What the sisters of ‘Putney Pusher’ suspect told me about the Met’s excitement
Nicholas Brandram took his own life last monthThe Met Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley is a good cop: on his watch 1,700 officers have been dismissed in a campaign to drive corruption out of the force. So I was disappointed by his refusal, last week, to concede his men had done anything wrong in their dealings with Nicholas Brandram.
The Met Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley is a good cop: on his watch 1,700 officers have been dismissed in a campaign to drive corruption out of the force. So I was disappointed by his refusal, last week, to concede his men had done anything wrong in their dealings with Nicholas Brandram.
This was a 44-year-old banker, previously a decorated soldier who’d served in Bosnia, Iraq and Afghanistan. Last June the police arrested him, convinced that after numerous false identifications they’d found “the Putney pusher” – the man recorded by CCTV on May 5, 2017, pushing a woman off the pavement of Putney Bridge, and into the path of a bus, whose driver managed to swerve, avoiding possible fatality.
Last month it did result in a death, however. Tormented by the endless delay in the police’s processing of a DNA sample he had willingly supplied (or in setting up an ID parade which he also desperately sought, to clear his name), Brandram took his own life.
In a compelling interview with the BBC’s Justin Webb, Brandram’s sisters, Sophie Voelcker and Alexia Hicks, revealed that when numerous police officers went to Brandram’s home to arrest him, they brought a media film crew in tow, apparently hired by a tabloid newspaper. Was the paper tipped off by the Met?
There was one aspect which made the arrest of particular excitement, including, I suspect, to the police: Brandram was a descendant of Queen Victoria (his father was the only child of Princess Katherine of Greece and Denmark).
The revelation in the media of the suspect’s “royal connections” and the nature of his past and current employment – which could have come from the police – meant that while not being named, Brandram was identified on social media, with the inevitable consequences for his peace of mind.
Yesterday I got in touch with his sisters and asked them about this. They told me: “It appears Nick’s connections and background made him more attractive to the police – and to the media the police had invited along to the arrest. There’s no other obvious explanation for why he was treated so differently from all the other men they’d questioned before him.
Alexia Hicks, one of the sisters of Nicholas Brandram, speaking to the BBC
“This wasn’t just another person being investigated in a nine-year-old case – it was someone with royal connections, someone whose background could generate headlines. We’ve seen this before – high-profile people identified, dragged through the media, their lives torn apart long before they’re then proven completely innocent.”
Indeed we have. The worst example was the deal struck between South Yorkshire Police and the BBC in 2014, when the broadcaster was tipped off by the cops that they were about to raid the home of Sir Cliff Richard, who’d suddenly been accused of sexual assault of a child at Sheffield United’s Bramall Lane stadium almost thirty years earlier.
The pop star, who furiously denied it, was never charged, and the investigation was dropped due to lack of evidence. Yet thanks to the deal between the cops and the broadcaster, the nation was provided with live TV coverage of his home being ransacked for “evidence”.
Eventually, the BBC forked out more than £2m to Sir Cliff, and South Yorkshire Police hundreds of thousands after the “distress and humiliation” he experienced.
No amount of money will bring back Sophie and Alexia’s brother.
More proof Jeffrey Archer was a wrong’un
My friend John Preston is an exquisite chronicler of colourful political chancers. You might recall his book A Very English Scandal, on the Jeremy Thorpe affair (made into a TV series with Hugh Grant as the louche Liberal Party leader) and Stonehouse, another broadcast drama, which John devised.
So I asked if he had ever encountered the late Jeffrey Archer. Turns out that when John worked for the Evening Standard, he interviewed the rogue. That was in 1988, the year after Archer succeeded through perjury in winning £500,000 in damages from newspapers which printed the truth about his dealings with a prostitute.
During their encounter, it emerged that interviewer and interviewee shared a love of Test cricket: it was on the same day Graham Gooch had been named as England’s new captain. “Absolute disaster” Archer bellowed to John, and went on to say that England would never win a Test with Gooch in charge. John recalled: “I thought this was being a bit pessimistic and suggested a small wager – £10.” Done, said Archer.
Jeffrey Archer passed away suddenly last week - AFP via Getty Images/Leon Neal
Then England won in Gooch’s second match as captain. John recounted: “A couple of months later I bumped into Archer again, reminded him of our bet and invited him to pay up. Whereupon he looked at me as if I’d emerged from the depths of a very murky pond, and denied all knowledge of it.”
As Preston points out, Archer’s habit of not paying his dues was his nemesis. If he had honoured in full his £20,000 bribe to his associate Ted Francis to provide him with a false alibi in that 1987 trial, rather than paying little more than half the promised sum, Francis would probably never have revealed the truth – which led to the perjury trial of 2001.
I can’t wait for a John Preston screenplay of the life and crimes of Jeffrey Archer.
Source: Crime