lives alongside his ex-wife, the Duchess of Rutland, in the 356-room castle down the road. Hardly cheek by jowl.
It is 11.15am, so I decline my host's offer of an alcoholic drink. Proctor, who was once described by Private Eye as 'so far-right as to be somewhere in the North Sea', is dressed head to toe in shades of Tory blue. We have tea in his book-lined sitting room. Through the windows are bucolic views of the Vale of Belvoir.
It was in this tranquil setting that Proctor's life was ripped apart. Early on March 4, 2015, about 20 Metropolitan Police officers, mostly in blue forensic uniforms, stormed the modest farmhouse. 'I assumed it was something to do with the castle,' Proctor recalls.
He quickly learnt that the raid, which lasted late into the night, was part of Operation Midland. Carl Beech, a former NHS paediatric nurse known at that point only by the pseudonym 'Nick', had accused Proctor and others — including the former home secretary Leon Brittan, the former armed forces chief Lord Bramall and the former prime minister Edward Heath — of operating a murderous VIP paedophile sex ring in Westminster in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Carl Beech, the fantasist who was known by the pseudonym 'Nick'
PA
Unfolding in the dark shadow of the Jimmy Savile scandal, the sensational tale was swallowed whole by the authorities and a classic moral panic ensued. Beech, from Gloucestershire, a divorced father of one, accused Proctor of rape, the murder of two children and being involved in the murder of a third child. He also alleged that Proctor had threatened to cut his genitals off with a penknife.
It turned out that Beech, 57, was a complete fantasist. He is now in prison serving an 18-year sentence for perverting the course of justice and fraud. He was also found to have more than 300 indecent images of children on his computers.
Operation Midland, which cost £2.5 million, lasted for 16 months and ended in 2016 with lives left in ruins and without a single arrest. To Proctor's understandable fury, not a single officer involved has faced any consequences. 'Bernard Hogan-Howe [the head of the Met at the time of Operation Midland] was ennobled,' he says. 'Cressida Dick [who was referred to the police watchdog, the IOPC — Independent Office of Police Conduct — over her role but found to have no case to answer] was made a dame. Steve Rodhouse [who led the inquiry] was made No 2 at the National Crime Agency. Lower ranks were promoted.'
Proctor had hoped this month he might finally see some accountability. Rodhouse faced a misconduct hearing to answer claims that he used 'inaccurate and dishonest words' at the conclusion of Operation Midland. On June 5, however, the IOPC unexpectedly dropped the misconduct hearing at the 11th hour. It said the decision came after a 'large volume of relevant material was recently disclosed to it' by the Met.
'It is cowardice. It is complicity. It is a cover-up,' Proctor says of the U-turn. Brittan's widow, Lady Brittan, was similarly appalled when the hearing turned to dust, telling the BBC: 'I feel that it would have at least put a closure … on the whole episode if somebody had been held to account, either for misconduct, or even for incompetence.' Brittan died before his name was cleared.
The apparent lack of consequences for his tormentors clearly weighs heavily on Proctor. 'It is an open wound because it's not scarred over. It's still open, it still hurts,' he says, sinking further into a brown leather armchair. 'Never a day goes by without thinking about what happened. Not a day.'
A decade ago, at his solicitor's office, Proctor learnt the gruesome details of the accusations levelled against him. 'What's so horrible is the thought that anyone, let alone the police, thought I could conceivably have done anything that this chap was suggesting,' he says.
The morning after his home was raided, he woke to see his face leading the morning news bulletins on television. He said it was a horrifying 'flashback' to 1987 and the first time his life had been cruelly upended.
In 1986, when Proctor was the Tory MP for Billericay, the Sunday People newspaper carried out a sting, paying a 19-year-old male prostitute to visit his flat. At the time the legal age of consent for gay people was 21. Proctor was charged with gross indecency in 1987 and forced to abandon his political career. 'It takes quite a while to recover from something like that,' he says quietly.
After a stint selling shirts in Richmond upon Thames, he left London and built a new life working for the 11th Duke of Rutland, David Manners.
During the second unravelling, in 2015, he was accused of heinous crimes and had to leave both his job at Belvoir Castle and his grace-and-favour home. 'You have school groups going around, you couldn't have somebody working there who — not only the allegation had been made by somebody that I'd sexually abused children and murdered children, but the Metropolitan Police had gone on TV and radio and confirmed that [detectives considered Beech's account to be] 'credible and true',' he says.
Throughout our day together, Proctor's pale blue eyes fill with tears and his voice keeps catching. 'The way that juries believe police, I genuinely thought that I could be charged, face trial and be found guilty and spend the rest of my life in prison,' he says.
Inevitably, he received death threats — and still receives the occasional one today. 'I know some of the people who made the death threats,' he says. Fearing for his safety, in mid-2015 he moved to live in Spain at a friend's villa with Terry, a retired art dealer, whom he has known for more than 50 years.
During that year, late into the Spanish nights, Proctor wrote his book, Credible and True, in a frantic attempt to document his innocence. He voluntarily flew back for police interviews and, in August 2015, against the advice of his lawyers, he held an extraordinary press conference at St Ermin's Hotel in Westminster. 'I am a homosexual. I am not a murderer. I am not a paedophile,' he told the packed room of journalists, who were agog. It was a brave and shrewd move; the tide started to shift and the press began to scrutinise the tales of 'Nick'.
In 2016, as the inquiry dragged on, Proctor moved back to the UK. 'We had no money, we had nowhere to live,' he recalls. 'A friend let us use her garden shed to live in. Terry, me and three dogs lived in a garden shed half the size of this room,' he says, gesturing around the small sitting room. Proctor pictured himself living homeless on the streets of nearby Grantham.
When the accusations first came out in 2015, some friends abandoned him, never to return; others abandoned him and later, when the truth emerged, came crawling back. He still can't work out which is worse. Other friends were loyal and supportive, 'without which you wouldn't survive'.
Over a homemade lasagne, I hear how Proctor grew up in Scarborough, and his father, who ran bakeries, abandoned the family for another woman. He never forgave him and didn't go to his funeral. After graduating from York University, Proctor served as the Conservative MP for Basildon, then Billericay, between 1979 and 1987, and advocated for the voluntary repatriation of immigrants. His political hero is Enoch Powell. Proctor, by his own description, is not a clubbable man.
Why does he think he was targeted by Beech? 'What happened in 1987 was definitely a factor,' he says. 'He went to journalists and I think they probably exacerbated his allegations. Thirdly, I was a homosexual and I've described [the inquiry] by the Met as a homosexual witch-hunt.'
In November 2019, Proctor received nearly £900,000 in compensation and costs from the Metropolitan Police. In early 2022, he resumed working for the duke. 'No two days are the same,' he says cheerily.
Slowly piecing himself back together, he has had therapy and now preaches the importance of talking things through. He is rejoining the Conservative Party and is president of the clunkily named Facing Allegations in Contexts of Trust (Fact), an organisation that advises those who have been falsely accused of abuse. He has had students, politicians and police come to him in desperation. 'I don't want anybody else to go through what I and others went through,' Proctor says. 'I try to help by talking to them, trying to reassure them and trying to establish what I lost, and that is confidence.'
He feels only 'icy contempt' for his accuser, and seems to have more anger for the former director of public prosecutions (DPP), one Sir Keir Starmer, under whose five-year tenure rape convictions rose. He stepped down as DPP in October 2013, more than a year before Operation Midland was launched.
Proctor says: 'He didn't like the fact that there [weren't] sufficient numbers of successful rape convictions, so he told the police wherever they would listen — and they did a lot, to a DPP — that 'henceforth you should believe the victim'. He wasn't DPP at the time of Operation Midland — he didn't need to be. The damage he'd done had already been done.'
Proctor proudly shows me Belvoir Castle's art collection — Gainsborough, Holbein, Stubbs, Reynolds — and tells me about a foiled burglary last year. On the surface, his life seems comfortably back on track. But after everything — the accusations, raid, threats, homelessness and prospect of life in prison — does he live looking over his shoulder? 'I try not to but I think it's inevitable. Things can get quite difficult,' he says, his voice cracking again.
'But not everything has been doom and gloom. I've had a remarkable life. And here we are, ten years later. I'm still here.'
