Who Watches the Watched?

How Britain’s greatest living explorer went missing inside the care system, and what Europe’s paper trail tells us about the rest of us

Sir Ranulph Fiennes has spent most of his life being hard to reach. He dragged sledges across Antarctica, climbed Everest in his sixties, and famously took a saw to his own frostbitten fingertips in the garden shed because the surgeons were taking too long. When a man like that disappears from view, you assume he’s somewhere improbable and freezing, probably in a tent. What you don’t expect is a care home in Wales, admitted under someone else’s name.

According to the Telegraph’s reporting, the 82-year-old explorer has not been seen in public for two years and has been placed in several care homes under a false name by his wife, Louise Millington-Cotes. A care inspectorate found at the start of this year that he was being deprived of his liberty unlawfully because his wife had acted without ensuring the relevant legal protocols were in place. The details are almost too theatrical for a regulatory report. The owner of one home said Mrs Millington-Cotes described her husband as an ex-SAS man whose life might be in danger from extremists, and claimed staff at a previous care home had tried to kill him. Earlier, at a care home in London, visitors were reportedly required to sign non-disclosure agreements before they could see him. Some of his friends and blood relatives are contemplating a legal challenge to her guardianship.

I want to be careful here, because this is a live family dispute and there is a great deal we don’t know. Marriages under the strain of a serious illness are private battlefields, and outsiders rarely see the whole map. So let me be clear about where I’m pointing the torch. This isn’t a piece about one wife. It’s about a system that let a famous man be moved around the country under a false identity, and the one detail that should keep every one of us awake at night: when he was moved out of the care home seven weeks after he arrived, the legal authorisation for depriving him of his liberty had still not been obtained. The person who raised the alarm wasn’t an inspector or a social worker, either. In March, the care home owner wrote to the Office of the Public Guardian to raise safeguarding concerns.

If it can happen to him, with his knighthood, his public profile and a family willing to talk to national newspapers, the obvious question is what happens to the Mr Smiths nobody is looking for. So I went looking, first at home and then across Europe. The picture that came back was not reassuring.

Britain: the safeguard that’s permanently on its way

For anyone who hasn’t had to learn this the hard way, a DoLS (Deprivation of Liberty Safeguards) authorisation is the legal paperwork required when someone who lacks mental capacity is kept under continuous supervision and control and isn’t free to leave. It exists because liberty is a human right, and the state has decided, quite rightly, that you don’t lose it just because you’ve got dementia. Someone independent is supposed to check that the restrictions are necessary and in your best interests.

That’s the theory. In practice, England received 364,900 DoLS applications in 2024-25, fewer than half were fully assessed, and 123,790 people were left sitting in the backlog. The law sets a 21-day deadline, but completed applications in 2022-23 took an average of 156 days, over seven times the statutory limit. Age UK put the consequence plainly, warning that many older people will have been unlawfully deprived of their liberty for long periods before any assessment took place, with no one outside the care setting checking whether it was in their best interests. One council worker told the Care Quality Commission that even if new applications stopped arriving altogether, it would take around eighteen months just to clear the existing backlog. Surrey, at one point, was worse still. The Ombudsman found that delays were sometimes so long that the person had moved to another home, or died, before the council ever issued an authorisation.

The truly British part is the fix. Parliament passed a replacement, the Liberty Protection Safeguards, back in 2019. They were meant to replace DoLS in 2020, but implementation was postponed repeatedly, and in April 2023 the government of the day pushed them beyond the life of that Parliament. They have never been brought into force. In October 2025 the government announced a fresh consultation for the first half of 2026. So the law designed to fix the broken law exists, has been approved, and sits on a shelf while someone consults about it.

The other half of the Fiennes story runs through powers of attorney, and here the numbers are just as sobering. By the end of 2024-25 the Office of the Public Guardian had 9.3 million lasting powers of attorney on its register, received 11,300 concerns, and fully investigated 3,800 cases, around a quarter of which ended in court action. The government’s line is that abuse is rare. Perhaps it is. But the system is overwhelmingly reactive: it acts when someone complains. If the only person with the full picture is the attorney, and the attorney is the problem, who exactly is going to complain?

I spent years in the RAF Police and then in security management, and one lesson never left me. A log is only as good as the person who reads it. Custody records, access registers, incident reports… they protect people only when somebody independent is checking them, regularly and without being asked. A safeguard that takes six months to arrive isn’t a safeguard. It’s an alibi for the institution.

France: the gravediggers and the guardians

Cross the Channel and the story changes shape but not substance. In January 2022 the journalist Victor Castanet published Les Fossoyeurs, The Gravediggers, a book about Orpea, one of the largest private care home operators in the world. It described residents in some Orpea homes having nappies and food rationed, while important clients, such as relatives of politicians, journalists and the wealthy, received special treatment. Castanet said he had even been offered 15 million euros not to publish. This wasn’t a fringe accusation that faded away. France’s General Inspectorates of Social Affairs and Finance went on to confirm most of the book’s accusations. Police raided dozens of the group’s homes across France as part of a judicial investigation into malpractice and possible mistreatment of residents.

What makes Orpea a European story rather than a French one is reach. It operated in more than twenty countries. When the scandal broke, Ireland’s Minister for Older People told parliament that the group’s Irish representatives had given assurances that the French issues had no bearing on its operations in Ireland. Assurances are lovely things. They’re also exactly what you’d expect a company to give.

France’s quieter scandal is guardianship. Nearly a million people in France live under some form of legal protection, tutelle, curatelle or judicial safeguard, and the number keeps rising, as do reports of negligence, fraud and abuse. The system relies heavily on professional guardians, and here’s the bit that made me put my coffee down. To be approved, a guardian needs a clean criminal record and a place on a list approved by the public prosecutor, but no qualification is required, even though the role combines banker, notary and social worker. Guardianship associations have been hit by repeated embezzlement cases, nearly 8 million euros in one department in 2007 and 90,000 euros in another in 2025, yet none of these scandals ever triggered serious organisational reform.

So France gives us both ends of the problem at once. On one side, a corporate operator whose economics allegedly depended on doing less for people than they paid for. On the other, a state-sanctioned system of strangers holding the keys to vulnerable people’s lives, with oversight that seems to wake up mostly after the money has gone.

Spain: the brave law and the bad spring

I live in Spain, in a cave in the hills with a small band of friends, so this section is less abstract for me than the others. Spain deserves credit first, because it did something Britain hasn’t managed. Law 8/2021 replaced the old model, in which guardians made decisions on behalf of people declared incapable, with one in which the person with a disability makes their own decisions and their will and preferences are respected. The law scrapped judicial incapacitation altogether, replacing it with a system of supports. Judicial support measures have to be reviewed at least every three years, and can be changed or ended if the person’s situation changes. On paper, it’s one of the most progressive frameworks in Europe, and it takes the individual’s voice seriously in a way the older systems never did.

But there’s a catch, and it’s the same catch at the heart of the Fiennes case. Much of the new system depends on arrangements people set up in advance, such as preventive powers of attorney. One Spanish lawyer points out that a preventive power of attorney actually gives the attorney less oversight than the old representative guardian had, who had to post a bond, draw up an inventory, seek judicial approval for many acts and account for their actions. In other words, respecting autonomy can also mean trusting whoever you picked years ago, with fewer people checking. That’s fine until it isn’t.

And then there is the spring of 2020 in Madrid, which nobody here has forgotten. A documentary counted 7,291 people who were denied hospital care and died, many of them alone and unattended, in Madrid’s care homes in March and April of that year. The regional protocols contained exclusion criteria under which older people with certain levels of dependency or disability were not to be sent to hospital if they caught Covid. The regional minister for social policy at the time, Alberto Reyero, said the protocols were unethical and possibly illegal. Later research made it worse, not better. A study in BMC Geriatrics found that transfers from care homes to hospitals began to be restricted on 7 March, when Covid patients occupied under 10% of hospital beds, eleven days before the first written protocol. Its lead author, François Béland, argued that it was impossible for every hospital and care home in Madrid to make the same decision at random, and that somebody must have decided.

Who that somebody was is now a matter for the courts. In January 2026, a former director of social and health care coordination for the region was summoned before a Madrid judge as a formal suspect, in a case examining whether the protocols amounted to discriminatory denial of assistance. Nobody has been convicted of anything, and it’s important to say so. But it has taken almost six years, and a campaign by bereaved families, to get this far. The regional government used its majority to block a parliamentary inquiry, which tells you something about how institutions tend to feel about being watched.

Strasbourg: the line that should anchor everything

The final stop on the tour is a courtroom, and a man most people have never heard of. Rusi Stanev, a Bulgarian diagnosed with schizophrenia, had been living in the community, but none of his relatives were willing to act as his guardian, so he met the criteria for admission to a social care home. A guardian he barely knew placed him in a remote institution. The European Court of Human Rights later found that the conditions he endured there for seven years amounted to degrading treatment.

In 2012 the Grand Chamber ruled in his favour, and in doing so broke new ground. For the first time, it found that conditions in a social care institution constituted inhuman and degrading treatment, and that involuntary placement in such an institution by a guardian was a deprivation of liberty. It held the detention unlawful because the authorities had never consulted him or checked whether he consented, and because there was no recent medical evidence showing he needed to be confined. One observation from that judgment should be pinned above every admissions desk in Europe. The court noted that lacking legal capacity does not mean a person is unable to understand their situation and make their wishes known.

That sentence cuts through everything else in this essay. The false names, the NDAs, the six-month backlogs, the unqualified guardians, the exclusion criteria… they all share one quiet assumption: that once someone is old, ill or confused, their own view of their life can be set aside for somebody else’s convenience.

The pattern nobody is paid to see

Put the four countries side by side and a pattern emerges that has little to do with national character. Britain wrote a better law and left it on the shelf. France built an industry and a guardianship system, and then discovered what happens when nobody audits either properly. Spain wrote an admirably humane law, and then, in a crisis, allegedly drew up criteria that decided some lives weren’t worth an ambulance. Bulgaria needed a court in Strasbourg to point out that a man in an institution was still a man.

And in almost every case, the alarm was raised by someone outside the system. A care home owner in Wales writing to the Public Guardian. A freelance journalist turning down millions of euros. A Canadian academic crunching Madrid’s referral data. Bereaved families refusing to let a statute of limitations run out. The inspectors, regulators and guardians who are paid to notice arrived late, if they arrived at all.

Back in my days writing memos in civilian security, I learned that paperwork serves whoever needs it later. Signed acknowledgements, incident logs, sign-in sheets… they’re rarely there to protect the person on the page. They’re there so that when something goes wrong, the institution can show it followed a process. The care systems of Europe are full of that sort of paperwork, and short of anyone actually reading it.

Up here in the hills, I sometimes wonder who would notice if I simply stopped appearing. I know my friends would, because we live close enough to hear each other cough. I’m far less confident the paperwork would. Sir Ranulph had friends asking questions for over a year, a family talking to the national press, and a name half the country knows. The question I can’t answer, and the one I’d rather you sat with than let me tidy away, is how many people are in care homes across Europe tonight with nobody asking anything at all.

Until Next Time