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A leader..........
Wellington at the Battle of Waterloo, 1815 |
So Cressida Dick has had to fall on her sword, not because she’s a particularly bad person, but due to the failings of the organisation that she leads.
Fair enough you may say. Certainly observing from afar in rural Gloucestershire it is difficult to assess the effectiveness of either Sadiq Khan or Cressida. I suspect they deserve each other but apparently Khan held the whip hand when it came to deciding who had to walk.
But it did get me thinking about that other news story of the week, namely the organisational issues that led to the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) failing to prosecute Jimmy Savile round about 2009. At the time the Director of Public Prosecutions and Head of the Crown Prosecution Service was Keir Starmer, a role he completed in 2013 and for which he was duly Knighted.
You can’t spend any time on social media without being aware of the Starmer Savile link; ok, some of it does get fanciful and belongs, as far as I’m concerned, in the deepest darkest corners of the internet. My view on conspiracy theories is that the players simply aren’t bright enough to do the things that the conspiracy theorists accuse them of. So keeping the link at its highest level, what do we know?
The Facts
For a start YouTube provides details of an independent fact checking website which has been my go to whenever I’ve stumbled across this story in the past. Here are a few extracts:
“Mr Starmer was head of the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) when the decision not to prosecute Savile was made on the grounds of “insufficient evidence”. The allegations against Savile were dealt with by local police and a reviewing lawyer for the CPS.
In January 2013, after Savile’s death and when his abuse had been revealed, an investigation into whether the CPS had been right not to charge Savile in 2009 was published by Alison Levitt QC. She was asked to investigate this by Mr Starmer.
When the investigation report was published in January 2013, Mr Starmer said in a statement that he accepted the conclusions and hoped it would be a “watershed moment” for the CPS.
He said: “I would like to take the opportunity to apologise for the shortcomings in the part played by the CPS in these cases.””
The Starmer Apology
There are telling words in his apology which are:
“In my view, these cases do not simply reflect errors of judgement by individual officers or prosecutors on the facts before them. If that were the case, they would, in many respects, be easier to deal with. These were errors of judgment by experienced and committed police officers and a prosecuting lawyer acting in good faith and attempting to apply the correct principles. That makes the findings of Ms Levitt’s report more profound and calls for a more robust response.”
While of course the DPP's apology is classic Captain Hindsight, what he is actually saying is that it was the principles, under pinning the organisation that he led, that were at fault. In other words the prosecuting lawyer was basically set up to fail. Hence in my view, although Sir Keir didn’t fail to prosecute per se, the organisation he led couldn’t claim to be blameless (which is presumably why he apologised in 2013).
Having read the fact checked version of events and the apology, I decided I needed to read the full report by Alison Levitt QC. What was troubling me was the question should Sir Keir have been aware of what was happening at a lower level of his organisation especially as it involved such a high profile national “celebrity”? Especially as this was all happening at the time he took over the role and presumably he was given some sort of pre-job brief of the cases that his new department were currently dealing with.
The Missing Files
The investigation report, imaginatively titled (In the matter of the late Jimmy Savile: Report to the Director of Public Prosecutions, January 2013) is not now easy to find. My searches led me to reports at the time from The Guardian and the BBC. Unfortunately in both cases the links to the report led nowhere. It would appear that the CPS had decided to either remove it from, or move it within, their document archive. However I later found a more recent link to a Reuters Fact Check Report which provided a link to the National Archives and a copy of the report. Interestingly the Reuters Report concluded that there was "no evidence to suggest Sir Keir Starmer, then DPP of the CPS, was directly involved in the decision not to prosecute Jimmy Savile." (emphasis added).
To continue this theme, when I started thumbing through the pages I was drawn to the section where Alison Levitt explained that she had not been able to work with the original CPS material as it had been destroyed (Page 5). Instead she had needed to recreate the material from the associated Police files which were in themselves incomplete (Page 2). As surprising as this sounds, and while this may get our conspiracy theorists excited, Alison Levitt makes it clear that this was common practice for the CPS back in the day and to his credit Keir Starmer did encourage the organisation to move away from its reliance on paper files.
The Investigation Report
Many commentators and "fact checkers" point to the fact that as the Surrey and Sussex police failed to make a case against Savile (Page 68), for the various reasons outlined in the investigation report, the CPS were not responsible for the decision not to proceed with the prosecution. However this is not a correct interpretation of the conclusion of the report.
While Alison Levitt accepts that it had not been unreasonable for the prosecuting officer to come to this conclusion, she would have expected him to attempt to “build a case” (Page 113) with the police officers rather than simply give up. The report does not tell us if the prosecuting officer referred his decision to a higher authority, neither does it explain if this would have been normal practice. Apart from the destruction of the case records and the failure to apply the principles of building a case, the report does not report on the organisational issues that led to the failure to prosecute. So we are no further forward in understanding just what “principles” Sir Keir was referring to in his apology.
Before I draw this to a conclusion, I must also point out that while researching the facts behind the investigation report I became aware of Freedom of Information Requests which were made to the CPS both before and after the investigation report was issued. In fact it would appear that the Levitt Report was commissioned as a result of an earlier FoI request. "The CPS cited section 36 (prejudice to the effective conduct of public affairs) as a basis for refusing the requested information." (emphasis added). The paperwork makes it clear that the DPP was consulted as the qualified person on this this part of the law; undoubtedly more fuel for the conspiracy theorists!
Conclusion
As Dame Cressida Dick has discovered to her cost if an organisation fails, then the person at the top is ultimately accountable and therefore in a large part responsible for the organisational failings.
In this case those failings are:
- poor communications
- unclear processes and procedures
- poor judgment and decision making
- wrong prioritisation
- and consequently, an apparent failure of leadership
True the report does not indicate if Mr Starmer had any involvement in the failure to prosecute Jimmy Savile. But as that was not the intention of the report that is hardly surprising. And in many ways, an absence of involvement, given the acknowledged seriousness (Page 114) of the case, is just as bad as being involved in the failure to prosecute, and ultimately led to the same result by an act of omission rather than an act of commission.
In 2022 what the left wing media are trying to do is to make out that this is all some looney, “darkest corners of the internet” conspiracy theory, in an attempt to deflect away from the demonstrable, accepted failings of the CPS at the time Keir Starmer was in charge.
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The Starmer apology as reported in "Counsel" at the time
COUNSEL
DPP apologises on Savile
31 January 2013
Crime
In a “watershed moment”, the Director of Public Prosecutions has apologised for “shortcomings in the part played by the CPS” in deciding not to prosecute four cases involving allegations of sexual assault by the late Jimmy Savile.
DPP Kier Starmer QC asked his Principal Legal Advisor, Alison Levitt QC, to examine the Crown Prosecution Service’s decisions in relation to the four allegations made to Surrey and Sussex Police in 2007 and 2008, that Savile indecently assaulted girls and young women in the 1970s.
Levitt found that whilst there was nothing to suggest that the decisions not to prosecute were consciously influenced by any improper motive on the part of either police or prosecutors, “[h]aving 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.” (In the matter of the late Jimmy Savile: Report to the Director of Public Prosecutions, January 2013.)
Accepting Levitt’s conclusions in full, the DPP said: “If this report and my apology are to serve their full purpose, then this must be seen as a watershed moment.
“In my view, these cases do not simply reflect errors of judgement by individual officers or prosecutors on the facts before them. If that were the case, they would, in many respects, be easier to deal with. These were errors of judgment by experienced and committed police officers and a prosecuting lawyer acting in good faith and attempting to apply the correct principles. That makes the findings of Ms Levitt’s report more profound and calls for a more robust response.”
Starmer proposes wholescale changes to the approach of police and prosecutors to credibility in sexual assault cases. Testing the suspect’s account should be equally important as testing that of the complainant and new guidance will be issued to that effect. Greater support is recommended for complainants and more thought is to be given to the use of pre-recorded cross-examination of child witnesses (see Counsel, ‘Time to Change the Rules?’, November 2012, p 32); and the extent to which vulnerable complainants can be subjected to repeated cross examination.
Joint Police/CPS panels will be set up to enable those who have made allegations of sexual assault in the past to have their cases looked at again and greater information-sharing duties established across the Criminal Justice System.
Levitt is to conduct a number of training exercises on the revised approach.
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....... or a Lawyer?
Mr Tulkinghorn in "Bleak House" drawn by Phiz |
Author - David Robinson
David spent approaching 50 years in Her Majesty's Electricity Supply Industry before retiring
He was part of the highly successful design team on the Sizewell B Nuclear Power Station Project before spending 25 years producing safety cases to keep our aging AGR fleet generating for the good of the nation
He is responsible for the Harveywetdog YouTube Channel which he maintains as an outlet for his creative talents
David is currently recovering from blood cancer but refuses to be a victim
All views are his own but might be influenced by the drugs he's currently having to take
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