An impressive defensive circle has formed around Keir Starmer since Boris Johnson told Parliament that the Labour leader “used his time prosecuting journalists and failing to prosecute Jimmy Savile”. It’s much like the circle that the same people formed around the previous Labour leader, except that the weapons are pointed outwards this time.
The story adopted, affirmed and assertively imposed by Starmer groupies at The Guardian, BBC News , Channel 4, Full Fact, sundry liberal social media outlets and so on, is that their man had absolutely nothing to do with the failure of the Crown Prosecution Service to prosecute Jimmy Savile. It’s a vile, cheap slur, typical of the serial liar Johnson and wholly the province of extreme right wing conspiracy theorist nutcases like those who subsequently harangued Starmer in the street by loudly asking questions. Johnson should apologise, no questions asked, right?
But there are questions to ask about Sir Keir Starmer QC’s tenure as Director of Public Prosecutions, and not just about the CPS’ failure to get Jimmy Savile into a courtroom. It’s indicative of the way the British media operates that only angry mob street protestors and marginalised independent journalists have been asking them.
In 2009 Starmer, at that time Director of Public Prosecutions, approved a decision made by reviewing lawyer Stephen O’Doherty not to prosecute the police officers who killed the completely innocent Brazilian electrician Jean Charles de Menezes. [1]
Jean Charles’s cousin Vivian Figuierdo said the Crown Prosecution Service move was “deeply upsetting”. She said: “We are in shock and cannot understand how the deliberate killing of an innocent man and an attempt by the Metropolitan police to cover it up does not result in a criminal offence”.
In 2010 he approved a decision not to prosecute Simon Harwood, the police officer who pushed over innocent bystander Ian Tomlinson [2], causing his death, only subsequently reversing the decision after an investigation by a Guardian journalist, Paul Lewis [3] and the revelation of the incompetence of the pathologist Freddy Patel [4].
‘Fifteen months later the director of public prosecutions, Keir Starmer, decides that “there is no realistic prospect of a conviction against [Harwood] for any offence arising from the matter investigated and that no charges should be brought against him”. The evidence for his role in Tomlinson’s death, Starmer says, is contradictory, and the time limit for pressing lesser charges has sadly expired. Starmer provides no convincing explanation of why it has taken him so long to make his decision, or of why a jury should not be allowed to make its own assessment of the evidence’.
George Monbiot. The Guardian 23/7/2010
The CPS was involved with the Savile case after it was referred to them by Surrey Police in 2009 [5], so what procedural difference meant that the decision not to prosecute Savile was not referred to Starmer for approval? He would presumably have known Savile and a few of his victims had been interviewed by police – it would have been somewhat remiss of him not to know – and was presumably aware that the case was being assessed by the organisation he headed. If the decision not to prosecute Savile was taken without his say-so, why didn’t he ask why his approval to drop a case against such a high-profile public figure was not sought? Why did his office not pressure prosecutors and police to keep the case open in the same way it pressured Swedish prosecutors to keep open the Julian Assange case [6], for which there was no evidence? or did he know nothing (again) about the CPS’ involvement with Assange’s extradition? What was it that made Savile none of his business?
On 24th October 2012 The Guardian reported that ‘Starmer said in a statement on Wednesday that a review of the files submitted by Surrey police in 2009 had already found “that the decisions taken at the time were the right decisions based on the information and evidence then available”. [7] However, he had asked his chief principal legal adviser, Alison Levitt, to consider the decisions out of “an abundance of caution” and had also asked to talk to the attorney general. He added that last week he had asked the chief crown prosecutor for the south-east, Roger Coe-Salazar, to review the files.
“He has done so and he has assured me that the decisions taken at the time were the right decisions based on the information and evidence then available.”
Alison Levitt subsequently found that the CPS had no files to review in 2012, because the originals had been handed back to Surrey Police ‘following the decision that no prosecution would take place.’ The CPS’ Case Management System had the files relevant to the case deleted on 26th October 2010, ‘in accordance with normal policy’. [7] We have to assume that since he had no files to peruse at the CPS, the chief crown prosecutor for the south-east had to ask for the same file back from Surrey Police for the purposes of his review as Alison Levitt referred to for her inquiry.
Starmer appointed Alison Levitt to carry out an inquiry into the procedures surrounding the Savile case despite assurances from Roger Coe-Salazar that there had been no failure on the part of the CPS. Her report [8] did not agree with this assessment, however, and pinned blame for the failure to prosecute Savile on police and the memory-deficient reviewing lawyer, concluding that sufficient evidence was available to build a case for prosecution:
‘ i) I have seen nothing to suggest that the decisions not to prosecute were consciously influenced by any improper motive on the part of either police or prosecutors.
ii)That having been said, I have reservations about the way in which the prosecutor reached his decision.
iii) On the face of it, the allegations made were both serious and credible; the prosecutor should have recognised this and sought to “build” a prosecution. In particular, there were aspects of what he was told by the police as to the reasons that the victims did not want to give evidence which should have caused him further questions. Instead, he appears to have treated the obstacles as fatal to the prospects of a prosecution taking place.
iv) Looked at objectively, there was nothing to suggest that the alleged victims had colluded in their accounts, nor that they were in any way inherently less reliable than, say, a victim of a burglary or a road traffic accident. Despite this, the police treated them and the accounts they gave with a degree of caution which was neither justified nor required.
v) Most of the victims continue to speak warmly of the individual officers with whom they had contact. However each of those to whom I have spoken has said that had she been given more information by police at the time of the investigation, and in particular had she been told that she was not the only woman to have complained, she would probably have been prepared to give evidence.
vi) Having spoken to the victims I have been driven to conclude that had the police and prosecutors taken a different approach a prosecution might have been possible.’ [8]
Starmer later appointed retired judge Christopher Rose to carry out an inquiry into the disastrous decision to prosecute environmental protesters whose groups had been infiltrated by Mark Kennedy and other undercover police officers [9]. This report also exonerated Starmer and blamed police and junior prosecutors. An inquiring mind might be left to consider the likelihood of Starmer ever commissioning a report from someone who might point the finger of blame in his direction.
An inquiring mind like Craig Murray’s, for example: ‘Given Savile’s tight ties to the establishment – from royalty and prime ministers down – and the establishment’s role in providing, however inadvertently, cover for Savile’s paedophilia for decades, it should hardly surprise us that the blame for the failure to prosecute him has been placed squarely on the shoulders of a low-level lawyer in the Crown Prosecution Service. How could it be otherwise? If we started unpicking the thorny Savile knot, who knows how the threads might unravel?’
The Spycops scandal was another botched prosecution, failure to bring police to justice and inquiry (by Christopher Rose) that, hey presto, placed the blame on junior prosecutors and police, as reported here by Bethany Rielly for the Morning Star on 4th February 2021:
‘Starmer became embroiled in the Spycops scandal while he was director of public prosecutions, when 20 activists were wrongly convicted in 2009 of plotting to occupy the Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station. A group of 114 people were arrested while planning the action. A further six were prosecuted separately but their case collapsed after it emerged that prosecutors had concealed information that one of the lead protesters was undercover police officer Mark Kennedy. This led to the 20 who were convicted in the earlier trial having their convictions quashed.
Two other trials involving Mr Kennedy also collapsed due to the CPS withholding evidence that he was an undercover officer.
However Mr Starmer only ordered the inquiry into the Ratcliffe-on-Soar case. The Labour leader told Channel 4 at the time that the problem was not “systemic,” but activists are now demanding answers as to whether Mr Starmer helped bury evidence of other miscarriages of justice involving undercover officers. The power station case led to the unfurling of the spycops scandal, which resulted in the unmasking of dozens of other undercover officers who infiltrated progressive groups for years at a time.’
Much as it might risk provoking further indignant outrage, shouldn’t we be entitled to ask if there is a pattern woven in to Starmer’s time as DPP? A pattern of excessive hands-off delegation, or one of finding reasons to go after some people, like environmental protesters and an Australian journalist who made the American military very cross, while finding reasons not to prosecute others, like police officers whose combination of negligence, violence and unethical activity ruined or terminated the lives of innocent people; A pattern of defending the police and junior CPS staff when it suits establishment interests and then blaming them to avert the spotlight from senior figures like himself. It might be argued that it’s always been this way and Starmer wouldn’t have got the job if he was likely to devote too much energy to batting for victims and too little to pursuing activist perpetrators of victimless crimes, but weren’t we supposed to expect something different from the renowned human rights lawyer and erstwhile Haldane Society member?
So many questions….
More reading and references:
Half of these are from The Guardian, which covered the CPS’ failures very well at the time, but put itself at the forefront of outrage and selective ‘fact-checking’ that followed Boris Johnson’s accusation. It sums up how little the paper resembles what it was a decade ago.
The family of Jean Charles de Menezes dropped their legal battle for justice last night after prosecutors refused to bring charges over his death. They said almost four years of relentless campaigning had brought them little closer to holding any individual to account for the innocent Brazilian’s death.
Daily Record 14/02/2009
[2] Ian Tomlinson ruling. We must all fight this whitewash. George Monbiot. 23/07/2010 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/libertycentral/2010/jul/23/ian-tomlinson-ruling-fight-whitewash?fbclid=IwAR00cbVPMjyQovGe0Kc0FzVYUHbh9Yyhe0Z_zN_5OVVSc7kKJuPObGOoVZg
[3] Paul Lewis. https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2010/jul/22/ian-tomlinson-story-justice-denied
[5] The interview was conducted at Savile’s office in the Buckinghamshire hospital’s spinal injuries unit on 1 October 2009. Prosecutors subsequently decided there was insufficient evidence to prosecute him. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-24535807?fbclid=IwAR1dGijcXkqfOhl69HZfii5Y7r5uBa_vS_bwYKJmU4_2p2l4HmcXo2UVxkA
[8] IN THE MATTER OF THE LATE JIMMY SAVILE. Report to the Director of Public Prosecutions by Alison Levitt QC. https://www.yumpu.com/en/document/read/7729339/report-to-the-director-of-public-prosecutions-by-alison-levitt-qc
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