John Arlidge at the Air Mail: Britain does a good line in scandal. The Profumo affair, the abdication of King Edward VIII, and Prince Andrew’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein are just a few. Each one starts small, seems almost unbelievable, and then turns out to be true.
Take the latest, the Post Office scandal, which was the subject of the recent hit TV show Mr Bates vs the Post Office. In what British prime minister Rishi Sunak called “one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in our nation’s history,” around 3,500 men and women who ran small branches of Britain’s postal service were wrongly accused of—and in some cases wrongly jailed for—theft, false accounting, and fraud. Some committed suicide. But all along a toxic combination of venal Post Office management and a faulty computer system was to blame.
Sometimes, though, a scandal can and should beggar belief. The case of Carl Beech is one. It was in 2014 that police first became aware of Beech, after he published his allegations on the news Web site Exaro. Beech, then in his 40s, was a former nurse and, using the pseudonym “Nick,” claimed that between the ages of 7 and 16 he, and other children, had been abused by a powerful pedophile ring that included former M.P.’s, secret-service chiefs, prime ministers, and other high-profile men in the British Establishment.
One of the accused was Harvey Proctor, a former Conservative member of Parliament, who in 1986 had been forced to resign after being caught having sexual relations with two male prostitutes, aged 17 and 19. (At the time, the age of consent for same-sex relationships was 21.)…
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