Did Shadowy Agency Ruin the Life of an Innocent Man While Failing to Prevent the Murder of Two MPs?
09:07 GMT 04.11.2021 (Updated: 12:19 GMT 01.03.2022)
© Sputnik / Chris Summers
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The Fixated Threat Assessment Centre (FTAC) was set up in 2006 to track individuals obsessed with VIPs. But it has failed to prevent the murder of two MPs and is accused of ruining the life of an innocent man.
An engineer from London whose life was ruined after he fell foul of a shadowy quasi-governmental organisation called FTAC has called for “justice”.
Calvin Benson, 50, was brought to the attention of FTAC after he made a flippant remark in 2009 which was portrayed as a “threat to kill” the then mayor of London, Boris Johnson.
“The majority of the UK population have no idea who FTAC are. When I speak to people about FTAC they think it’s absurd”, Benson said. "A psychiatrist said to me once ‘Don’t go around talking about your story. You will sound delusional even though it’s 100 percent true".
FTAC - the Fixed Threat Assessment Centre - was designed to keep track of individuals, many of them with mental health problems, who became fixated by VIPs such as the Queen, the Pope, and then Prime Minister Tony Blair.
In 2010, prior to the Pope's visit to Britain, a senior police officer, Meredydd Hughes, admitted FTAC would have been involved in monitoring certain individuals.
"These are fixated individuals. They either believe they are the true Pope or are harbouring a grudge against him", said Mr Hughes.
The letter from FTAC to Calvin Benson's doctor
© Sputnik / Chris Summers
At the time, FTAC had nine police officers, four forensic community mental health nurses, and several forensic psychiatrists, and was led by Dr David James, who had studied dozens of attacks on British and European politicians and dignitaries by people suffering pathological fixations.
Why Did FTAC Not Prevent MPs' Murders?
Four years later, FTAC largely escaped criticism for failing to prevent the murder of Jo Cox, a Labour MP who was shot and stabbed to death by Thomas Mair shortly before the Brexit referendum.
FTAC's role may also be scrutinised in the aftermath of the murder of Sir David Amess.
The founder of FTAC, Dr David James, wrote an article in The Guardian after Ms Cox was killed in which he referred to the need for "interventions" such as "arranging rapid compulsory admission to hospital".
"If the risk someone posed was based on delusional beliefs, then treating their illness promptly removed it", he said.
But Calvin Benson says he was sectioned in a psychiatric hospital on FTAC's advice despite being completely sane and no danger to anyone.
Independent tribunal letter which freed Calvin Benson
© Sputnik / Chris Summers / Mental health tribunal letter
'I Just Want Some Justice'
Benson said: “Before I started tweeting in 2017 I thought I was on my own, but I’ve found hundreds of people who spoke out. People have been made homeless and driven to suicide. I just want some justice”, he told Sputnik.
His story began in 2003, when he was working as a senior engineer on the CCTV systems for London Underground and British Transport Police (BTP).
“I was working at Finsbury Park Station one day when a group of cops turned up and swarmed around me. They told me to get my tools and leave. I was sacked and barred from British Transport Police premises”, Benson recalled.
He was told he posed a “security threat” and it later emerged BTP had received information he was a “Category C” football hooligan, linked to West Ham United’s infamous Inter City Firm (ICF).
Calvin Benson's police record includes the 1990 meat pie incident
© Sputnik / chris summers
The ICF was one of Britain’s most dangerous “firms” of football hooligans back in the 1980s.
Mr Benson, who supports West Ham, told Sputnik: “I would have been about eight years old at the time. The people who ran the ICF are in their late 60s and 70s nowadays”.
Denies He Was a Football Hooligan
He said he was convicted for throwing a meat pie at a match at Oldham in 1990, but was never a top level football hooligan and says part of his job at London Underground was to manage security breaches.
Mr Benson said he also later found out the Police National Computer had him down as only having one eye - he has two - and he was also accused of claiming London Underground's CCTV system was down at the time of the 7 July 2005 terrorist attacks, something he says he has never claimed.
After losing his job, he was out of work for six months before getting a job as a project inspector for London Underground overseeing Metronet, a company which was refurbishing Tube stations.
Four years later, he was suddenly told he was barred from BTP premises again, which meant he could not do his job, so he was fired.
Mr Benson tried to appeal to the then mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, but he got nowhere and later approached a Conservative member of the London Assembly, Roger Evans, who put him in touch with Andrew Gilligan.
Journalist at Centre of WMD Controversy
Gilligan was a former BBC journalist whose reports about whether Iraq really had WMDs in 2003 touched off a huge saga when biological weapons scientist Dr David Kelly committed suicide after being outed as Gilligan’s source.
By 2008, he was working for the Evening Standard and on the lookout for a story.
Mr Benson said he contacted Gilligan in a bid to highlight his own plight but instead the journalist, allegedly using Mr Benson’s documents, wrote an article about the huge sums Metronet labourers had been earning before the company collapsed in 2007.
Mayor of London Boris Johnson (L) boxes with a trainer during his visit to Fight for Peace Academy in North Woolwich, London, on October 28, 2014
© AFP 2023 / LEON NEAL
Mr Benson also claims Gilligan told him that if his friend Boris Johnson won the 2008 election and became mayor of London, he would get Mr Benson his job back.
Johnson did indeed win that election, but Mr Benson did not get his job back and has in fact been unemployed ever since.
Mr Benson said he eventually had to sell his house and split up with his partner.
He says it was then, in 2009, that he made a small, but stupid mistake which was to have huge consequences for his future.
“I was homeless and my Dad had just died, and I was in a bit of a state. In a phone call I said ‘What do I have to do to get rehoused, kill Boris Johnson?’” Mr Benson recalls.
'Flippant Remark'
It was a flippant, jokey remark, and certainly not meant as a threat, he said.
A few months later his doctor told him he had been contacted by FTAC, who said they had concerns about him.
“They said I had delusions of grandeur because I kept talking about being Andrew Gilligan’s source”, said Mr Benson.
Independent tribunal letter confirming Calvin Benson was not mentally ill
© Sputnik / Chris Summers
In October 2009, Mr Benson was asked to attend Plaistow Police Station in east London to answer questions about whether he was involved in a riot before the West Ham v Millwall football match two months earlier.
“I attended as I had not been involved in any violence, but when I arrived they switched subjects and claimed I'd made a threat to kill Boris Johnson”, Mr Benson recalled.
He was detained by the police and examined by a number of psychiatrists, one of whom asked him: “Do you work for MI5?”
“I said ‘What the f*** are you on about? Are you mental?’ and that was that. I was sectioned. I was flabbergasted”, recalled Mr Benson.
Locked Up in Secure Psychiatric Hospital
He had been sectioned under the Mental Health Act for 30 days and was held at the Riverside Unit, a psychiatric unit at Hillingdon Hospital which is ironically in Boris Johnson’s Uxbridge constituency.
Mr Benson said some of the other patients were cutting themselves, eating their own faeces and rambling on about Idi Amin, and one of them committed suicide while on day release.
He was also charged with threatening to kill Boris Johnson and with violent disorder at the West Ham v Millwall game.
Letter from the police claiming Calvin Benson was considered a Category C football hooligan in 1997
© Sputnik / Chris Summers
An independent tribunal which looked at Mr Benson’s case immediately ruled he was not mentally ill and he was promptly released.
A few days later, the charges were dropped.
But years have gone by and Mr Benson is still unable to get a job, even as a lowly labourer.
'Have I Been Blacklisted?'
He says he does not know if he has been “blacklisted” by employers or by the police or if there is some other reason why he cannot get a job in the construction industry.
“What I can’t prove I don’t say, so I’m not going to say I have been blacklisted by someone powerful because I can’t prove it”, Mr Benson said carefully.
In 2013 Boris Johnson, then mayor of London, appointed Andrew Gilligan as a cycling commissioner and in 2019 the new prime minister he hired him as a special adviser in Downing Street.
“We believe what the news tells us. We trust politicians and journalists. But now I know different and I’ve learned the hard way”, concluded Mr Benson.
Mr Benson warned: “If you go after a government agency like FTAC which deals with mental health and you are slagging it off there is a danger they will come after you and shut you up, silence you”.
FTAC, the Metropolitan Police, and the Home Office were all contacted by Sputnik but did not comment on FTAC, who it was accountable to, and whether it had been involved in the monitoring of the suspects in the murder of MPs Jo Cox and Sir David Amess.
