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Child abuse claims: why due process and a fair hearing matter
By Michael White
It looks as if the Metropolitan police commissioner, Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe, is edging towards an apology to Field Marshall Lord Bramall, 92, over unfounded allegations of child sex abuse and that some kind of further apology is coming to the family of the late Leon Brittan. It’s too late to do him much good, as it is to former prime minister Edward Heath, also caught up by some wildly improbable allegations. Monday’s report by senior Dorset police officer James Vaughan into the Met’s handling of the Brittan allegations shows how complicated such historical claims can be. Vaughan’s report says detectives were “fully justified” in pursuing a “fairly compelling account” of rape in 1967 but only made to police in 2012, though procedural mistakes were made. Newspapers that made hay with separate lurid claims of sexual abuse and worse, made by someone known as “Nick” and others, later switched sides, as their reporting of Vaughan confirms. His report did not say Brittan would have been cleared, only that an acquittal was more likely than a conviction. It’s worth noting in passing that Vaughan concluded that a key police officer in the Brittan case misunderstood the law on consent and it would have been reasonable to arrest the former cabinet minister, which nearly happened but didn’t. As so often, loose ends need tidying up. But is (arguably) the most distinguished of all those accused, George Bell, bishop of Chichester (1929-58) – a saint by some reckonings – being quietly traduced by the Church of England to cover its own back? I’ve made some inquiries but don’t claim to know the definitive answer. Others are furious in his defence. One of them, ex-Telegraph editor and formidable Thatcher biographer Charles Moore thinks Bell has been stitched up by the police and his church. This case is again bubbling up this week thanks to a scoop in the Brighton Argus – of which more later. In reality, Moore wrote last month (paywall), Bell was Chichester’s “nearest thing to a saint since Richard of Chichester” – miracle-worker and patron saint of Sussex, who died in 1253. The issue has been scorching the pages of the church press – and here – since October, when Martin Warner, the current bishop, revealed that a pre-litigation sum of £15,000 compensation had been paid, and an apology made, to an unnamed victim of child abuse in the sepia tinted postwar years when society was more innocent than now. Why should only rightwing pundits (Peter Hitchens is also on the case) and churchgoers be concerned? In January, the redoubtable cleric Giles Fraser weighed in in the Guardian. Fraser is agnostic about Bell’s guilt but says due process and the rights of a much-admired bishop to be defended have left the church asking to have too much taken on trust. Due process and a fair hearing should matter to secular progressives as much as they do to both sides in the Julian Assange case and other legal controversies. But Bell should appeal to the left because he was a brave and early opponent of the Nazis (when the Daily Mail was still playing footsie), a friend and ally of the great and murdered Dietrich Bonhoeffer, of Gandhi and TS Eliot, a champion of refugees. Perhaps most compelling of all, during the second world war Bell was a courageous critic of Allied bombing of German civilian targets. I’m not sure I’d have agreed with him but it took guts. It may also have cost him the archbishopric of Canterbury. Was this the man who also did cruel and wicked things to a small girl in his care under the pretext of reading her a bedtime story a few years later? The question is hard to answer at 65 years’ distance. Human nature has a dark side, as Bell, who saw Hitlerism close up, knew better than most. Here’s last week’s Brighton Argus’s scoop, an interview with the alleged victim, “Carol”, her life intact but marked by what she says happened. Like Dorset copper Vaughan’s reading of the account of “Jane”, Brittan’s alleged rape victim, I found her story chilling and – on the face of it – persuasive. So was Argus reporter Joel Adams on Radio 4. Others I have spoken to dismiss it. In his Telegraph column on Monday Charles Moore protests that those who knew and loved Bell, some still alive, have not been given a chance to defend him, that no lawyer was appointed to sift the evidential record of the time. Warner is using Carol as “a human shield” to protect his own procedural failings, he argues. On Sunday, Hitchens also returned to the fray, citing an admission by Paul Butler, the bishop of Durham, the No 3 man in C of E’s hierarchy and charged with supervising these cases. Butler said in the Lords (column 1,516, pdf) that Bell was “an astounding man” and that, after careful consideration, the church was not saying he actually did what he is alleged to have done. “There has been no declaration that we are convinced that this took place. It’s about the balance of probabilities,” Butler told peers. That’s quite a stroke and not how the “Bell guilty, admits church” headlines told it last October. Here’s Warner’s latest statement. My own inquiries shed light in both directions. Friends who know church politics and gossip very well tell me the diocese of Chichester has had an unsavoury reputation for sexual misconduct for decades, as demonstrated by the Peter Ball case. He was finally jailed last year at 83 despite friends in high places. The issue was compounded by a geographical split in which posher West Sussex – around Chichester and its handsome 12th-century cathedral – is a centre of high church Anglo-Catholicism, whereas East Sussex was until recently the territory of south-coast evangelical Anglicans, some of whom are anti-women, anti-gay. It is not quite Shia and Sunni, but C of E’s culture wars have been nasty, and still are. Given the shaming of the Catholic church worldwide and Anglicanism closer to home, given the uproar over paedophilia and establishment cover-ups (some bits real, others the fruit of malign or damaged imagination), it’s easy to see why Lambeth Palace seems to have prudently sacrificed the reputation of a long dead bishop under the leadership of Justin Welby. It’s also disappointing. Those close to Rowan Williams, the last archbishop, are categorical that they have no record that a complaint against Bell reached Lambeth on his watch circa 2010. The buck passes. Meanwhile, local buildings and institutions named in honour of Bell are being renamed, no Cecil Rhodes reprieve for him. Yet for justice to be done and seen to be done, process matters. Bell may or may not be guilty. But quasi saints do not come along very often and the comments of those who have affected his reputation need to be examined. Process matters, the right to a proper police investigation and legal defence matters for the guilty as much as the innocent. It is that responsibility which distinguishes us from lynch mobs, be they in dusty Mississippi towns, dustier Iraqi ones – or on Twitter.
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