Police cosied up to a predator hiding behind rainbow flag

LISA Townsend, the Surrey Police and Crime Commissioner, sat in court last week as a paedophile a man she had once been told to apologise to was jailed for 24 years.

- Jo Bartosch

The moment marked a reckoning, not just for a predator, but for senior public officials who championed him.

Pride in Surrey's founder Stephen Ireland was the face of LGBTQ+ inclusion; positioning himself as a partner to the police, cosying up to councillors and posing as a safe pair of hands for vulnerable teenagers.

He campaigned against so-called "anti-trans bigots", ran a helpline and posed proudly in a patrol car wrapped in the rainbow flag. All the while, he was preying on children.

The warning signs were there. But when ordinary people some of them former Pride in Surrey volunteers spoke up, they were ignored, sneered at, branded bigots. One was even silenced with a legal letter.

Now it's brutally clear: those who should have protected children instead protected the reputations of their abusers.

Ireland was "Mr Inclusion" and that made him untouchable. Being associated with him, and the beliefs he promoted, was good branding.

Until it wasn't.

OVER the years, his views on gender became embedded in the policies of organisations across Surrey. According to Townsend, her concerns about allowing men to "self-identify" as women were met with hostility by Surrey's then-chief constable Gavin Stephens.