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News and Comment April 2016

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27 April - Behind the portcullis

The schedule over the next few days is far too hectic to get anything very significant on to BiB. Tomorrow’s likely ‘blog holiday’ will, I am pleased to say, have absolutely nothing to do with Bexley Council unless certain plans come to nought.

Today I was in Portcullis House (Parliament) along with two police officers from the Met’s Directorate of Professional Standards at a meeting arranged by my MP Teresa Pearce. The subject matter was Bexley police’s initial failure to investigate the so called obscene blog in 2011 and then, when they were forced to look into it, the funny business that went on to ensure its ultimate failure.

Mr. Elwyn Bryant was with me but not his MP. James Brokenshire had deemed such a meeting “inappropriate”.

Elwyn may have been disappointed by the lack of support but I wasn’t. Someone who has taken very little interest in the case would have been a drag on proceedings. Teresa Pearce has kept abreast of the situation throughout and remembers most of it. Without reference to the hundreds of letters no one can remember it all.

That of course is the police’s problem, it is very difficult to take on board every detail and nuance, however I was once or twice quite impressed by how much the Detective Sergeant did know. The previous team may have wasted the past four years but the newcomers appear to have have been doing their homework thoroughly.

Obviously delicate negotiations cannot be revealed but it is clear that the new police team fully accepts that their investigation up until now has been inadequate and that their first draft report answered none of the original questions.

How much has that cost?


Port CullisOne can only hope that the two new brooms will do a better job. Calling for the meetings that Elwyn and I had requested years ago was a good start. I think the DS and DI now have a better idea of what is important to Elwyn and me than they did before.

I am moderately optimistic about the outcome, the police could so easily have announced a whitewash as they did once before, but they appear to have taken the far more difficult route of a proper re-evaluation of all the evidence.

Elwyn, who is the eternal pessimist, thinks it may be another attempt to kick the complaint another four years down the road. I’d dismiss the possibility except that he has been right so far all along the way. Even to the point of telling me the blogger had to be Councillor Craske just a week or two after the offence was committed. The circumstantial evidence was overwhelming. It took the police about six months to track the IP address to Craske’s house.

The police said they were not going to take another four years. I think I will start to get impatient if it goes past four months this time.

Note: Elwyn and I took tea at the table shown front left in the photo. Elwyn paid but I think the price was fifty pence a cup. Coffee was £1·10.

 

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