Prince Charles has denied trying to influence two police investigations into a paedophile bishop who he invited into his home […]
Prince Charles has provided a statement to the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse concerning his links with disgraced former Bishop of Lewes and then Bishop of Gloucester Peter Ball. (Photo: Mick Tsikas – Pool/Getty)
Prince Charles has denied trying to influence two police investigations into a paedophile bishop who he invited into his home to officiate communion during the 1990s.
In an unprecedented intervention to a major public inquiry by a senior member of the royal family, the Prince of Wales said he became friends with Peter Ball after meeting him in the 1980s, but was later “misled” by the disgraced bishop. Ball was eventually was jailed, aged 86, for 32 months in October 2015 for offences against 18 teenagers and men.
Ball resigned from his position as Bishop of Gloucester – “my local diocesan bishop” in Charles’s words – in 1993 after admitting to an act of gross indecency with a 19-year-old man and accepting a formal police caution for it. In an extraordinary statement to the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) investigation into the Anglican Church, Prince Charles claimed he was unaware of the exact reason behind Ball’s resignation.
“Peter Ball told me he had been involved in some sort of ‘indiscretion’ which prompted his resignation as my local bishop. When this exchange took place, I did not know about the nature of the complaint.
“[Ball] emphasised that one individual that I now understand to be Mr Neil Todd had made a complaint to the police, that the police had investigated the matter, and the Crown Prosecution Service had decided to take no action.
“That sequence of events seemed to support Mr Ball’s claim that the complaint emanated from one individual and that individual bore a grudge against him and was persecuting him, that the complaint was false, but that the individual had nonetheless profited from the complaint by selling his story.
