Harvey Proctor: False allegations have scarred me for life - I still think about Operation Midland every day, ten years on

It was a powerful declaration of his innocence, from a man who found himself a subject, among other public figures, of lurid and false allegations made by the fantasist Carl Beech.

“They amount to just about the worst allegations anyone can make against another person,” he said as he spoke to the press close to New Scotland Yard, after being interviewed by Metropolitan Police working on Operation Midland, an investigation that was launched into what are now known to be fake claims of a VIP paedophile ring. “I am completely innocent of all these allegations.”

Pontefract-born Mr Proctor held the press conference on August 25, 2015, suggesting that either he should be arrested, charged and prosecuted for the crimes so he could challenge the allegations in open court or that ‘Nick’, as Beech was known at the time, should be stripped of his anonymity and prosecuted for wasting police time and for attempting to pervert the course of justice.

“I knew that no one could correctly come forward because all of this was false,” Proctor tells The Yorkshire Post a decade on. But it had been a turbulent few months.

In March that year, police officers searched his home on the estate of Belvoir Castle in Leicestershire, where he was working as private secretary to the Duke of Rutland.

“When I (later) read what I was supposed to have done, there was a mixture of relief that I now knew what the police were saying I had done and knowing that I had done none of that, and horror at the grotesque nature of the situation I was in and that anyone, let alone the Metropolitan Police could think I could have done any of that,” Mr Proctor says.

He says he left to live in Spain for a year for “my own safety” following the “grotesque and heinous” allegations.

“When I left, I did so because of death threats. I felt safer being out of the United Kingdom. This wasn’t the first scandal I was involved in. In 1986/1987 I was involved in another scandal which terminated my parliamentary career…I knew the difficulties that I faced then when allegations against me were considerably less, much much less, than what Operation Midland was about.”

Mr Proctor, who had joined the Young Conservatives in Yorkshire as a teenager, was elected as MP for Basildon in 1979 and later also represented the constituency of Billericay.

In 1987, Mr Proctor left parliament as he pleaded guilty to four charges of gross indecency. The charges related to homosexual activity with men over the current age of consent, but at a time when the legal age of consent for gay men was 21.

Reflecting on the impact of being linked with Operation Midland years later, Mr Proctor says: “The impact on me was to lose my job (he resigned as Private Secretary to the Duke of Rutland), my house, my home, and my repute, which I’d built up again over nearly 30 years since the scandal in ‘87.”

In Spain, there were times he felt like giving up, that he could no longer face the allegations. “I got very close to ending it,” he says now, emotion evident in his voice. “I knew I had done none of that (I was being accused of), but how do you prove a negative?”

“The police believed Beech,” he adds. “Once they said that (he was credible and true), it meant they believed him.”

Former High Court judge Sir Richard Henriques, who was commissioned in 2016 to carry out an independent review of the handling of Operation Midland, was critical in his report of the use of the words during a briefing with the media in December 2014, finding they were “inappropriate, prejudicial to any suspect, and misleading to the public”.

“I certainly felt during the whole of the Metropolitan Police’s operation that they thought, and other people including the media thought, that I was guilty before I had an opportunity to prove otherwise,” Mr Proctor says. “That isn’t the way that it works in this country.”

In 2019, it was reported that Mr Proctor would receive nearly £500,000 in compensation and nearly £400,000 towards legal fees from the Metropolitan Police over the force’s disastrous investigation.

But despite the Sir Richard Henriques report, the Met’s compensation and Beech’s prosecution, Mr Proctor, who is now back at the Belvoir Estate working for the Duke of Rutland, says he still has to deal with the “no smoke without fire brigade”.

“All of that still does not erase the difficulties of the no smoke without fire brigade, and from time to time, I still receive death threats,” he says.

Whilst he believes there has been justice, he says it “doesn’t eradicate deep-seated feelings that this should never have happened…An organisation that when I was a Member of Parliament I looked up to and respected greatly, now I do not.”

Writing for ConservativeHome back in 2022, Mr Proctor said he would “never return to being the person I was prior to Operation Midland”, adding “it is impossible to overestimate the damaging impact of such torment on an individual. It has scarred me for life”.

He echoed such words to The Yorkshire Post. “I said years ago that I would think about Operation Midland until the day I die and all these years later, ten years later, and I still think about it every day,” the 78-year-old says, his voice wavering. “I shouldn’t, it’s not a good thing, but it has never left me and I can’t conceive of a situation where it ever will.”

It is why Mr Proctor says he now tries to do what he can to support other people who are falsely accused.

“Before this, I would never have thought about people falsely accusing others. If I hadn’t historically thought about that, why should anybody else?”

“I’m trying to fight now not for myself but for others who have been, or are being, falsely accused,” he adds. “That’s to my mind the most important thing.”