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A former judge today demands a criminal inquiry into detectives who asked him to sign search warrants in the disastrous VIP child sex abuse inquiry.
In a dramatic intervention, Howard Riddle says there are reasonable grounds to suspect a criminal offence has been committed.
He says that if police failed to reveal evidence undermining the credibility of their witness Nick then the applications for warrants would appear to amount to perverting the course of justice.
Scotland Yard detectives used the warrants – revealed in the Mail – to raid the homes of Lord Brittan s widow and former Army chief Lord Bramall.
Mr Riddle said: Perverting the course of justice is a serious criminal offence that almost always carries a prison sentence.
How we like to mock the credulity of Americans. Especially when that credulity manifests itself in paranoiac conspiracy theories.
The latest, reported with amazement across the world, is QAnon, a social media-fuelled campaign, which claims the U.S. has been controlled by elite members of a paedophile gang with a penchant for the sex-trafficking of children.
Many of its believers were among those who last month stormed the Capitol most spectacularly in the form of Jacob Chansley, known to some as QAnon Shaman. He wore, for the occasion, a furry hat with horns.
Then there is Marjorie Taylor Greene, who in a 2017 video supported QAnon s claims, declaring: There s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to take this cabal of Satan-worshipping paedophiles out and I think we have the president to do it.
When Ms Patel was repeatedly asked by Nick Ferrari on LBC whether she had confidence in Dame Cressida, she would only say: “I work with the commissioner. The commissioner does a lot of great work and she oversees the largest police force in the country.
There are still questions, rightly so – some questions have been put to me today, actually, very publicly in newspapers, and it’s right that I also look at these questions.”
Ms Patel’s spokesman later insisted: “As the Home Secretary said, she works with Cressida Dick every day.
“The Home Secretary has full confidence in her to do her job.”
Not so long ago, Met Commissioner Cressida Dick lambasted TV dramas such as Line Of Duty for painting a wholly inaccurate picture of today’s police ‘service’.
After meeting one of the show’s stars, Vicky McClure, Dick decided to watch a couple of episodes. ‘I was absolutely outraged by the level of casual and extreme corruption that was being portrayed as the way the police is in 2018/19,’ she said. ‘It’s so far from that. The standards and the professionalism are so high.’
How hollow her words ring today, after Daily Mail s devastating exposure of cover-up and abuse of power at the highest levels of Scotland Yard.