Met Police (Operation Grange) - Bollocks or not bollocks?

BlueBag wrote:Why?
Just why?

And that is one of the interesting things about this entire Saga.

To start with, for the first few years even, the issue was whether all the various people involved had told the truth, made mistakes, or had deliberately lied.

But over the last decade, as it became clear that the list of initial lies is fairly settled and agreed - in the sense that no one even from the most supportive side can offer a proper correction or a decent interpretation -  the question has turned to the one you pose

WHY ?

For some of the more simple issues, like the Pool Photo, the answer seems fairly clear.
We can also understand the attack on the PJ and Dr Amaral in this context.
(Indeed some issues are ONLY comprehensible when the context and the intent are understood)

But the continued funding of Grange is still not clear.   
And that is how Conspiracy Theories start.

It is very clear that Grange is NOT looking for Madeleine
It is very clear that Grange is NOT interviewing witnesses or suspects
It is very clear that Grange is NOT going back to basics and re-examining the scene
It is very clear that Grange is NOT doing any of the conventional 'things' one might expect of hope an enquiry would be doing

SO what do they spend their 160 working hours each week actually DOING ?

For one brief euphoric moment a long time ago I thought they might be preparing a Prosecution file.
Alas.

I think this is just money to keep the case "open" so they don't have to answer questions about an "ongoing investigation".

It's just insane that they are still spending money like this when they have never done it for any other missing person - this much for so long.

It's money to keep a lid on it.

Possibly.

It's bollocks at the expense of tax payers no doubt

I don't believe they, the police, have to answer questions of any description, outside of internal inquiries for misconduct - broadly speaking.

There is this thing floated about, labelled Freedom of Information but much like an insurance policy small print, there is a way out covering all eventualities.  They will perhaps divulge unimportant information. like how many officers are working on a particular case but ask them anything sensitive and the portcullis comes down with a great big thud!  Stands to reason they won't reveal anything that might incriminate.

As with the other words and phrases introduced to make the populace think they play a part, it's in name only.  

Tony's latest FOI, is yet another act of dastardly cunning but from past experience, we know that the important information, the most desired, won't be forthcoming.  Bravo Tony for perseverance!

Still, it lets them know that caring folk are still around who won't be frightened off by officialdom, nor give-up on a little soul thrown to the winds for self preservation alone.

Why they keep the show on the road is a mystery to me - it can't go on forever.  The UK establishment managed to artfully remove the investigation from the clutches of the Portuguese, in order to conduct an inquiry/investigation of their own.  No possible confusion there, it takes time to review thousands of pages of translated documentation [cough - loudly], search - that word again, interview .... investigate.  The reduction in staffing was the beginning of the end, my guess is they are painstakingly preparing a final report that will justify the inordinate expenditure and time scale of the operation.

It was Colin Sutton I believe who at some stage said, an operational team set-up internally never works on one specific case.

I have a hunch the curtains will come down next March, when the current grant allocation (?) is exhausted.  But even that is open to interpretation, one such Home Office press bureau release indicated that grants allocated are also floating.  I've posted here in the past, I'll find it again later. Ignore that, it's the same press release as posted up-page ..

Funding for Special Grant applications can be paid retrospectively for operational work already done in the same financial year. As usual, full details of any Special Grant awards in 2019/20 will be published after the end of the financial year.

Time for another airing - for those who haven't before seen and those who need a reminder and those who perhaps prefer to forget..

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Transcript of interview between AC Mark Rowley (MR) - Assistant Commisionaire and broadcast media for use from 21:00hrs on Tuesday, 25 April 2017

Q: Six years’ on of Scotland Yard’s involvement, a team of largely 30 people, £11/12 million you’ve spent, what have you achieved?

MR: We’ve achieved an awful lot. I think you know that we have a track record for using cold cases on serious old cases, and we solve many cases that way. This is no different in one respect but is particularly complicated. I think people get seduced perhaps by what they see in TV dramas where the most complex cases are solved in 30 minutes or 60 minutes with adverts as well. What we started with here was something extraordinary. We started with 40,000 documents. We’ve got the original Portuguese investigation and six or eight sets of private detectives who’ve done work and we did appeals to the public, four Crimewatch appeals, hoovering as much information as possible. Sifting that, structuring it and working through it is an immense effort. It’s much more ‘hard slog’ in reality than it is inspiration. That takes time and it takes systems. That’s what we’ve been working on. And what you’ve seen in the bits which have been reported publically is those appeals, when we’ve announced suspects, when we’ve made particular announcements, slowly crunching through it and focusing our attention and making progress. And of course at one stage we had 600 people who at one stage have been of interest to the enquiry, that doesn’t mean that they are suspects, people who were suspicious at the time or have a track record which makes us concerned about them, sifting, which focused the enquiry increasingly and when you’re doing this then across a continent and with multiple languages and having to build working relationships with the Portuguese, you put that together and that takes real time.

So we’ve achieved complete understanding of it all, we’ve sifted out many of the potential suspects, people of interest, and where we are today is a much smaller team, focused on a small remaining number of critical lines of enquiry, which we think are significant. If we didn’t think they were significant we wouldn’t be carrying on.

Q: So when you talk of success and progress, it’s really a case of eliminating things? You’re not getting any nearer to finding out what happened?

MR: So our mission here is to do everything reasonable to provide an answer to Kate and Gerry McCann. I’d love to guarantee them that we would get an answer, sadly investigations can never be 100 per cent successful. But, it’s our job, and I’ve discussed it with them, we’ll do everything we can do, reasonably, to find an answer to what’s happened to Madeleine. And I know, Pedro, the senior Portuguese colleague I’ve worked with and his team, have a shared determination, to find an answer. That’s what we’re going to do.

Q: You’ve described it as a ‘unique’ case. Why is it unique?

MR: I think it’s unique in two or three respects. First of all the way its captured attention in different countries is quite unusual. You’ll get a very high-profile case in a particular country, the way it has captured interest across countries, I think is significant. The length of it. And it’s unusual to have a case like this where you’re doing a missing persons investigation, where ten years on, we still don’t have definitive evidence about exactly what’s happened. And that’s why we’re open minded, even if we have to be pessimistic about the prospects, we are open minded because we don’t have definitive evidence about what happened to Madeleine.

Q: You say you haven’t got definitive evidence, do you have any clues at all which might explain what happened to her?

MR: So, you’ll understand from your experience, the way murder investigations work, detectives will start off with various hypotheses, about what’s happened in a murder, what has happened in a missing person’s investigation, whether someone has been abducted. All those different possibilities will be worked through. This case is no different from that but the evidence is limited at the moment to
be cast iron as to which one of those hypotheses we should follow. So we have to keep an open mind. As I said we have some critical lines of enquiry, those linked to particular lines of enquiry, but I’m not going to discuss them today because they are very much live investigations.

Q: Do you have some evidence, in your six years of investigation, have you unearthed some evidence to explain what happened?

MR: We’ve got some thoughts on what we think the most likely explanations might be and we’re pursuing those. And those link into the key lines of enquiry we’re doing now. As I said, those are very much live investigations and I know that’s frustrating when you’re doing a programme looking back but it’s hard to talk about that now, it’s going to frustrate the investigation.

Q: I know it’s not your money, it has come from the Home Office, but how do you justify spending so much on one missing person?

MR: Big cases can take a lot of resource and a lot of time and we have that with more conventional cases which Scotland Yard gets involved with that run over many years. I think it’s worth noting that this cold case approach we do, every year we’re solving cases that have gone cold years ago. I think in the last year it’s 35 rape cases, and two murder cases. Some of those reaching back to the 1980s. The cold case approach does have some expense, it is time-consuming, looking back at old records, but it does help solve old cases and you give families and victims an understanding of what went on. It’s worthwhile. This case is unusual, it’s not in Scotland Yard’s remit to investigate crimes across the world normally. In this case, in 2011, the Portuguese and British prime ministers were discussing the case and agreed that Scotland Yard would help and recognising that it’s not what we’re normally funded for, we were given extra money to put a team together to work with the Portuguese and that’s what we’ve been doing ever since. We’ve tried to be careful about public money and we started with that massive sifting and we’ve narrowed the enquiry, the funding has reduced accordingly. And we will stick with it as long as the funding is available, as long as there are sensible lines of enquiry to pursue.

Q: You’ve talked about 600 people. You at one point had four suspects. Can you tell me the story about how they came into the frame?

MR: So, one of the lines of enquiry, one of the hypotheses was could this be a burglary gone wrong? Someone is doing a burglary, panicked maybe by a waking child, which leads to Madeleine going missing.

Q: Most burglars would just run out.

MR: Possibly.

Q: Difficult for the public to understand that potential theory, given that every child wakes up.

MR: In my experience, if you try to apply the rational logic of a normal person sat in their front room to what criminals do under pressure, you tend to make mistakes, so it was a sensible hypothesis, it’s still not entirely ruled out, but there was also lots of material about people acting suspiciously, a potential history of some recent thefts from holiday apartments. Working through that it was a sensible thing to pursue, and we had some descriptions to work with, and that led to us identifying amongst the 600, a group of people who were worth pursuing, have they been involved in this activity, have they had a role in Madeleine going missing? Because what the hypothesis was, then we’ve got some searches, we’ve worked with the Portuguese, they were spoken to, and we pretty much closed off that group of people. That’s one example of the journey I spoke about, you start with this massive pool of evidence, you understand it, structure it, prioritise it, you work through and you try and sift the potential suspects, and then you end up where we are today with some key lines of enquiry.

Q: As I understand it, the key to your suspicion about those four suspects was very much to do with
their use of mobile phones and one of the criticisms of the original Portuguese police investigation was that they didn’t interrogate the mobile phone data as thoroughly as they could have done. How important was it for you as that part of your investigation for you to pick up and thoroughly investigate the mobile phone data?

MR: So that phone data is always something we will look at and we wouldn’t have had it available if the Portuguese had not got hold of it at the time so we need to be careful about criticism. But we had the data available and we worked with the Portuguese and that was part of the background to do with phone data and various sightings. There was enough there to say, not to prove the case, but there was something worth looking at in more detail and that’s what we did.

Q: How old were the suspects because I think you interviewed them originally through the Portuguese beginning of July 2014?

MR: By the end of the year we were happy to have brought them out and we were moving on to other parts of the investigation.

Q: Do you have any other suspects at the moment?

MR: So, we have got some critical lines of enquiry that are definitely worth pursuing and I’m not going to go into further detail on those. Another I would say though is, these lines of enquiry we have to date, they are the product of information available at the time and information that has come from public appeals that we have done. Four Crimewatch appeals, and other media channels have been incredibly helpful, including yourselves, and thousands of pieces of information have come forward, some useful some not, but amongst that have been some nuggets that have thrown some extra light on the original material that came from the time and that is one of the things that has helped us to make progress and have some critical lines of enquiry we are pursuing today.

Q: The question of other suspects, is there anyone like those four who have been dismissed, is there anyone who has the “alguido” status?

MR: I’m not going to give that level of detail away, we have got some critical lines of enquiry and we are working with the Portuguese on that, we are both interested in. Disclosing any more information on that will not help the investigation.

Q: You said the burglary gone wrong theory is not completely dismissed. What are the other theories? You have spoken in the past, Andy Redwood spoke in the past about focussing on the idea of a stranger abduction, is that still the focus, or a focus?

MR: Whilst we’ve got some lead ideas there is still a lot of unknown on this case. We’ve got a young girl gone missing 10 years ago. Until we get to the point where we have solved it, we’re unlikely to have definitive evidence as to exactly what happened at the time. All the hypothesises that you or I could come up with, they all have to remain open and the key lines of enquiry open today focus on one or two of those areas but we have to keep them all open until we get to that critical piece of evidence that narrows it down and helps us to be more confident as to exactly what has happened on the day Maddie went missing.

Q: Over the years you have appealed for a number of what could be called suspicious-looking men, watching the apartment, watching the apartment block. Knocking on the doors touting for a bogus charity. You have issued E-fits, have you been able to identify and eliminate any of those?

MR: Some of them have been identified and eliminated but not all of them.

Q: The theory of a sex predator responsible for Maddie’s disappearance is something the Portuguese police have focussed on. How big a part of your investigation has that been, because there were a series of sex attack on sleeping, mainly British children in nearby resorts. So how important has that
been to your investigation?

MR: That has been one key line of enquiry. The reality is in any urban area, you cast your net wide and you find a whole range of offences and sex offenders who live nearby and those coincidences need to be sifted out; what is a coincidence and what could be linked to the investigation we are currently dealing with and just like we do in London we have been doing in Portugal so offences which could be linked have to be looked at and either ruled in or ruled out and that’s the work we have been doing.

Q: Andy Redwood, the first senior investigating officer, said in one interview his policy was to go right back to the beginning, accept nothing, but one thing you appear to have accepted is that this was an abduction. It’s in your first remit statement, it refers to ‘the abduction’, which rather suggests right from the start you had a closed mind to the possibility of parents’ involvement, an accident or Madeleine simply walking out of the apartment.

MR: Two points to that, firstly the involvement of the parents, that was dealt with at the time by the original investigation by the Portuguese. We had a look at all the material and we are happy that was all dealt with and there is no reason whatsoever to reopen that or start rumours that was a line of investigation. The McCanns are parents of a missing girl, we are trying to get to the bottom of. In terms of Andy using the word abduction, she was not old enough to set off and start her own life. However she left that apartment, she has been abducted. It is not a 20-year-old who has gone missing and who has made a decision to start a new life, this is a young girl who is missing and at the heart of this has been an abduction.

Q: One of the biggest criticisms of the Portuguese investigation, which they acknowledge as well, is that they did not interrogate the parents from the start, if only to eliminate them. When you started your investigation, you appear to have done the same. Did you formally interview the McCann’s under caution, ever consider them as suspects?

MR: So when we started, we started five or so years into this and there is already a lot of ground been covered, we don’t cover the same ground, what we do is pull all the material we had at the start, all the Portuguese material, private detective material, with all the work that had been done, what that evidence supports, what rules these lines of enquiry out, what keeps them open and you progress forward. It would be no different if there were a cold case in London, a missing person from 1990, we would go back to square one look at all the material and if the material was convincing it ruled out that line of enquiry we would look somewhere else. So you reflect on the original material, you challenge it, don’t take it at face value. You don’t restart an investigation pretending it doesn’t exist and do all the same enquiries again that is not constructive.

Q: The first detective in charge of the case said he was going right back to the start of the case and accepting nothing. It seems very much he was suggesting that it was going to be a brand new investigation.

MR: It’s a brand new investigation, you are going in with an open mind. You are not ignoring the evidence in front of you. That would be a bizarre conclusion. You would look at that material, what does it prove, what it doesn’t. What hypothesis does it open what does it close down and you work your way through the case.

Q: Just to be clear you did not interview the McCanns as potential suspects?

MR: No

Q: Let’s move to today, recently you were given more funding £84,000 to £85,000, how is that going to be used?

MR: As you understand we started with a full-sized murder team of 30 officers, that was a standard
operating approach at the time. So we start with that team and work through the massive amount of investigation. The Home Office has been funding that and of course it is public money so they review that from time to time and as the enquiry has gone on we suggested we could run it with a smaller group of people and that is what happened. That recent level of funding reflects that it’s keeping the team going for the next six months and we will want to keep this running as long as there are sensible lines of enquiry and keep asking the Home Office to fund it as long as there are those open lines of enquiry.

Q: I know you don’t want to go into detail but are there more forensic tests, is that what is going on?

MR: I’m not going to talk about detail of the type of work going on but there are critical lines of enquiry of great interest to ourselves and our Portuguese counterparts and there are some significant investigative avenues we are pursuing that we see as very worthwhile.

Q: Are you still waiting for answers to new ‘rogatory’ letters. I understand how the system works if you want something in Portugal, you have to send ‘rogatory’ letter and get that approved over there. Are there letters in the post?

MR: That process you describe reflects the first four or five years of our work there, sifting through mass amounts of material, putting together with new evidence that comes from appeals, generates new enquiries and the legal requirements the Portuguese have is quite labour intensive in terms of dotting I’s and crossing T’s and working through that detail. Where we are now is much narrower much more focussed.

Q: Is there anyone you are still looking for?

MR: Where we are now is much narrower and much more focussed.

Q: There was a report recently that there was an international manhunt in regards to a person you were interested in talking to, maybe not even a suspect, maybe a witness?

MR: There are odd headlines and odd stories in newspapers on a regular basis and most of those are nonsense.

Q: You say in your statement, you are getting information on a daily basis, new information, what sort of information?

MR: First of all it is indicative of the level of interest in this case, not just in this country but across the world. The team are getting emails, phone calls, new information all the time and it ranges from the eccentric, through to information that on the surface looks potentially interesting and needs to be bottomed out and are constantly sifting through them.

Q: Are you any closer to solving this then you were six years ago?

MR: I know we have a significant line of enquiry that is worth pursuing, and because of that, it could provide an answer. Until we have gone through it, I won’t know if we will get there or not.

Q: What area is that enquiry?

MR: Ourselves and the Portuguese are doing a critical piece of work and we don’t want to spoil it by putting titbits out on it publically.

Q: How confident are you this will solve it for you?

MR: It is worth pursuing
Q: What does your instinct say about what happened to Maddie?

MR: If I start going in to my instinct having read the material of interest we are dealing with at the moment it would give away what we are looking in to so I’m not going to answer that. But what I would say from my experience of dealing with cold cases and these types of investigations is that this time, even sadly after 10 years of Maddie being missing there are nuggets of information and lines of enquiry that are worth pursuing and it is possible they may lead to an answer. As long as we have the resources to do it, and as long as we have those sensible lines of enquiry because if we can provide an answer to a family in this horrible situation that is what we must do.

Q: Do the significant lines of enquiry suggest to you Maddie is alive or dead?

MR: As I said earlier on we have no definitive evidence as to whether Maddie is alive or dead. We have to keep an open mind that is why we describe it as a missing person enquiry. Of course we understand why after so many years people would be pessimistic but we are keeping an open mind and treating it as a missing person enquiry.

Q: You’ve said you are realistic about what you are dealing with, what do you mean by that?

MR: We are realistic about the prospects and the assumptions people will make 10 years on when a little girl has gone missing but there is no definitive evidence and as long as that is the case we have to have an open mind and treat it as a missing person enquiry.

Q: If she is alive, she is nearly 14, do you have any idea what she might be doing, where she might be, the circumstances she might be living?

MR: That is such a hypothetical question I cannot begin to answer.

Q: There is a chance she may still be alive.

MR: We have to keep an open mind, it is a missing person enquiry, we don’t have that definitive evidence either way.

Q: How confident are you that you will solve the case?

MR: I wish I could say we will solve this. We solve more than 90 per cent of serious cases at Scotland Yard. I wish I could say I could definitely solve it but a small number of cases don’t get solved. What I have always said on this case and I’ve said to Kate and Gerry. We will do everything we can that is possible to try to find and answer. I hope to find an answer but can’t quite guarantee and as a professional police officer and dealing with the families in awful situations it always hurts you can’t guarantee success, but we will do everything we can to try to get there.

Q: How long might it keep going, your investigation?

MR: It is impossible to be exactly clear. We have a small number of ongoing lines of enquiry, they are critical and we need to deal with those and see how long it takes.

Q: You talk about lines of enquiry because last year the ex-commissioner said there was one piece of work still to be done and when that was completed that would be the end of the investigation. You are rather suggesting things have moved on since then and there is more to pursue, is that true?

MR: We have a small number of lines of enquiry and that’s what we are focussed on.

Q: But he was the boss and he was quite specific ‘one piece of work to do’, you are saying something different?

MR: We have a small number of lines of enquiry, that is what we are pursuing today.
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Reading between the lines, the apparent cagey diplomacy, spot the numerous contradictions from this a former chief of the Metropolitan Police - one sentence to the next.

How did this hypocrite ever reach the dizzy heights of Assistant Commissionaire - fair means or foul?  Whatever, he didn't appear to be very adept at subterfuge.

A link to four open/closed minded freaks who are convinced making the right/wrong decisions in this simple case. 

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The Leveson Inquiry - Rebekah Brooks

Proceeds of the inquiry as reported by the Grauniad..

Brooks is asked about the serialisation in the Sunday Times and the Sun of a book by Kate McCann, the mother of Madeleine.

Gerry McCann told the inquiry that they were initially "horrified" about the serialisation, but were later convinced after News International pledged to back their campaign if they agreed to the serialisation.

Brooks can't remember how much News International paid for the book serialisation.

"Hundreds of thousands. It wasn't £1m. Half a million maybe?"

She adds: "I had always got on very well with Gerry and Kate McCann. I think if asked they would be very positive about the Sun. In this case I thought Dominic Mohan's idea to run the campaign, this review of Madeleine's case by the home secretary, was the right thing to do … I don't think I spoke to Theresa May directly. Dominic [Mohan] may have done."

12.52pm: Brooks says she did not take the McCann issue up with Downing Street.

Editor Dominic Mohan or Tom Newton-Dunn, the Sun's political editor, will have spoken to No 10 or the Home Office about reopening the Madeleine investigation after the Sun's campaign, she says.

Was there an ultimatum or threat to the home secretary?

"I'm pretty sure there will not have been a threat, but you will have to ask Dominic Mohan," she says.

Jay says he has been told that Brooks intervened personally with the prime minister and said the Sun would put Theresa May on the front page every day until the paper's demands were met.

Brooks says that is not true. "I did not say to the prime minister we would put Theresa May on the front page every day. If I'd had any conversations with No 10 directly they would not have been particularly about that," she adds.

12.55pm: Lord Justice Leveson intervenes. He asks whether Brooks was involved in a strategy to threaten No 10 in order to obtain a review of the Madeleine investigation.

"I was certainly part of a strategy to launch a campaign in order to get a review for the McCanns," Brooks says, disputing that it was a "threat".

Leveson: "Give me another word for it, would you?"

Brooks: "Persuade?"

Leveson appears unconvinced.

12.57pm: Jay suggests the government yielded to Brooks's pressure to reopen the McCann investigation. "It only took about a day," he notes, drily.

Brooks insists that this was a worthwhile campaign.

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It was the guilty minded couple who abducted a dead body to create a “ no body no case”. 

ACTUS REUS and MENS REA.

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They are still brainwashing their twins. The consciousness of wrong doing did make them schizofrenic in their behavior till the day they themselves disappear.

There is only life. One appears and disappears. Death doesn’t exist.

They show the world how corrupt the human mind can be.

Time for a new letter to Cressida Dick.

Jill Havern wrote:Time for a new letter to Cressida Dick.

Or to the Mayor of London and the independent Office for Police conduct. 

This is how this investigation came about, no harm in adding fuel to a good fire.  And this started with a complaint from a member of the public.

Why not send a letter to Nigel Farage?

He appears to be an independent thinker and activist.

Verdi wrote:Why not send a letter to Nigel Farage?

He appears to be an independent thinker and activist.

An all rounder then?

They can hardly just brush it off and tell us not to publish the reply if someone like Nigel has a copy of our letter.

Boris
Nigel
Mayor of London
Independent Office for police conduct 
Dame Dick
Portuguese AG

I think we should let 31 January pass.
Allow Boris to do his inevitable 'Night of the long Knives' re-shuffle, and for the blood to be washed away.
And then re-draft the letter to Home Sec. Priti Patel, making it clear that it IS in similar terms to the one sent to her
just to rub it in.

Boris J, Nigel F, and Sadig K can have a short version.
IOPC, Met Comm, and Portuguese AG (?) should perhaps have a version which is still reasonably concise, but with fuller appendices.

I am happy to do it in my name.

Unless of course Madeleine is found alive and well in the meantime, or the parents are investigated correctly,
or the sky falls in, or cum volare porcos . . .

Meghan?

Meghan the pig?

My suggestion was and still is, to send a a shortish missive to Nigel Farage only, detailing CMOMM's and the MMRG's concerns about the mismanagement of a serious case of a missing three year old child.

Nigel Farage is not an MP nor a representative of any of the other categories of co-conspirator. He is independent and likes to be thought of as one who challenges mainstream convention - who better for the job?

If you lump him in with the establishment that has so far declined to take any positive action as regards this protracted case, it might well deter him from getting involved. Worse still, it could compromise his position.

Fresh blood is what's required here, not some cosseted crony that hides behind the bastion of parliament or the British police force.

Whatever happened to Dandy Deadwood?

When pondering the future of this unsolved protracted case as regards the political stance, a brief reminder of what we are up against..

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Plus:
Baroness Catherine Meyer CBE
Cherie Blair CBE QC [nee Booth], wife of former Prime Minister and warmonger Tony Blair
Sir Alec Jeffreys, University of Leicester
Missing People Charity
NHS

Does anyone really believe that a representative of the establishment, past present or future, is likely to break rank?

Nah - I'll stick with bollox!

RE: Andrea Davis, in the box of people to the left of the three girls (one royal, one an MP who became a PM for a while, and one coquette) plus one bloke

I read Andrea's book, "Shoot the women first: How I became an intelligence agent". 

Does anybody who has also read it want to share notes?

Earlier today I was about to post-up a very very long epistle about Andrea Davison's alleged exposé of the Westminster child abuse cover-up, which led to her fleeing to the US of A - allegedly.

I hadn't got very far in before it struck me that the whole screed was totally bonkers - leading me to seriously doubt it's authenticity!  I think the woman, whoever she is, is a fantasist of the highest order, if not ever so slightly off balance.

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This might help with Operation Strange

Boris Johnson declares war on Whitehall 'waste' vowing to give taxpayers value for money

BORIS JOHNSON declared war on wasteful Whitehall projects yesterday in a new drive to provide better value for taxpayers. The Prime Minister tasked his entire Cabinet to "root out waste" in their departments so the Government can focus on the priorities set out in the Tories' general election manifesto.

Hundreds of projects will be scrutinised ahead of the March 11 budget with many likely to be axed if they do not come up to scratch. Mr Johnson and Chancellor Sajid Javid told ministers that “tough decisions” will be taken “in order to prepare the economy for the next decade”. The announcement of the review comes amid growing concerns about the cost of a number of big-ticket government spending items, most notably the planned HS2 high-speed railway project.

Every so-called “legacy project” – those started under a previous government - will be rated on whether they fit with the new administration's priorities and the latest Tory manifesto which propelled Mr Johnson to an 80-seat majority at the election last month.

The Prime Minister's official spokesman said: “Cabinet held a discussion on the economy and upcoming fiscal events. The Prime Minister said the Budget will focus on delivering the priorities set out in the manifesto.

“This is a new government with a new mandate, including to level up across the country, invest in infrastructure and tackle climate change.

“The Prime Minister said there is a massive opportunity to unleash potential to every corner of the United Kingdom.

“The Chancellor and the Prime Minister said the Budget is also the time to take tough decisions in order to prepare the economy for the next decade.

“They said ministers need to root out any waste, particularly anything that is not aligned with the government's priorities, and demonstrate value for money of every pound of taxpayers' money that we spend.”

The PM's order means ministers and officials now face the prospect of having to conduct huge, and speedy, pieces of work so that they can justify how they are spending each and every pound they are provided with.

The findings of each department will be presented to Mr Javid and the Treasury for further analysis.

Number 10 stressed the review is purely about making sure time and money is being used effectively rather than it being a drive to save cash.  

The Tories believe that they must take long-term policy decisions now in order to guarantee future economic and political success.

A source said: “In Cabinet Boris Johnson told ministers they should be prepared to ‘slaughter' projects previously seen as 'holy cows' if they do not align with the Government's priorities.

“He said that some officials will be like 'tigers defending their cubs' and resist change.

“There are hundreds of legacy projects that have been rumbling along around Whitehall and this is a chance to look at them and some will be axed.

“There will be squeals of protest but every project must be worked through.”

Mr Johnson's administration is expected to borrow money to fund big infrastructure projects.

But with day-to-day government spending relatively tight – and with manifesto pledges not to increase taxes – there is a desire to make sure every penny available is spent as well as possible.

This might help with Operation Strange

Operation Strangeways if you please

I don't doubt folk are now awaiting news of Operation Grange this coming March 2020, to be or not to be - continued!

Unless something unforeseen happens in the next few weeks, I anticipate a melodramatic half-hearted dissolution of Operation Grange.  A sort of clouded end of operations but left open pending fresh/new evidence, you know - routine policing without the transparency of the formal archiving process.

In reality it happened in October (that month again) 2015, when they scaled back staffing from 39 and a bit to 3 and a bit.  That little revelation moment said it all.

So, is Operation Grange a legitimate force assigned to review and/or re-investigate the disappearance of Madeleine McCann or, was it established for some other reason - a nefarious reason?

There is not much evidence to suggest any commitment by the UK authorities to solve this case, just to prolong the agony year upon year at great cost to the public purse.

Never forgetting that Portugal were and still are and always will be the leading force.

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I'll throw this in for good measure..

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Operation Midland was a disgrace: the Met sank millions of pounds into investigating the preposterous allegations of sexual abuse by a serial liar, Carl Beech, described by one officer as “credible and true”. One person who was briefly in charge of Midland [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], who is now head of the entire Met.
Dame Cressida was handed an opportunity to make amends with the Henriques Report of 2016, which made a series of recommendations designed to prevent another disaster. But a new report by HM Inspectorate of Constabulary (HMIC) suggests that a cabal of senior officers, including Dame Cressida, were slow to act and more interested in protecting the force’s reputation than acknowledging and learning from the Henriques findings....
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It's that time of year again - lest they forget..

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Will the 4 detectives on Operation Grange ( the on going investigation ) now be expected to work from home ? 

It'll save on the coffee and biscuits , plus they can buy their own loo rolls and hand sanitizer ( that's if they can find any on the empty supermarket shelves !) 

Sorry officers no trip to Portugal this year to go " investigating the abduction " . The " latest suspect " wearing a mask whilst loitering around the Ocean Club will have to wait !