The BBC has been trumpeting the fact that the Metropolitan Police spent £2.5 million on Operation Midland, the failed 16-month long investigation into VIP paedophile claims.
BBC News – Operation Midland cost £2.5m, says Met Police https://t.co/RY0iMhlAEx
— Daniel De Simone (@DdesimoneDaniel) August 9, 2016
It had been seeking this information for some time, having made a Freedom of Information request about it earlier this year.
Because Operation Midland was aborted without a single arrest being made, and because the Met’s probe was based on the claims of an anonymous accuser known as “Nick”, £2.5 million is indeed a giant sum for any public body to have spent without getting a result. The £2.5 million figure should have been published by the police a long time ago without any fuss.
However, let’s not forget the BBC’s own form when it comes to child abuse claims, inquiries, and disclosing costs.
In 2012 it spent even more public money than the Met – a staggering £3 million – on an eight-week long “inquiry” into why it buried a Newsnight investigation into Jimmy Savile’s sexual abuse of children and young people on BBC premises and elsewhere.
The BBC’s probe, chaired by Nick Pollard, was very similar to Operation Midland in that it secured no tangible results whatsoever.
The BBC employee who killed the Savile story was never named. Nobody at the BBC was sacked over the affair. And the chairman of the BBC’s “inquiry”, Nick Pollard, told me after publishing his results that he had left out key evidence from his report which raises serious questions about the behaviour and judgment of BBC chief Mark Thompson, now CEO of the New York Times.
Furthermore, just like the Met, the BBC took many months to admit how much the Pollard Inquiry cost. It published the true cost only when it thought everybody had forgotten the affair.
Operation Midland may have been a disaster, but on the basis that the BBC’s Pollard Inquiry cost even more money and ran for a fraction of the time, it was surely a catastrophe.
