How our DPPs are remembered

The statement that Sir Keir Starmer, as DPP in 2008, never saw the file alleging rape by Mohamed Al Fayed must, of course, be true. But it almost beggars belief. 

Here was a serious allegation of indecency against a major public figure who, but for a car accident, might have technically become a member of the royal family. And the file never goes near Starmer?

It was not as if there had not been complaints about Al Fayed 10 years earlier. All right, dismiss the claim as unwinnable; call for further evidence, certainly. But never to see it? What sort of service was Sir Keir running?

Every DPP’s tenure is judged by one or two cases which they should have prosecuted but didn’t, or shouldn’t have prosecuted but did.

In recent times, Dame Barbara Mills holds the unenviable distinction of having defended Winston Silcott in the Broadwater Farm murder and lost, and then conducting the prosecution of police officers after Silcott’s exoneration. She lost that, too.

After a report by West Yorkshire Police into abuses at the West Midlands Serious Crime Squad, Mills found there was insufficient evidence to prosecute – a decision for which she was heavily criticised. She was also criticised in 1993 when she declined to prosecute suspects for the murder of Stephen Lawrence.

Mills resigned in 1998 over not bringing prosecutions over deaths in police custody. She ordered a 75-year embargo on the Devon and Cornwall Police investigation of failures by West Midlands Police in the Birmingham Six scandal of 1974.

Further back, Sir Thomas Hetherington was criticised over his failure to prosecute police officers over the 1979 deaths in the separate incidents of Liddle Towers and Blair Peach. Both were almost certainly killed by police, but by which officer?

And what about Sir Norman Skelhorn and the prosecution of the 1972 murder of Maxwell Confait, which led in part to the foundation of the CPS?

At least they looked at the files.

James Morton is a writer and former criminal defence solicitor