Sir David Amess Summer Adjournment

Peter Bottomley Excerpts

Thursday 20th July 2023 Commons Chamber

[Sir Peter Bottomley (Worthing West) (Con)]

David Amess and I had a common interest in the all-party parliamentary fire safety and rescue group, which is one of the groups of which I am an officer. That is relevant to the debate we had yesterday, when the House sort of came to a conclusion on the Standards Committee’s rules on all-party groups, but that is for another day, when it has had a chance to review what is going on.

I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Gateshead (Ian Mearns) for his work with me on the High Speed Rail (London – West Midlands) Bill Committee a long time ago, for nearly two years, and for the exemplary way in which he and his Committee run the Backbench Business Committee. All who come to make applications are grateful for the serious consideration given by members of that Committee and the way they manage to schedule so many debates that are of interest to our constituents and important to the nation, and that give MPs the chance to say what they want to say.

I am afraid that I cannot be here for the winding-up speeches at 5 o’clock, because today is the day of St Margaret of Antioch, the patron saint of St Margaret’s church, Westminster, across the road from here. As parliamentary warden, I will be at that service.

I want the Minister to get others together and have a meeting with me and representatives of the former sergeant Gurpal Virdi, an excellent police officer. In my previous constituency, I represented the family of Stephen Lawrence after he had been attacked. One police officer in that investigation did well; many others did not. There was a similar attack—not a fatal one—on a foreign student in Ealing. Gurpal Virdi left his police station, found two of the suspects, found the attack weapon and went to see the family. Later on, he asked whether the attack had been recorded as potentially racist. When he came back from holiday, his home was turned over by a terrorist search squad because he was thought to have sent a message to himself saying, “You’re not wanted here. National Front.” He is Sikh, and that message was also received by other minority ethnic officers.

There is no need to take too many notes, because most of this is recorded in a book he has published called “Behind the Blue Line”. I contributed one of the forewords, and the other one was contributed by Dr Richard Stone, the Jewish human rights doctor who was one of the advisers on Macpherson’s Stephen Lawrence inquiry. Both Richard Stone and I knew what we were writing about, and we know Gurpal Virdi.

Gurpal Virdi managed to get out of the difficulties that some people in the police were putting on him. He was later commended by Bernard Hogan-Howe when deputy commissioner. One of his tasks in the police was working in the Battersea police station when one of the sergeants was Cressida Dick. People who have been at the top of the Metropolitan Police Service have known about him and his case for a long time.

In 2014, I wrote to the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, the Director of Public Prosecutions and the Home Secretary explaining why the proposed prosecution of Gurpal Virdi for what was originally described as indecently assaulting someone under the age of 16 in a police van in 1986 was an impossible prosecution and should not go ahead. The prosecution did go ahead, and after a week and a half’s trial in Southwark Crown court, ending on 31 July 2015, the jury took about 50 minutes to come back to court with their conclusion. If we allow them 10 minutes to get back to the jury room, five minutes to go to the rest room, five minutes to have a discussion and 10 minutes to get back to the court, we can see how long it took them to decide that the case was not a proper one to have been brought and to establish his innocence.

I then asked whether the police could review how the prosecution happened. I also asked the Crown Prosecution Service and the Attorney General how it happened. What is now the Independent Office for Police Conduct put to the Metropolitan police the question of whether it had acted properly. The Metropolitan police referred that to its directorate of professional standards. Most cases of historical sex abuse were investigated by the Sapphire group, but it was not interested in this; it had passed it to the directorate of professional standards, who were the people who actually did the investigation. When the IOPC or whatever it was called in those days referred it to them, the directorate of professional standards came to the conclusion, “There’s nothing wrong here.”

I am going to spell out briefly some of the things that were wrong. First, the Metropolitan police and the CPS held a press briefing announcing that Gurpal Virdi had assaulted somebody under the age of 16. They had known from the day after they started investigating that the complainant was over 16. They accused Gurpal Virdi of using a collapsible police baton up the bottom of this young man, when there was another police officer in the back of the van and another in the front. They have never found the driver and the person they believe was the other person in the van denied there was an assault. Secondly, they said the arrest was made in a different place from where the complainant said it happened. Thirdly, they said it was a different kind of police van. Fourthly, they said there was no serious assault and, most importantly, that there was no collapsible police truncheon or baton. That is not a big surprise, because the alleged events were in 1986 and collapsible police batons were issued in 1995, years later. This case was supervised by a gold group at Scotland Yard—so we are talking about senior officers—with the CPS. How did they manage not to notice that the case was impossible?

I could go on at greater length, but I make this point, through the Minister, to those responsible. When we have this meeting, I would like them to explain how the prosecution managed to avoid paying any attention to the only documentary evidence that was left. Gurpal Virdi’s notebooks had been taken by the police and destroyed. What was available was a conviction notice in the Lambeth East juvenile court from spring 1987 about the complainant. He had been arrested a month before by an officer with Gurpal Virdi. The complainant never mentioned that arrest, which definitely did take place. He had made up nonsense about the time he was arrested in the autumn of 1986, but there was no evidence whatsoever that Gurpal Virdi was involved. Other officers were named—the officer in charge is named, but he made no statement. When asked, he said, “I know nothing about it.” If the complainant thought that he had been mistreated by Gurpal Virdi in the autumn of 1986, one would expect that he would have mentioned that at the time of his arrest, which certainly did happen, in the spring of 1987. He did not mention it at all. The investigating officers did not even interview the other police officer who was known to have been part of that arrest. That is the level of either incompetence or targeting of a good police officer that we are seeing here.

I want the police, the IOPC, the CPS and Ministers to get together in a meeting, preferably with me, Gurpal Virdi and his lawyer, Matt Foot of Birnberg Peirce, to go through what needs to be established, so that people can have confidence in the Metropolitan police in the future. If they decline, that confidence is not going to return. We have all heard Sir Mark Rowley speaking recently about historical things that he is going to put right and about the officers he says he does not want to keep in his force.

Many of those involved in what I have been talking about will have retired. I wish them no ill, but I want to know that no other person like Gurpal Virdi—one of the best people I have known—can be subjected to something like the earlier incident with the racist material he did not produce or be put through a totally bogus charge after they have retired. All the evidence available showed that he was not involved, and that the crime did not happen and could not have happened. I am not satisfied and I will not be. Therefore, if I have to come back this time next year for another Adjournment debate, I will, but I will name names. I will name the names of every officer involved, everyone involved in the Crime Prosecution Service and the others. I would prefer not to do so; I would prefer to get this sorted out. I believe that, if the commissioner agreed with the IOPC and the CPS, they could get two people to look together at what was available and what happened. They could then produce a report. The Metropolitan police could then say that they had learned the lessons and, if they felt like it, apologise to Gurpal Virdi for the third time.