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Why has no one been made to pay for almost ruining my life?

He was so traumatised by sex abuse lies he feared it would kill him. Now, 8 years on, Sir Cliff Richard shares his fury that the police chiefs and BBC bosses to blame for his torment still haven’t been held to account

By Stephen Wright

THE worst time was the middle of the night, when he would jolt awake in the darkness, heart pounding, pulse racing. The same scenes kept playing through Sir Cliff Richard’s head: police cars ranged outside his Berkshire home and inside, officers rifling through his possessions.

Unable to sleep, he took to pacing around the beautiful house in Portugal he lived in, waiting for dawn. ‘I was never suicidal, but I did think I might die,’ he says. ‘I used to wake up and every pulse was going. I would think maybe I am going to have a heart attack. So that was a little bit frightening. That could have been it.’

The images that haunted Cliff were those broadcast to the world by the BBC in 2014.

In the wake of the Jimmy Savile scandal, the police began investigating allegations of abuse against Cliff — and kicked off with a spectacular raid, filmed for the TV news from a helicopter.

The allegations have since been shown to be completely untrue — and, of course, Cliff knew all along they were a lie, but nonetheless felt utterly humiliated. ‘Your whole being becomes involved in this one accusation that you know is false and that you know he [his accuser] knows must be false,’ he says softly.

‘God knew it was false. I used to comfort myself with that, but it still doesn’t change the fact that you can’t sleep at night.’ The day of the raid, Cliff

‘We turned on the news and there was the helicopter shot. It was just horrible’

was visiting a wine consultant halfway between his home on the Algarve, where he then owned a vineyard, and the Portuguese capital, Lisbon.

‘We were staying the night there, my sister and I, and on our way, we began to hear the story breaking. We turned on the TV news and there it was, the helicopter shot. I mean, it was just horrible.’

It is more than five years since the Crown Prosecution Service ruled out bringing any charges against Cliff and more than three years since he won a landmark privacy action against the BBC, for filming the raid. He now wants to add his support to an influential group including his long-time friend and DJ Paul Gambaccini, who have been similarly, falsely accused of sexual abuse or have suffered at the hands of the police.

The group was brought together by the Daily Mail in September, and include Baroness Doreen Lawrence, Leon Brittan’s widow Lady Brittan, Operation Midland victim Harvey Proctor, Field Marshal Lord Bramall’s son Nick, Alastair Morgan (the brother of axe murder victim Daniel Morgan) and Sir Edward Heath’s former political secretary, Michael McManus.

They wrote to the Prime Minister and Home Secretary to express their deep concerns about the running of the Met and to call for urgent reforms.

Over the past seven years, I have reported extensively on Operation

Midland (the notorious investigation centred around allegations made by a man named ‘Nick’, the serial fantasist Carl Beech), Paul Gambaccini’s legal battles with the police and CPS after he was cleared, as well as investigating Cliff ’s case, which was mishandled by both South Yorkshire Police and the BBC.

When we meet — at a new, elegant country hotel near Windsor Great Park belonging to one of Cliff’s friends — we shake hands and he graciously thanks the Mail for ‘taking up the cudgels’ on behalf of those falsely accused of sex crimes.

Sir Cliff is 81, but I am instantly struck by how youthful, slim and trendy he looks in a designer jacket, unbuttoned white shirt and loose-hanging, patterned tie. After ordering a black coffee he is down to earth, friendly and attentive.

On the surface, then, Cliff seems his usual, easy-going self, but his life has been upended. He was so upset by the police search he could not bear to return to the apartment in Berkshire.

He has also decided to sell the £5 million, painstakingly-renovated villa in Portugal that was his sanctuary during the two, long years he was under investigation.

Cliff could not make it to the meeting of VIP victims of alleged Met wrongdoing and incompetence, but wants everyone to know why their cause — highlighting police wrongdoing and the lack of accountability for it — is so important. He says he feels a ‘kinship’ with the seven signatories — in particular, perhaps, with opera-loving Lady Brittan (whose late husband was falsely accused of being part of a VIP paedophile ring). They were born on the same day in 1940 and addressed Parliament together in 2016.

The night before I talked to Cliff, I visited Lady Brittan at her London home and we sat in her firstfloor sitting room where police rifled through condolence cards just six weeks after her husband’s death. ‘I absolutely empathise with her, because somehow or another when that happens being a guilty person is almost easier, because you could say “it’s a fair cop, guv”,’ says Cliff.

‘But when you are innocent... although Lady Brittan didn’t use the word ‘rape’, rape would be a way to describe what happens to your brain. You know your brain is raped.’ Discovering that others have been through similar experiences and mental anguish has been a revelation as one of the most difficult aspects of the investigation was feeling so alone.

It is a strange sort of comfort to think the police behaved so badly to so many people — and it has shattered the confidence Cliff once had in the police. Growing up in Hertfordshire in the 1950s, he and his three sisters were told by their parents to speak to a bobby if they got lost or felt at risk.

In those days, society’s trust in officers was unquestioned. Now, with the Metropolitan Police and its hapless Commissioner, Cressida Dick, facing one crisis after another — including the fallout from the rape and murder of Sarah Everard by a serving officer and the

still-festering scandal over the Operation Midland VIP abuse inquiry — respect for the force has probably never been so low.

‘There was a time when I would have said I would hate to live in a society where there were no policemen,’ says Cliff. ‘You grew up with that thing of trusting the police. If you look at those old TV shows, such as Dixon of Dock Green, that was what they were offering you. This great man, he cares for you, and you can trust him.

‘Whereas now, I don’t know if I would go straight to the police — more likely to go straight to a lawyer to say something has happened. But if you are a false accuser, there is only one way to go and that is to the police.’

During the two years before the CPS ruled out charges (adding insult to injury by citing ‘insufficient evidence’ rather than admitting there was no credible evidence against Cliff) he became, by his own admission, fixated on the possibility of facing criminal charges.

‘Because all you can think about is this accusation and that somebody might believe it. Even if the whole planet said ‘no’, but one person believed it,’ he says.

‘You want to be completely exonerated [but] even now, I will never be completely exonerated because there is the internet.’

Being a Christian, he tried to understand his accuser: but a few nights after the drama began, he found himself lying awake thinking, ‘I hate this guy’. ‘And then I thought this is ridiculous, I can’t live like this,’ he says. ‘How can I live with hate? So I prayed. I said: “God . . . I forgive him.” And I slept quite well that night.

‘The thing which made it really difficult for me is that my sister came and she said: “I can’t help it, I hate him.” And I said: “Fine, you hate him. That’s good. He needs to be hated. But I can’t do it. Otherwise I couldn’t live.” ’

Which brings us to the issue of why police took Cliff’s accusers seriously in the first place. The first accuser claimed he was molested by Cliff at a Billy Graham crusade in Sheffield in 1983. He got even the alleged year wrong. The Billy Graham rally did not take place until two years later. Subsequently, more men of seriously dubious character made complaints.

‘It’s a frightening thing that this can happen,’ says Cliff. ‘It still frustrates me that the police don’t have the means to check out the accuser and chuck him out. In my case, it was pretty obvious they should never have continued.’

We discuss some of the other more bizarre claims made against him, including the allegation that he twice abused a man in a clothes shop — while on roller skates and filming the video for his hit song Wired For Sound in the 1980s. Cliff laughs. ‘There was one guy [another accuser] who was actually in prison for rape. He claimed I had abused him. Some of it was laughable, really. Another tried to blackmail me.’

It infuriates Cliff that those who make false allegations can (unless they are later prosecuted for doing so) keep their anonymity.

‘Paul [Gambaccini] is right: if they are a malicious liar, either they need to be helped back into reality or punished. Honestly, that guy with the roller skates . . . if I had gone in there [the shop] with roller skates, I would have fallen over.’

I suggest that even Carl Beech — who dreamed up scenes of VIP ‘wasp and snake torture’ for the police to investigate — might not have dared suggest the roller skate scenario to dim-witted Operation Midland detectives.

Cliff looks me in the eye and replies instantly: ‘Stephen, Carl Beech is in prison. He went there because they finally checked his home — finally, after all those years of making up all those stories, and found images of child sexual abuse there. Why didn’t they check the accuser first?’

What also continues to rankle is what motivated his original accuser. Was it money? A chance to make a quick buck?

He is astonished that Met chief Cressida Dick has been awarded a twoyear contract extension. ‘When I read it, I thought: “What, with all the stuff we have been reading about the police she has been given two years more?” Yet she has been in charge of those people. It doesn’t make sense.’

In his first police interview (after the raid on his home), Cliff was in tears: ‘I told them: “You are supposed to be looking after me.”

‘You have to be the right character [to be a policeman]. Dixon of Dock Green was like a walking angel in his suburb of London. He was an upright man. He could smell a crime. If you are going to be in an institution as important as the BBC, or police forces, the instinct is vital.’

What becomes increasingly evident as our interview proceeds is that he is not just angry and disappointed with the police, he feels even more let down by the BBC.

He would like a full, un-caveated, apology from the corporation. He is deeply unhappy that former BBC director-general Lord Hall emerged unscathed from the debacle and has retired, that director of news Fran Unsworth — who signed off the use of the footage of the police raid on Cliff’s home — is soon to retire, and the journalist who covered the raid, Dan Johnson, has seen his career go from strength to strength.

‘The BBC were out for the scoop, weren’t they?’ says Cliff. ‘None of them suffered anything, that’s what bugs me. They all got on quite well after what they did to me. None of them paid anything for almost ruining my life.’

Referring to his legal action against the corporation (which saw him win £210,000 in damages), he adds: ‘We were prepared to stop everything if they apologised. Halfway through the court case, if they [had] apologised, we would have said, “OK, thanks”. But they didn’t. So I am still frustrated.’

Since then, more evidence of wrongdoing at the BBC has emerged, regarding its now disgraced ex-star journalist Martin Bashir and how he conned Princess Diana into granting him an interview, and lost potentially vital evidence in the so-called Babes in the Wood double murder case.

The BBC and the police were not the only ones to receive broadsides from Cliff: former Labour deputy leader Tom Watson, widely blamed for triggering the VIP abuse witchhunt with an incendiary speech in the House of Commons in 2012, also comes in for flak.

There was no substance to his claims of a Westminster paedophile ring, but his support for Carl Beech and another fantasist known as Jane, a mentally-ill Labour activist who made false rape allegations against dying Lord Brittan and ruined his final months, piled pressure on Scotland Yard.

In 2020, Cliff co-signed a letter protesting at the appointment of Watson as chairman of UK Music, the umbrella organisation which

‘You’re supposed to be looking after me,’ I told police ‘I hope my life and career over eight decades speaks for itself ’

represents the music industry. For him, it comes down to judgment — or lack of it in the case of the former MP, who according to some reports could still be in line for a peerage despite being refused one last year.

‘I would rather anyone else managed my musical body [UK Music],’ Cliff tells me. ‘He escalated the whole thing, that there was a big paedophile ring within parliament. This was pernicious and not based on anything. I didn’t vote for him. He is not good enough to be leading our industry. How could we trust him?’

After his much-praised tour across England and Scotland in the autumn, Cliff is finally looking to the future and is backing Falsely Accused Individuals for Reform (Fair), a campaign group calling for a change in the law to provide anonymity before charge in alleged cases of sex abuse.

Is he concerned that, as a result of those false allegations, his legacy is forever tarnished?

‘I can’t control what people think, but I hope my life and career over eight decades speaks for itself,’ he says. ‘So whatever happens, there will always be that good stuff there. I have been true to my faith, all the way through. Even forgiving my accuser.

‘I think legacies are over-rated, unless you have been fighting in the field like Field Marshal Lord Bramall [one of the Establishment figures targeted by Beech]. I am not sure what a legacy of a pop star is.’

It would suit him fine, he says, to be remembered as a nice guy.

Ukraine On The Brink

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