“The reaction from here [Scotland Yard] is, rightly or wrongly, that any re-investigation will be unlikely to reach any different conclusion.” – Sky News, 4 August, 12.18pm. Scotland Yard have been briefing journalists furiously for the last forty eight hours that Barry George is guilty and the jury got it wrong. Two teams of detectives, they told the Sky reporter, had investigated the case and reached the same conclusion. Disgracefully Sky News are challenging poor George – who has a mental age of 10 – to take a lie detector test.

I was horrified by the original conviction and the case has been on my mind from time to time for the last eight years. I have no idea who killed Jill Dando or why, but plainly it was very professional. It was carried out with a custom modified and silenced gun, leaving no evidence of the killer on site. George, who needed help with his shoelaces and became confused and lost if on the streets on his own, plainly was simply not up to it. In the police laboratory a single micro-fleck of gunpowder residue, invisible to the naked eye, reached his coat.

There was something medieval about the conviction – a crime has been committed, so let us convict the local mentally disabled person. Lessons must be learnt urgently about the need to protect the mentally weak from the Police and from the prejudice of juries. The case is almost exactly the same as the horrible miscarriage of justice that destroyed the life of Stefan Kiszko and his family. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/7052109.stm That again was a case of simply harrowing the local mentally disabled member of the community.

We have learnt nothing in the last thirty years. And judging by their arrogant and disgraceful attitude today, Scotland Yard have no intention of learning anything.

As frequently detailed on this site, Jack Straw’s relationship with British Aerospace has been a consistent thread in his political career and in government he has been especially helpful to them, over the sale of Hawk jets to Indonesia, the stopping of the Saudi bribes investigation, corruption allegations in Tanzania, and doubtless in other ways I do not yet know fully about. Not to menoion the billions in arms sales they have made from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan which he helped to promote. It probably was not entirely unhelpful either that Jack Straw’s wife, Alice Perkins, held Treasury and Cabinet Office jobs which involved policy on defence spending. Among the benefits to Jack Straw which are declared in public are substantial payments for his election expenses by a BAE director.

The huge bribes which the sleazebags in BAE gave to disgusting Saudi crooks were channelled through middlemen including Wafic Said.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2006/nov/29/topstories3.politics

As the Guardian politely puts it: “Wafic Said is one of Britain’s wealthiest men. But how he accumulated his estimated £1bn fortune is somewhat opaque.”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/jun/07/bae17

In other words, he is a crook.

http://intl-news.blogspot.com/2006/11/uks-bae-systems-caught-bribing-saudi.html

But in this brave new world where Universities exist not to advance the sum of human knowledge, but to oil the wheels of commerce, being a succesful crook opens the door to governing boards and gilded statues amidst the groves of academe. Witness the (vomit warning) Oxford University Wafic Said Business School.

http://www.sbs.ox.ac.uk/news/archives/Main/Wafic+Said+creates+25+million+fund+for+Said+Business+School.htm

And who is this on the Said School’s Business Advisory Forum – oh look – it’s Alice Perkins, aka Mrs Jack Straw!!

http://www.sbs.ox.ac.uk/corporate/baf/

Some may think it is a bit strange for the wife of the Minister for Justice (sic) and Lord Chancellor to sit on the board of the foundation of a suspect in a major crime who has just been let off by the government on grounds of “National Security”. But in these brave days of New Labour, it doesn’t matter at all.

Jack Straw’s wife was a senior civil servant and I am sure she was entirely competent. But there are many thousand retired public employees around of equivalent rank, and they don’t get nominated to positions by dodgy Arab arms dealers, or for that matter to the board of that rip-off mis-managed monopoly, the British Airports Authority.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2006/aug/20/businesscomment.theairlineindustry?commentpage=1

Incidentally, there are some lovely people on the board of Said’s business school. There is the former chairman of Centrica, owners of British Gas who just put the price of fuel up 35%. And there is the former chairman of the Charities Commission. See my post on the Smith Institute immediately below.