Daily Mail, November 26 2002

George Orwell, you should be alive at this moment. Liberty in Britain has never been under greater threat from such upside-down values and a sinister misuse of language.

The government’s new crime package – opposed most noisily by the left -- simply tears up fundamental principles of justice. The presumption of innocence will be put through the salami-slicer. Witnesses will be allowed gaily to blacken the character of both defendants and other witnesses in court without a shred of proof.

But further assaults are being mounted upon our freedoms. For while muggings and other violent crimes soar, the police are devoting more and more effort to criminalising the wrong kind of opinion.

Yet many on the left actually support the abolition of this kind of civil liberty. And you also won’t find them leaping to protest that Islamic fascists are currently getting away with incitement to murder and threatening our rights to life and safety. On the contrary, any attempt to fight terror effectively provokes a megaphone diatribe against xenophobia, a thought crime which can now land you in the dock in Europe and no doubt will soon be locking up minds here, too.

Travelling on the Tube the other day, I was startled to learn from a poster that Commander Cressida Dick, head of the Metropolitan Police’s ‘Diversity Directorate’ (yes, really) was urging us all to report to the police anyone whose views we found hateful. If anyone had committed a thought crime -- abusing people because of their faith, race, religion or disability or because they were lesbian, gay, bisexual or transsexual – Commander Dick wanted us to provide the police with ‘a name, an address or even a description of offenders’.

A few days later, I fell into conversation at a dinner with a woman who told me that she ‘hates the Jews’. As a Jew myself, I was very shocked (though these days not, alas, surprised). If I had heeded Commander Dick, I would no doubt have marched my dinner companion off to the Diversity Directorate or my local ‘Community Safety Unit’ (oh Orwell!) to be interrogated by the thought police.

The very idea is (or should be) utterly unthinkable. What kind of policing is this, where people are urged to inform against anyone they fancy has insulted them? What kind of society have we become, where we are to turn copper’s nark against our neighbours -- not because of what they do, but because of what they think?

Commander Dick declared people should not be subjected to abuse ‘because of what they believe in’. So now – if they believe what she decrees to be the wrong kind of thing -- she’s going to lock them up instead!

This is no idle or abstract threat. Robin Page, a former presenter of TV’s One Man and His Dog, was accused of ‘bombarding visitors with pro-hunting propaganda’ at Frampton country fair in Gloucestershire. As a result, Sergeant Geoff Clark of Stonehouse police said he would ‘like to hear from anyone who was upset by the commentary’.

And Mr Page’s alleged crime to justify this outrageous police fishing expedition? Merely saying that country folk had the same right to protect their own culture as minorities had to protect theirs. ‘If there is a black, vegetarian, Muslim, asylum-seeking, one-legged, lesbian lorry driver present,’ he joked, ‘then you may be offended at what I am going to say, as I want the same rights that you have got already’.

He never spoke a truer word. For that, he was arrested and thrown into a cell. Since he had suffered six break-ins on his farm when no policeman would travel the four miles from Cambridge to take a statement, it seemed more than a little strange that Sergeant Clark was prepared to travel 200 miles to investigate a les than pressing incident. For there was nothing offensive, let alone criminal, in his remarks. He was making a joke -- not against these sainted minorities, but against political correctness.

Until now, we have associated such authoritarian behaviour with a police state, not the Gloucestershire constabulary. But this is by no means a lone example. An elderly street preacher, Harry Hammond, was fined £300 for displaying a placard which said: ‘Stop immorality. Stop homosexuality. Stop lesbianism’. To his credit, even the gay activist Peter Tatchell protested at this assault on free speech. Bigotry may offend – but a liberal society deals with it through argument.

And last month, Alistair Scott was convicted of ‘religiously aggravated, threatening, abusive or insulting behaviour’ – after a row over September 11 with a Moslem, who called him a ‘Zionist pig-f*****’ and said all Americans deserved to die.

Such apparent one-sidedness is particularly alarming. For the law officers are notably reluctant to act against people distributing material which is not just offensive but may inflame real violence.

In the light of the terrorist threat to Britain, this reluctance is astonishing. In leaflets and at meetings, Islamic fascists call for ‘death to the Jews’. London is considered such a centre for Al Q’aeda and other Islamic terrorist activity that it has been dubbed ‘Londonistan’. Yet virtually nothing is done.

The Home Office says such people stay just on the right side of the law. Rot. This inertia is a failure of political will. And what kind of a law is the government trying to justify here, that turns a deaf ear to regular incitement to murderous frenzy while mounting dawn raids on people with politically incorrect views?

It seems the less able or willing the law officers are to take action against any real threat to life and limb, the more determined they become to lock people up for opinions with which they disagree. The highest crime, it now seems, is to give offence.

Later this week, the Crown Prosecution Service is to announce a greater emphasis on ‘homophobic’ offences. Of course people who hurt homosexuals or any other minority should be brought to justice. But is this really a priority for the police, when everyone – gay people included – needs the police to be patrolling the streets against our mounting crisis of gang warfare, drug-dealing and all violent crime?

More worrying still, hate crimes are defined under the doctrine promulgated by the Macpherson inquiry into the murder of Stephen Lawrence, that an incident is racist if anyone involved thinks it is. Because of this dreadful piece of sophistry, the police are now patrolling not the streets but the mind.

Any assault is foul and should be stopped. But the real purpose of categorising hate crime is symbolic: to destroy prejudice and alter human nature. Such subjective and politicised definitions threaten to unleash a witch-hunt. This is not only unjust -- it will not destroy prejudice.

On the contrary, it will merely increase the risk of violence towards minorities. The more people believe our governing class has taken leave of its collective senses and is standing justice on its head, the more repetitions we will have of last week’s disturbing ward victory in Blackburn by the thugs of the British National Party.

Political correctness corrodes a society’s willingness to fight for its survival. At a time when Islamic fascism threatens the well-being of peaceful Moslems no less than that of any other citizen, and when rampant crime makes everyone a possible victim, for official thinking on liberty and justice to be so back-to-front is potentially lethal to the security of us all.

Daily Mail, November 18 2002

The A-level scandal refuses to lie down and die.

A senior A-level maths examiner, Roger Porkess, says the Tomlinson inquiry into the results crisis vastly underestimated the number of wrong grades awarded last summer. Mike Tomlinson, the former Chief Inspector of Schools, investigated claims that the exam boards had been pressured into arbitrarily slashing the A-level results to avoid claims of grade inflation and sliding standards.

As a result of his inquiry into the fiasco – for which he said no-one was to blame –1,945 AS or A-level grades were improved, resulting in just 168 students becoming eligible to switch to their first choice of university.

But Mr Porkess has calculated that, at a minimum, 35,000 results were wrongly downgraded -- and the figure might even be as high as 50,000.

Mr Porkess is not to be dismissed lightly. A Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society, he is an experienced examiner and a designer of one of the largest maths A-level syllabuses -- which happens to be examined by the Oxford, Cambridge and RSA (OCR) board, the body at the centre of the re-grading scandal.

The boards were accused of moving the goalposts at the eleventh hour by significantly raising the mark required for each grade. Mr Porkess has now revealed the staggering fact that Mr Tomlinson did not obtain from the boards all available information to work through this statistical maze. Instead, he based his inquiry on an assertion by the OCR chief executive Ron McLone – the person who was most in the frame for alleged misconduct.

According to Mr Porkess, Mr Tomlinson accepted on face value Dr McLone’s claim that, in the past, the board had typically adjusted A-level grade boundaries by five to six marks. As a result, he confined his inquiry to those results where the grade had been raised by six marks or more.

But according to Mr Porkess, such a huge rise was not typical at all. It was simply unprecedented. Grades wouldn’t normally rise by more than one mark.

By restricting his inquiry in this way, however, Mr Tomlinson only detected the most outlandish downgradings -- for example, where a predicted ‘A’ turned into a fail. He would have missed the vast majority, where less glaring reductions meant that the students themselves may not have suspected they were victims.

Students taking Mr Porkess’s own maths papers were downgraded by three marks. Thousands of these students, he says, were given the wrong grades as a result. Yet these papers were not even looked at by the inquiry.

In frustration, Mr Porkess contacted Mr Tomlinson – who told him, he said, that the adjustments to his maths papers ‘weren’t large enough’ because Mr Tomlinson was only using the figures the exam boards had given him.

The new Education Secretary Charles Clarke has rejected calls for a fresh inquiry. Now the exam scripts themselves are due to be shredded in two days’ time. The evidence will then vanish.

But if Mr Porkess is correct, the wool has been pulled over Mr Tomlinson’s eyes, and the integrity of the exam system will have been destroyed. These revelations demand a far deeper and more robust inquiry. For there is a corruption at the very heart of the education system.

The re-grading scandal occurred because A-level standards have slipped. And the root cause of that is the huge expansion of the universities, and the government’s aim to get half of all 18 year-olds into higher education.

This vast rise is also the cause of the crisis over university funding, which has led the government to float the politically explosive solution of ‘top-up fees’ for students.

The Higher Education Minister Margaret Hodge last week raised the prospect of middle class families having to pay top-up fees of £15,000 for a three year degree course -- because it wasn’t right, she said, to ask the ‘dustman to subsidise the doctor’.

This latest class-war soundbite is insufferable. For as Cambridge university has rightly protested, top-up fees are grossly inequitable. The rich won’t notice them. The poor won’t have to pay them. The people who will be clobbered will be – once again – the aspiring middle classes.

The real issue here is the visceral animosity against ‘privilege’. Ms Hodge says it is wrong to subsidise graduates who earn on average £400,000 more than non-graduates over a lifetime. But top-up fees will penalise not the graduates but their parents. The dustman whose son becomes a merchant banker will end up subsiding his offspring’s Porsche.

It’s true that money alone doesn’t put people off university. If only the government would realise, after all, that relatively few want or need a degree. But it defies common sense for Ms Hodge to claim that the prospect of a huge debt plays no part in the decision to give university a miss.

Some – including, it is said, Mr Clarke, until he arrived in the education hot seat -- think a graduate tax is fairer. Such a tax would certainly conceal the debt. But it would still be inequitable.

It would mean that graduates in teaching, say, or management, or the police would pay more in tax than non-graduates doing identical jobs. And it doesn’t follow that higher qualifications invariably mean more money. Lecturers, for example, are paid less than school teachers.

What’s more, if it’s unfair to subsidise a degree, it must also be unfair to subsidise any vocational qualification too. Ms Hodge’s dustman may be enraged to discover from her that he is subsidising a nurse or a social worker. As result, when he calls chez Hodge for his Christmas bonus this year, he might be tempted to leave the odd champagne bottle littering his patron’s elegant front garden.

Progressive taxation is fair because people on low incomes should not contribute disproportionately to the common weal. But a tax on learning is a different matter. It is not – as Mr Clarke has implied – like spending on a holiday or a car. Education benefits the whole of society.

The real problem is that university degrees no longer benefit all of us. By being spread so thinly, they are now hurting society by devaluing education standards.

So even the dumbest now get degrees. And what is the government’s response to this rampant degree inflation? Why, it proposes to do away with degree classifications altogether! The words deckchairs and Titanic come to mind – with Ms Hodge playing the role of the iceberg.

There is something off-putting about well-to-do, upper-middle-class ministers -- who themselves have benefited from free university tuition and maintenance grants -- pulling up the gang-plank behind them and their children in the name of attacking ‘privilege’.

The universities and the head teachers should put the pusillanimity of a lifetime to one side. They should both demand that the A-level papers be preserved and a proper inquiry held, and they should also start telling the truth about the collapse of standards in schools and universities.

As for our class-war government, it is presiding over the implosion of education, resulting in a corruption at the heart of the examination process – and it now proposes to punish the middle classes for the privilege of watching it happen.

Daily Mail, November 15 2002

Pinch me; I must be dreaming. The police are going to come down on us like a ton of bricks if we drop chewing gum in the street, while turning a blind eye to people having homosexual intercourse in the middle of a local park.

What kind of madness is this? According to the Queen's Speech, it is what the Government calls 'tackling anti-social behaviour'. This was surely one of the most surreal Queen's Speeches in memory - and one of the most sinister and terrifying.

It is not just that the Government's new programme is astonishingly illiberal. It's not just that it threatens to tear up hundreds of years of tradition in the name of some callow concept of modernisation. It's the fact that it takes our most cherished values - justice, self-restraint, order and liberty - and simply turns them inside out.

All this while managing to avoid tackling the real issues which so trouble and preoccupy this nation - the collapse of the public services; the sheer, bungling incompetence of virtually every arm of government; the implosion of education standards; and the real causes of crime: mass fatherlessness, drug-taking and the erosion of community responsibility and pride.

Yet what is the reaction to a set of proposals that reads like something straight out of Lewis Carroll? Virtual silence. One or two commentators have bewailed the illiberalism of the criminal justice proposals. But the full, far-reaching import of this bizarre programme has occasioned no general outburst of astonishment or protest. It's as if the nation has been anaesthetised.

True, the lawyers will fight some of the criminal justice proposals. But those in a position of influence -- the university vice-chancellors, the doctors, the police, the higher reaches of the judiciary - who should be raising merry hell about the real problems we face and shouting from the rooftops about the war being waged against common-sense, decency and truth, have been all but emasculated.

They are exhausted and demoralised. They know standards have been eroded. They know our precious liberties are in danger. But they don't speak up because of the vice-like grip in which they are now held by a government that has taken control over everyday provision to an unprecedented degree.

But if ever a fighting spirit is needed, it is surely now. For the Government's programme should alarm anyone concerned to protect and uphold both freedom and order.

Take its centrepiece measures on criminal justice, said to 're-balance' the system in favour of victims. In three key areas, it will take an axe to some of our most fundamental freedoms, astonishingly described by Home Secretary David Blunkett as 'twisted traditions'.

The first is the end of the double jeopardy rule which prevents someone being tried twice for the same offence. This move was recommended by the Macpherson report into the murder of black teenager Stephen Lawrence, where the prime suspects could not be retried having already been acquitted in

private prosecution.

But even if further evidence arrives after a trial has finished, trying someone again is simply oppressive. A criminal trial should be the end of the matter; otherwise, there is no limit to police 'fishing expeditions'.

The second onslaught is the proposal to allow a jury to be told in certain circumstances of a defendant's previous convictions. This undermines the cardinal principle that guilt has to be proved.

Mr Blunkett says it is untenable to hold that someone who has already committed ten rapes is as likely to be innocent of a further rape charge as someone who has never committed such a crime.

For a Home Secretary to show such a cavalier attitude to the presumption of innocence is simply astounding. On his logic, one might as well do without a trial altogether and judge a man guilty simply because of his past.

The third attack on our liberties is restricting jury trial in serious fraud or other complex cases. But the principle behind jury trial is that if someone faces imprisonment, he should be tried by his peers as a safeguard against an oppressive state.

What's behind all these proposals is the assumption that all defendants are guilty, and so the system which lets some of them off must be 'twisted'. But it's not the system but the Government's assumption that's twisted here.

Not only is this assault on our ancient principles a recipe for injustice - it will fail to address the problem of crime itself. People are above all victims of crime, not of the criminal justice system. What happens in court is pretty marginal to the victims of crime, since so few criminals are prosecuted.

The real scandal is that so many crimes are committed in the first place, and that so few of them are dealt with at all. And that boils down to the failure to deal with the roots of crime and to police it properly.

Yet the incidence of crime is actually likely to be increased, not reduced, by other parts of the Government's programme. Its proposals to crack down on anti-social behaviour such as dropping litter or chewing gum, or graffiti and fly posting, are not wrong in themselves.

American 'zero tolerance' policies which include such measures have had remarkable success. The thinking behind this is that all the signals on anti-social behaviour have to point in the same direction. In other words, you must have 'zero tolerance' of ALL criminal and anti-social behaviours.

But our government is pointing some crucial signals in precisely the wrong direction - such as introducing round-the-clock drinking.

What is the point of signalling to young people -- whose drinking has already reached an alarming scale -- that it's perfectly OK for them to stagger out of a pub at four in the morning, but then the full force of the law will descend upon them if they drop a crisp packet?

What on earth is the point of cracking down hard on graffiti when Mr Blunkett is simultaneously liberalising the law on drug-taking and our streets are awash with every kind of drug?

And what is the point of fiddling around with chewing gum, when the Government is continuing to undermine the family and presiding over widespread educational failure, two major causes of crime?

Ministers simply refuse to tackle the collapse of parental responsibility and authority that fuels so much juvenile criminality. Its parenting orders are the equivalent of applying sticking plaster to an amputated limb. For the core problem that is sending children out of control is the absence of fathers, not just from individual families but in some areas from entire communities.

Yet the government insists on promulgating the message that every type of household, however fractured, is equally valid in the upbringing of children. It is busy giving equal rights to cohabitants despite the fact that cohabitation is now the major force behind the growing scourge of fatherlessness. It is thus giving a green light to adult irresponsibility.

Imposing on-the-spot fines on parents of children who play truant is all very well. But once again, it’s a case of shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted. Very often, a child who is truanting comes from a background of emotional and practical chaos because of the absence of its father.

Instead of facing up to this deep-seated and most urgent of problems, the Government is choosing to open up yet another front in the war against men that has done so much damage to family life. It is proposing to change the law on sex offences in a way that will both criminalise innocent men and offend the sensibilities of ordinary people.

A woman who claims she has been raped will be presumed not to have given her consent to sex if she was drunk. Not only will the burden of proof shift to the male defendant – destroying another precious principle - but it means, absurdly, that any woman who is drunk and has sex must technically have been raped. And all because the Government believes - preposterously -- that men accused of rape must be guilty, and their acquittal denies 'victims’ their rights.

But then, 'victim culture' - or the trampling of majority interests by minority demands -- lies at the heart of the Government's thinking. Offences of gross indecency and soliciting by homosexuals are to be repealed, and gay sex in public will become legal - unless someone complains, when it will become an offence.

But this means that a mother and her small children, say, may have to stumble across this scene in a local park and then make a complaint. By what grotesque set of values can such a deeply uncivilised scenario possibly be justified?

The onslaught on our freedoms and values does not stop there. The new extradition warrant will mean that a European country such as, say, Spain can have a British citizen arrested in Britain for making a xenophobic remark in Spain. He will then be removed from his own country and, with no evidence ever having been presented, flung into a Spanish jail to await

trial for an activity which the British don't even recognise as a crime.

How can such a sinister and yet deeply irrelevant programme have ever been created? Mr Blair is said to be galvanised by a new sense of urgency. No wonder. He looks around and finds everything is in worse shape than when he started. So he turns against the institutions and values of the country.

No-one dares tell him that the problem lies in his own policies. No-one dares tell him that, crucially, his government's mania for control over the public services destroys the sense of local belonging and involvement that is one of the best antidotes to crime.

No-one can tell him any of this because he is surrounded by so many sycophants and shallow, post-modern wreckers who are only too eager to destroy British tradition.

The real problem is that those who should be standing up against this tyranny lack the one crucial thing that might give them courage. They cannot see any end to this government's grip on power. With the Conservative Party indulging itself in its protracted nervous breakdown, there is no real opposition. The next election has already been written off as a shoo-in for Tony Blair.

Whether or not this is necessarily true is beside the point. People assume it to be so. So they lack the motivation or courage to stand up and fight. The result is that hundreds of thousands of ordinary, decent people who look on in bemusement feel utterly disenfranchised, as there is no-one to

fight the battles that need to be fought.

But don't worry: criminalising hunting with dogs is once again back on the agenda. We can all rest easy in our beds.

Daily Mail, November 11 2002

This is all now getting completely out of hand.

When Paul Burrell was accused of stealing the possessions of Diana, Princess of Wales, it seemed odd but not earth-shattering. When his trial was abruptly halted following the Queen’s sensational intervention, the implications still seemed to be limited to a distinctly peculiar episode.

But now, the affair has taken on a life of its own. It threatens to do serious damage to the monarchy, engulfing the Royal Family in a tidal wave of sordid and lurid allegations.

Last week was bad enough, when the Queen and the Prince of Wales were accused of halting the Burrell trial in order to prevent him from making damaging revelations from the witness box. But now, after claims made in yesterday’s papers, the Prince of Wales stands accused of effectively perverting the course of justice to protect a favourite courtier from allegations of homosexual rape – with the Prince’s ex-wife haunting him from beyond the grave with a smoking tape-recording.

The claim has been made by the alleged victim, George Smith, who worked for the Prince of Wales as a valet after being badly traumatised by serving in the Falklands war. Mr Smith claims he was brutally assaulted in the courtier’s home after getting drunk and falling asleep on a sofa. While unconscious, he claims, he was raped, a fact he discovered only when he woke up. The same courtier, he says, made another attempt to assault him six years later on a Royal tour of Egypt.

He told this story to the Princess who, he says, first surreptitiously and then openly made a tape-recording of his account. This is the tape that allegedly went missing from a box of the Princess’s most sensitive possessions which her sister gave to Mr Burrell. It is this tape, we are led to believe, whose explosive contents the Royal Family was so determined to prevent Mr Burrell from airing in court.

Mr Smith claims that the Prince of Wales covered up his allegation at the time. But St James’s Palace, which says it conducted an inquiry, maintains that Mr Smith refused to discuss it. He says now he was never asked to do so. But why then didn’t he ever come forward of his own accord?

By his own admission, he didn’t even tell his psychiatrists what had happened because he felt too ‘dirty’. But surely a heterosexual man who is brutally assaulted in this way would tell someone, if only his doctors?

And is it really likely that he would have known nothing about it until he later woke up? Wouldn’t such a violent assault that left him injured have roused him from his drunken stupor?

The fact is that by his own admission, Mr Smith is deeply unstable. He has been convicted three times of drink-driving and once of being drunk and disorderly, and has had several spells of psychiatric treatment. The police investigated his claim but the Crown Prosecution Service decided there was no evidence to support a case, which was hardly surprising given his unreliability as a witness.

It is possible that he was indeed raped as he says. But it is also possible that the Prince of Wales, whose loyalty to devoted servants reaches epic proportions, was not trying to cover anything up but was doggedly determined to defend the reputation of a man he believed to be innocent – whether or not that belief was well-founded.

Mr Smith, though, has gone even further. He has made another, far more explosive claim about behaviour he witnessed between a courtier and an unnamed royal. He says he told this to the Princess of Wales, and this is included on the missing tape.

But why should we believe him on this, as on anything else? And if the Princess of Wales had believed him, wouldn’t that tortured and scheming soul have made sure this seeped out into the public domain?

The Burrell fiasco seems to have opened the floodgates for disloyal Royal servants to fling mud which is sticking, even though some of their claims sound too silly for words. Mr Burrell, for example, has said the Queen told him: ‘There are powers at work in this country of which we have no knowledge’. But can anyone imagine the Queen, of all people, saying something which makes her sound like Mohamed Fayed having a bad hair day?

Beneath this orgy of mud-flinging, there is a fetid swamp of rival agendas. Poisonous factions are pitted against each other both within and between the Royal palaces.

There are those still determined to avenge the martyred Diana and bring down the Prince of Wales. There is the Spencer family, hating and hated. There are the police, trying to shift the blame from themselves for the débâcle of the Burrell prosecution.

All of these people are briefing against each other to the media. It is a truly lamentable state of affairs, and one that threatens to bring all the institutions involved, including the monarchy, into disrepute.

So who is to be believed? All one can do is apply some common sense. Is Mr Smith a reliable witness? No. Is Mr Burrell, the man who has now sold his Royal secrets, to be trusted? No. Is it likely that the Queen is so inept a conspirator that she would have left the suppression of Mr Burrell’s trial to the very last minute, thus provoking the paroxysm of conspiracy theories now swirling round her throne? No.

Yet the mud is sticking because people have become deeply, shockingly credulous. They believed the Princess of Wales’s carefully manipulated version of the breakdown of her marriage. Yet she was a deeply unstable character who -- we now learn -- went round taping conversations; and who despite Mr Smith’s serious alcohol problem, plied him with champagne at Kensington Palace as she mused with him over victimhood into the early hours.

Following the mistakes made after her death, the Royal Family and in particular the Prince of Wales did much to restore the monarchy to high public esteem.

But now, every hanger-on who has a grievance or is after fame or fortune may feel emboldened to poison the Royal well with either secrets or lies. However questionable or disloyal each revelation may be, public approval of the Royal Family is taking a dive. And the republicans, scenting blood, are sharpening their axes and preparing to strike.

This crisis is not something that can be stitched up between courtiers behind closed doors. However preposterous they may think the allegations to be, these claims must be addressed openly and transparently. Concerns about further embarrassment should be set aside. The Queen and the Prince of Wales should tell us exactly what has been going on. If they took the public into their confidence in this way, they would be believed.

This is a moment of great danger for the monarchy. If the mud is swept under the Royal carpet, all the patient work of recent years will be quite undone – and public approval, on which the monarchy depends, will float away faster than one of the Prince of Wales’s feathers.

Daily Mail, November 4 2002

Republicans are in seventh heaven. The spectacular fiasco of the Paul Burrell trial has handed them another opportunity to put the boot into the monarchy.

Having failed to finish off the Royal Family after the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, and forced instead to grind their teeth at the outpouring of loyalty on the death of the Queen Mother, they have now seized upon the astonishing denouement of the Burrell trial to spread once again a cloud of ignorance, idiocy and ideological bile.

The Queen’s eleventh-hour recall of her now famous meeting with Mr Burrell demonstrates – they say – that the root cause of the fiasco is that the Queen is above the law.

Apparently, the reason an innocent man almost went to prison was because court cases are prosecuted in the name of the Crown. The fact that the Queen sat on information without telling anyone shows that the monarchy is beyond the reach of justice.

The most ludicrous suggestion came --as usual -- from the Liberal Democrats, who said prosecutions should no longer brought in the name of the Crown but by a public prosecutor.

Such silliness is clearly contagious. Even the historian Lord Blake – who cannot be accused of republican sympathies – is suggesting that cases should be prosecuted in the name of the state.

But what earthly good would that have done in this case where the state public prosecutor screwed up big-time? For the root cause of this débâcle was not the constitution, but the utterly astounding incompetence of both the police and the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS).

The constitutional argument is a monumental red herring. The Queen’s meeting with Mr Burrell was not concealed because she was beyond the reach of justice. How could it be, since it was the Queen who eventually made the encounter known?

She didn’t speak about it earlier for the simple reason that no-one asked her. This was purely because of an incomprehensible decision that she should not be troubled with such questioning. Mr Burrell had mentioned the meeting in a statement. The police, acting on legal advice, had failed to follow it up.

It is further being claimed that the Queen could not have given evidence for the defence against herself. The absurdity of ‘Regina versus Regina’ is a nice conceit, but it is wholly irrelevant here. For cases are brought only nominally in the name of the Crown. The Queen is no more involved in court cases than she is in posting our letters through the Royal Mail.

Nor is it true that she couldn’t give evidence. There was nothing to stop her from doing so. True, she couldn’t be compelled to do so or forced to undergo cross-examination. But that was clearly unnecessary here anyway. A mere statement would have sufficed at any time – as, indeed, events came to prove.

It is true that the Queen cannot be found guilty of any offence, because as the embodiment of the state she is the fount of justice. But how, in heaven’s name, is that supposed to have affected the trial of Mr Burrell?

The idea that the constitution has somehow got in the way of justice here is demonstrably absurd. The cause of this fiasco is very different. This prosecution should never have been brought. The police rested their case on a series of assertions which fell apart well before the Queen’s intervention.

Officers had told the Prince of Wales and Prince William in August 2001 that Mr Burrell had sold the Princess’s possessions, that he had become wealthy as a result and that he had helped staff dress up in the Princess’s clothes.

In fact, they had no evidence for these claims whatsoever. Yet not only did they grossly mislead the princes, but this cock and bull story turned out to be the lynchpin of the prosecution decision to bring the case.

It beggars belief that such a case should have been brought to court with not a shred of evidence to back up its core assertions. The police and CPS were both at fault. The police were fundamentally incompetent. But surely the whole point of the CPS’s existence is to make sure that the prosecution case stands up.

It was not until two weeks ago, when it became clear during the trial that the police had misled the Prince of Wales, that he realised that he had been led up the garden path. The shattering nature of this revelation may in itself explain all that then followed.

Originally, he had been against the prosecution of Mr Burrell, whether out of affection for the former butler or from fear of what he might reveal in court.

But this view had changed after the crucial meeting at Highgrove, where the police had told the princes of Mr Burrell’s alleged infamy. Just consider what effect that would have had. Here were the police telling them that Mr Burrell had not only monstrously profited from selling the Princess’s possessions, but had mocked her memory too. Just imagine how they would have viewed such appalling treachery.

And then just imagine the effect on the Prince of Wales when he learned that what the police had told him about Mr Burrell was simply untrue. It was he who leapt into action upon hearing his mother’s account just three days after realising he had been misled. Just imagine also the effect on the Queen. Her conversation with Mr Burrell would suddenly have been cast in a different light for the third time.

In any event, just suppose she had indeed come forward much earlier with her recollection of that meeting. To whom would she have made it available? To Mr Burrell’s defence. But she must surely have assumed – as would anyone – that Mr Burrell himself would have informed his defence team of all relevant information that could have helped him. The reason he restricted himself to an oblique reference that everyone missed remains a mystery.

Of course, it was highly convenient that the Queen made her intervention shortly before Mr Burrell hade a chance to release who knows what skeletons from the royal closet. So not surprisingly, conspiracy theorists are having a field day. But why on earth would the Queen have intervened in this way, prompting so much furore and republican mischief-making, when she could have discreetly scuppered the trial far earlier?

It is not the reputation of the Royal Family that lies in ruins but those of the police and the CPS. How can an élite police squad have failed to discover that Mr Burrell had made a lot of money from his book and from speaking engagements? How can the police have launched a prosecution on the basis of evidence that did not exist? How can the CPS have backed such a case? Are they all asleep or half-witted? It beggars belief.

In case after case – Damilola Taylor, Jill Dando, Stephen Lawrence, now Paul Burrell – the police have shown themselves incapable of mounting a properly run operation. In case after case, the CPS has also proved itself utterly useless.

The constitution is a diversion for republicans. The core problem is dire institutional incompetence, which threatens the liberty and safety of all the Queen’s subjects.