>>144505However, the fact remained that Starmer was Director of Public Prosecutions when British authorities possessed persuasive evidence of Savile’s heinous sexual crimes over many years, and he inexplicably refused to move against the pedophile. Sources within the CPS have claimed that he had no knowledge of the decision to drop the case. It is also commonly alleged that a formal inquiry he ordered in 2012 into the failure to prosecute Savile condemned investigating police, not the CPS.
As the inquiry report’s contents make clear, this characterization is completely false. Officers who interviewed Savile’s victims in 2007/8 were indeed slammed for not providing them with more information – namely, that others had independently come forward, telling disturbingly similar stories. The report concluded their testimony should’ve been acted upon, as “there was nothing to suggest that the alleged victims had colluded in their accounts, nor that they were in any way [unreliable].”
Despite this, “police treated them and the accounts they gave with a degree of caution which was neither justified nor required.” It is nonetheless clear officers shut down the investigation under express CPS direction. The Service’s designated “reviewing lawyer” on the allegations – an “extremely experienced ‘rape specialist’” – told police “at an early stage” he “would not be inclined to prosecute these cases because they were ‘relatively minor’,” and due to the time that had elapsed since the offenses were allegedly committed.
The CPS lawyer’s “relatively minor” appraisal of Savile’s heinous crimes “troubled” the inquiry investigator. “I would hope that any prosecutor would regard a sexual assault as being in and of itself serious,” they wrote. “These particular assaults were far from trivial: they represented a course of conduct against vulnerable women and girls by a man who was in effect in a position of trust.” As a result, the investigator had “reservations about the way in which the prosecutor reached his decision”:
“The allegations made were both serious and credible; the prosecutor should have recognised this and sought to ‘build’ a prosecution. In particular, there were aspects of what he was told by the police…which should have caused him to ask further questions…I have been driven to conclude that had the police and prosecutors [emphasis added] taken a different approach a prosecution might have been possible.”
Starmer’s irresistible, corrupt path to power
Despite these grave criticisms, the investigator concluded, “I have seen nothing to suggest that the decisions not to prosecute were consciously influenced by any improper motive on the part of either police or prosecutors.” Which might be true, if only because all CPS files on Savile were destroyed in October 2010. The report was therefore “dependent on material provided by the police to show what documents were seen by the reviewing lawyer and the advice which was given.”
Even these records were “in parts either incomplete or [contained] internal inconsistencies,” which “made it at points difficult to assess what happened,” and “impossible to recreate with any certainty” what was actually seen by the reviewing lawyer. For its part, the CPS had “no record at all” of the case. The inquiry was told this was due to the decision to take no action against Savile resulting in the Service’s files being “automatically deleted,” according to the CPS’ “normal policy.”
However, Service guidelines on “retention and disposal” of evidence clearly state that documents on “discontinued cases,” in which “no proceedings have taken place or where the case was discontinued before trial,” must be kept for five years. The destruction of the Savile file was a flagrant breach of these rules. The decision to violate the guidelines on such a high profile case had to have been made at the highest levels of the CPS. We are thus left to ponder whether Starmer himself made that call, and if so, why.