Because the waste of two million pounds, justified by police saying a false allegation HAD to be investigated at great cost, might lead to the media realising this was incorrect.

Common sense must first govern police behaviour.

When someone claims to have robbed Harrods forty years ago, a few simple phone calls can guarantee it never happened and the allegation is certainly not worth spending a fortune in man power and budget on. When someone accuses David Cameron of murdering George Osborne, it easy to ascertain whether this crime ever took place.

People can be muddled, malicious, wrong, confused, greedy. Police must use common sense and not automatically assume something is true. And when they investigate, it must be to find the truth, not to prove a claim true or untrue in order to get a conviction. Or, for the media, to construct a good story. I tried to tell The Leveson Inquiry this, some years ago, and was told that my information was not on the agenda.

One officer making a dozen phone calls would have found, as Panorama did, that Nick was a fantasist. Police behaviour must be changed, immediately.

Automatic assumption of truth is absolutely wrong and can lead to enormous expense and waste.

Worse; it allows other tragedies to happen. There will be future terrorist successes because less time and money was available to be used to prevent them. I would have preferred two million pounds of my tax monies to have saved 100 migrant, orphaned children with food, education, a roof and love.