Jeffrey Boothe: Senior cop loses compensation claim after using prostitutes

A senior policeman who kept his job despite using prostitutes has lost an astonishing compensation claim – outing himself in the process.

The Mail reported last year that an examination of Jeffrey Boothe’s phone showed he had routinely spent hundreds of pounds on ‘high-class’ call girls. He was not named in the paper’s original report.

Colleagues assumed he would be sacked and were outraged when he was simply given ‘words of advice’ and allowed to continue in a £100,000-a-year role that involved recruiting more women to the Metropolitan Police.

Members of the London Assembly attacked the decision to let the former borough commander go unpunished.

Yet rather than keeping his head down, Boothe launched an employment tribunal claim against his employer. He claimed he had suffered ‘discrimination’, saying the force was responsible for the leak of details of his alleged ‘sex addiction’, which he maintained was a ‘disability’, to the media.

It was that ‘sex addiction’, which he said was diagnosed by a doctor of psychology in 2015, which he blamed for driving him to use prostitutes.

He said the Mail becoming aware of it amounted to ‘unfavourable treatment’. When a tribunal rejected that, the now-retired officer changed tack, claiming his ‘disability’ came under the umbrella of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) – saying it was that impairment that caused his ‘sex addiction’.

But Judge Pavel Klimov said after the final hearing in the case: ‘The only evidence before me as to the existence of the alleged impairment is his say-so.’ There had been no reference to OCD in any document before his latest claim was made in August, the judge said.

Judge Klimov added: ‘Mr Boothe says that “when the news of his medical condition was leaked to the media, he was overwhelmed with feelings of self-loathing, stress, anxiety, and a strong feeling of being persecuted”. However, he accepted in cross-examination what was “leaked” to the press was not his medical condition of sex addiction but the fact that he had been hiring prostitutes for sex.

‘It is likely the reliance on OCD first arose when it became apparent to him and his solicitors that he would have serious difficulties relying on his alleged sex addiction as a disability.

‘He has failed to establish that at the material times, he had a mental impairment because of OCD. The impairment condition of the disability test is not satisfied, meaning that at the relevant times, he was not a disabled person.’ Boothe’s claim of disability discrimination was dismissed.