Innocent Until Proven Dead



Dominic Lawson writing in The Sunday Times gives both barrels to Labour politicians and Max Clifford over their behaviour in relation to the recently deceased former Tory cabinet minister Leon Brittan. 

I have to say I agree wholeheartedly because if these people had credible evidence then instead of playing political games or trying to settle old party scores, they should be handing their evidence to the police, not least because as Parliamentarians they are in a position to hold public authorities to account.    

These child abuse slurs are just the angry left’s revenge on Thatcher


By Dominic Lawson - The Sunday Times



In Jewish tradition burial takes place within 24 hours of death. Yet there was barely time for that dignity to be accorded the late Leon Brittan before the Labour MP Tom Watson publicly declared that the former Conservative home secretary “stands accused of multiple child rape”.

This form of words cunningly created the sense of a judicial process, though the only jury likely to have heard such a claim had Brittan still been alive would have been that in a court of libel. Watson based his charge on the word of a man — known only as “Nick” — who had told him that as a child he had been repeatedly sexually assaulted in a Westminster apartment block by a man calling himself “Leon” .

Well, anything is possible: even that the intensely analytical and ambitious barrister that Brittan was would have identified himself in this way during the committing of a very serious crime. Watson, again with a certain cunning, compared Brittan to Jimmy Savile, as if to suggest that those who dismissed this story were somehow on a par with the people who covered up for that grotesque sexual predator.

And he had back-up from another Labour MP, Simon Danczuk, who for months had been claiming Brittan was responsible for “covering up” the so-called “Dickens dossier” of “establishment child abuse” while home secretary. And why would that be, eh?

Yet, as The Sunday Times revealed last week, the alleged establishment child abuse dossier presented by the late Conservative MP Geoffrey Dickens to Brittan in 1984 consisted of just two letters, one from an angry mother claiming her 16-year-old son had “become homosexual” after working in the kitchens of Buckingham Palace — something in the food, perhaps — and the other from a civil servant pointing out that addresses linked to paedophile material sent from abroad were not routinely passed on to the police. Later Dickens passed Brittan a second “dossier”, about a cult known as “Children of God” that had been accused of abusing children.

Far from ignoring or suppressing this material, Brittan passed it on to his officials. It was they — or rather their successors — who eventually managed to lose all trace of it, as they did with more than 100 other files about child abuse between 1979 and 1999 (for only two years of which period Brittan had been home secretary).

An inquiry by Peter Wanless, the head of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) — commissioned by the current home secretary, Theresa May — reported “nothing to support a concern that files had been deliberately or systematically removed or destroyed to cover up child abuse”.

This unequivocal statement by someone one might reasonably regard as an irreproachable figure in such matters will only feed the foil-hatted conspiracy theorists who see the Palace of Westminster as nothing other than a cover for satanic rituals, with young boys deflowered every third Friday of the month in the crypt of St Stephen’s Hall. So the NSPCC is in on it too? Of course!

Dickens — whom his colleagues politely described as a “maverick” — was in fact one of the promulgators of the great satanic ritual abuse conspiracy: this reached its febrile heights in both Britain and America in the 1980s, dying away only after hundreds of people had unjustly had their children snatched away by social workers infected with this form of hysteria.

Yet even Dickens — unlike Watson and Danczuk — had nothing bad to say about Brittan. From 1984 until his death in 1995 he made 40 interventions in parliament on child sexual abuse, and in none of these did he accuse either Brittan or the Home Office of a cover-up. Indeed, if the “dossier” he presented to Brittan was truly explosive, one wonders why Dickens — or his family — did not keep his own copy.

Unlike Dickens, Watson is on the opposite floor of the House of Commons to the party Brittan represented. There is a section within the Labour party still convulsed with loathing for anyone and anything to do with Margaret Thatcher because she not only defeated Michael Foot and Neil Kinnock in three general elections, but in so doing also buried British parliamentary socialism. Their only revenge is to dig up the bodies of her lieutenants and disfigure them.

As home secretary during the miners’ strike, Brittan was — is — the perfect target, which explains why Jim Hood MP, one of the National Union of Mineworkers’ leaders at the time of that catastrophic defeat, used parliamentary privilege — in a debate last October on the 30th anniversary of the strike — to link him to “improper conduct with children”.

A similar malicious persecution for “paedophilia” almost certainly hastened the death of Lord McAlpine, a close friend of Thatcher and Conservative party treasurer during her heyday. In his case the alleged victim belatedly confessed he had confused McAlpine with someone “with the same surname” who had raped him in a children’s home decades earlier. So at least before he died McAlpine was able to gain apologies and damages from those such as the Labour party activist Sally Bercow who had defamed him.

Thatcher’s most valued mentor in her early cabinet was Sir Keith Joseph. So no surprise that the Sunday Mirror, eternally amenable to the most maniacal claims of sexual depravity in Tory circles, last year ran a front-page story accusing the late Sir Keith — full disclosure: my distant cousin — of being one of several Thatcher ministers to have taken part in “cocaine-fuelled parties” with “rent boys”. Not exactly the Keith Joseph I knew.

The source for this, one Anthony Gilberthorpe, somehow linked it to the Brighton bombing (a more violently physical attempt to destroy the living bodies of Thatcher and her ministers): he told the newspaper that after the bombing he was “asked to look after two rent boys”, and then “I rushed over there from my hotel after I heard the blast and saw Keith Joseph stood outside in a blanket”. A blanket! What had he been doing without his clothes on? Well, it was three in the morning when the IRA’s bomb went off.

Just after this disgusting farrago was published and paid for, Private Eye revealed Gilberthorpe to be a liar and fantasist: among his other escapades was announcing his engagement (in The Times) to a Miss Leah Bergdorf-Hunt of California. But there was no engagement — and no Miss Leah Bergdorf-Hunt. That would not worry the Sunday Mirror about its “revelations” concerning Joseph: as the comedian Al Murray noted of Leon Brittan’s post-mortem traducing, it’s a case of “innocent until proven dead”.

Innocent, that is, in the legal sense. But what lies behind this campaign is a belief by many on the left that to be a Conservative minister — and especially a “right-wing Tory” — is not just to be a political enemy but actually evil. With the death of ideology in the parliamentary Labour party, moral vanity has filled the vacuum of genuine intellectual disagreement.

In that context “Tory sleaze” — of which there were real examples — is a reassuring rallying cry. Its arch-purveyor, who fed the red-top press with all it could want, was Max Clifford. He frequently spoke of his hatred of “the Tories” and did his best to do for them with tales (not invariably untrue) of their sexual improprieties and hypocrisy. What ever happened to him?

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