Boris, Govey, Morrissey, Bono – and now, “Nick”. An update on the latter – an individual who inspired a promising, if short-lived moral panic – confirms that a man’s notoriety under a single name is not necessarily indicative of public affection.

In the case of Nick, who was initially known – to the police, at least – as a purveyor of “credible and true” horror stories about a murderous, sex-crazed VIP ring operating in and around London’s Dolphin Square, his reputation has been suffering since a criminologist, Dr Rachel Hoskins, asked in 2016 to assess related witness statements, described some of their allegations as “preposterous”. A retired judge, Richard Henriques, similarly concluded, among his criticisms of the police’s Operation Midland, that Nick was not, in fact, credible. He questioned, too, the use of the word “victim” as immediately applied to Nick. The then Metropolitan police commissioner – now Lord Hogan-Howe – subsequently forced an apology to one of Nick’s accused, the former MP Harvey Proctor. It was too late to apologise to Sir Leon Brittan. Lord Bramall, whose home was also raided, had already objected, concerning one allegation, that he was chief of the defence staff at the time and thus under observation that must have jeopardised the staging of a Remembrance Day paedophile torture orgy. “It was completely and utterly daft. I would have been at the Cenotaph.”

Mind, the Met might retort, Sherlock-style: once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth. How do we know it wasn’t a body double?

Lord Hogan-Howe would ultimately agree that not enough had been done to “test the credibility” of Nick. That wasn’t enough, however, to halt Operation Conifer, investigating Nick’s allegations against Ted Heath. Like Midland, it had featured an explicit, public “appeal for victims”.

Conifer concluded last August, to be followed by a defensive report in which the police said that Heath, if alive, would have been interviewed under caution about seven (from an original 42) claims against him. Its findings, presumably minus earlier material featuring satanic abuse and VIP cabals, will be passed to the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse.

I am shocked that Nick is an alleged paedophile. I am also disgusted that the authorities have covered this up

Now, following this confusing – to the point it looks almost intentional – cluster of different, but related, partially redacted, police reports and reports on reports, Fairbank, Midland, Henriques, Conifer –it emerges that Nick, their common denominator, has been charged with possessing and making indecent images of children. Some offences were committed, it’s reported, even as the police were investigating his claims about the paedophile elite. Harvey Proctor, former target of Nick allegations, has responded: “I am shocked that Nick is an alleged paedophile. I am also disgusted that the authorities have covered this up for several months.”

As shocking as they are, the charges against Nick have yet to receive, perhaps understandably, anything approaching the media coverage he attracted in 2014, when, in newspaper and broadcast interviews, he supplied horrifying accounts of child murder and rape by senior establishment figures, often hosted within admirably soundproofed, or regrettably incurious, Dolphin Square.

Back then, police interest, it having been elicited by journalists and the MP Tom Watson, was interpreted as adding weight to Nick’s most spectacular claims: “The truth is out: The People reveals the investigation into the VIP abuse ring”. The paper headlined its Nick-based exclusive: “I watched Tory MP MURDER a boy during depraved Westminster VIP paedophile party”.

Not that the appetite for high-net-worth Tory child murder was confined to the party’s traditional adversaries. The Daily Mail, for example, quickly followed up with: “Paedophile orgies in luxury flats and claims three boys were murdered by VIPs: special report into the growing stench of a cover-up by the Establishment”.

Without exonerating the police for credulity that sounds, earlier, to have been practically limitless, they could reasonably expect, two years post-Savile, to be congratulated for acting on allegations that MPs and their motley associates had accomplished the murder of three children, along with paedophile abuse, as the Mail put it, on an “industrial” scale.

Or if they didn’t move promptly – when Nick said Proctor had tried to cut off his penis with a penknife but Ted Heath had stopped him – the opposite. They had, after all, recently been exposed for ignoring extensive, visible child abuse in Rotherham.

Perhaps there was nothing to be gained in 2014, with Nick holding court, from mentioning the similarities between his allegations (shortly to be ornamented by scenes of a demonic nature) and the great satanic abuse scare of the early 90s.

Then, too, the offenders were alleged to hold great parties, to commit child murder and rape and to include, in their never-discovered woodland rituals, all-powerful VIPs. In her government report on the purported evidence, The Extent and Nature of Organised Ritual Abuse, Jean la Fontaine noted that, of those actually accused of ritual abuse, 73% of cases “involve very poor people”.

Fontaine, though the recent trajectory of Nick-related police work might suggest otherwise, found zero evidence of the satanic ritual abuse that was repeatedly claimed in the 1990s, and even treated, by self-styled specialists.

Her explanation for the scare – “a belief in evil cults is convincing because it draws on powerful cultural axioms” – is perhaps supported by the excitement, only 20 years later, around the unveiling of a fresh set of alleged conspirators. Again, their horror film, axiom-defying tortures make more common forms of child abuse – by, say, individual priests, celebrities, teachers, sports coaches, MPs such as Clement Freud – look almost unremarkable.

“Concern with satanic abuse,” she wrote in 1994, “draws attention from the very serious state of this minority of damaged children.” And with the myth of Dolphin Square already contributing to a re-evaluation of both victimhood and anonymity, the same, surely, applies to Nick.