Daily Star, 27th August 1983
We can assume that the PIE member who worked at the Home Office’s Property Service Agency was Barry Cutler, but it’s strange that Geoffrey Dickens doesn’t mention PIE chairman Steven Smith, who had been exposed the previous year as also being employed by the Home Office. More information on the Desiring Progress blog: PIE and the Home Office
Sunday People, 24th May 1987
Sunday People, 12th July 1987
Community Care, 17th February 1983
Daily Mail, 9th March 1994
Viscount Tonypandy (formerly George Thomas MP, Speaker of the Commons) was appointed as chairman of National Children’s Home (NCH) in 1983. He led NCH’s ‘Children in Danger’ campaign – “to counter the effects of a continuing high level of physical and sexual abuse”, and joined a BBC radio crew looking for ‘waifs’ on the streets of Soho and Leicester Square.
Police are currently investigating allegations that the late George Thomas raped a nine-year-old boy. (BBC News)
George Thomas helped former Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe escape prosecution for ‘a homsexual offence against a minor’. Leo Abse MP boasted that he had threatened a young ‘delinquent’ who had allegedly tried to blackmail his close friend George Thomas. See Leo Abse MP, George Thomas MP, and Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe
The Times, 13th October 1983
The Times, 12th December 1983
The Times, 10th December 1984
The Times, 18th September 1985
The Times, 19th September 1985
The Times, 23rd September 1985
Leo Abse MP on dealing with George Thomas MP’s young blackmailer:
“Over the years, given his exposed position, it was inevitable that he would fall victim to blackmail. On one occasion, after a distraught recounting to me of the pressure upon him, I insisted I would meet and deal with the young criminal in his constituency into whose hands he had fallen.
My reputation in Cardiff’s criminal underworld stood me in good stead in dealing with the wretch. As a lawyer, I had often acted in the courts on behalf of the local prosecution department, and even more frequently, I had defended the city’s gangsters. As one-time chairman of the watch committee, I had the duty of supervising the local police.
The blackmailing cur, therefore, had no doubt that, unless he desisted, I would carry out my threat to ensure he was put behind bars for 10 years; shortly after our encounter he found it was politic to quit the city.”
Leo Abse MP on how George Thomas MP helped Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe escape prosecution for ‘a homosexual offence against a minor’:
“Yet the slightest tremor of scandal, however faintly reverberating into his private domain, reduced him to jelly. One such ocasion was in 1976 when, summoned to his sitting-room in the Speaker’s house, I found him grey-faced and trembling. Investigative journalists, some from the BBC, were pursuing inquiries into the then Liberal leader, Jeremy Thorpe.
They had evidently reached the conclusion that, some 16 years earlier, under a Conservative government, political intervention had saved Thorpe from being prosecuted for a homosexual offence against a minor. They also believed that, when Thorpe became embroiled in another scandal in 1964, he feared that the records in the Home Office of his earlier misbehaviour would wreck his efforts to free himself of his new dilemma.
The journalists had discovered that Thorpe – using his friend, the fraudulent Liberal MP Peter Bessell, as an intermediary – had turned to George, who was then a parliamentary under-secretary at the Home Office, for help. Yielding to Bessell’s importuning, George had set up a private meeting between Bessell and the home secretary.”
Police are currently investigating allegations that George Thomas MP raped a nine-year-old boy. BBC News
Sunday Times, 18th March 2001
Sunday People, 24th June 1984
The People, 7th June 1987
More on the ‘dirty dozen’ here (Hackney Gazette, 12th June 1987):
Follow up Open Letter to David Cameron with copies to Nick Clegg and Ed Miliband (to be read in conjunction with my original Open Letter of September 16th 2013)
Dear Mr. Cameron,
I write further following my original Open Letter to you of 16th September 2013, to which your office responded on 22nd October 2013 stating that the “Home Office was best placed to respond to the matters you raise”.
I and Dr.Liz Davies, an acknowledged expert on Child Protection, met with Mr. Norman Baker, Minister of State for Crime Prevention at the Home Office on 13th May 2014 to address the “matters” I raised with you, thus we were able to assess for ourselves whether the Home Office was indeed “best placed to respond”.
The meeting with Mr. Baker was an insult to both my and Dr. Davies’s integrity and intelligence but of far greater concern is that it was a true indicator of the Government’s attitude to the survivors of sexual abuse by people in powerful positions of authority such as Members of the Houses of Commons or Lords.
Since that meeting you were asked a PMQ by Duncan Hames MP, on 11th June 2014 which indicated that there is at last a recognition amongst a small but highly significant group of cross-party MPs that there is the need for an Independent Inquiry on a Hillsborough model in to the cover ups over MPs and other powerful individuals linked to government, and there is a growing body of evidence to show that the Home Office is the very last Government Department that you as Prime Minister should have delegated the “matters you raise” to.
In my letter of September 2013 to you, with copies to Mr. Clegg and Mr.Miliband, I wrote the following:-
“I appeal to you to forget your political roles and act as fathers of young children, decent citizens and show the moral courage to stop the cover ups and allow all abusers to face justice regardless of their privileged position in society”
” Until this Government and Parliament are seen by the public to be supporting a full and independent inquiry victims will remain silent and be too frightened to come forward.”
” It would be better if you led such an exercise before it is forced upon you by public demand.
THE LATTER WILL HAPPEN IN TIME “
Survivors and their supporters have gained great strength from the courage of the first 80 MPs from across the parties who have agreed to support the call for a fully independent inquiry in to organised and networked sexual abuse and its cover up over at least 4 decades where members of the Establishment and in particular MPs have been involved.
However in the last 48 hours it has become obvious that your party and possibly your Government is exercising some control over MPs wishes and a “Standard Response” has crept in to letters to constituents who have written to them asking them to support the demand for an Independent Inquiry, repeating word for word the sound bites that started in the Home Office’s first written response to me last November 2013 :-
“Child abuse is an abhorrent crime, no matter when, or where, it occurs. We are committed to tackling it, in whatever form it takes”
This patronising attitude towards survivors is now being repeated in the most recent responses from the likes of Andrew Lansley, Gareth Johnson, Mark Prisk etc.
The issue of the sexual abuse of very vulnerable children should have transcended party politics and three line whips and political self- interest and self- preservation a long time ago.
I note that your Response to Duncan Hames’s PMQ of 11th June indicated that you were fairly satisfied that the Home Secretary and the Home Office’s investigations were suficient in themselves and no other measures were necessary.
It seems that your Government is placing great faith in the Sexual Violence against Children and Vulnerable People National Group.
Do you really believe that the public in this country and, of far greater significance, the survivors of abuse by the most powerful of abusers, will trust the very Government Department ie the Home Office that must face up to the following allegations or facts:-
1. Two Cabinet Ministers who hold or have held positions in the Home Office are under current investigation by a live Police investigation. Another two, now dead, will be the subject of information and before too long evidence that can be presented to an Independent Inquiry with a great deal of confidence.
2. It employed within its Queen Anne’s Gate headquarters the Chairman of the Paedophile Information Exchange and allowed him to co-ordinate its meetings and printing of publicity on a Home Office telephone extension and on Home Office headed notepaper.
3. The Home Office funded the Paedophile Information Exchange for many years and it is alleged that the Government of the time authorised this funding in conjunction with the security services.
I personally tracked down the very senior Home Office employee at the time who has now given a formal statement to the Police.
4. The role played by the Home Office at the time in the concerted attempts to discredit and humiliate the Conservative MP, Geoffrey Dickens, because of what he was threatening to expose, and its current role in failing to identify the contents or whereabouts of the “Dickens Dossiers”.
Parliament itself in an Independent Inquiry will need to look at its behaviour in the way it jeered Geoffrey Dickens and cheered Granvile Janner on their respective re-entry in to the Commons after the allegations against Janner first surfaced.
5 . The long list of decisions taken either by an Attorney General or a Director of Public Prosecutions that it would not “be in the public interest” to continue any criminal proceedings against the likes of Sir Peter Morrison, Sir Cyril Smith and Sir Peter Hayman.
It wouldn’t take an Independent Inquiry too long to conclude that such decisions were taken solely in the interests of Government and Parliament and what was in the public interest was never going to be a consideration.
I note that one of the roles (under the heading of “statutory remit”) allocated to your National Group is:-
“Reducing the risks from abuse of authority and power”.
Under that heading could I ask the group to urgently address the following and give a written commitment that it will do so pending the setting up of an Independent Inquiry to examine the way it has gone about its work and to examine its findings.
A starting point would be the admission by the Government Whip, Tim Fortescue, on national television that MP’s and Governments keep allegations of paedophiliac behaviour by their own within house as trade offs – the Dirt Books practice.
The dictionary definition of “abhorrent” is disgusting, despicable, vile
You and the MPs now adopting the standard response bandy that word around as a soundbite but refuse to acknowledge or address how despicable, vile and disgusting it has been for fellow politicians not only to fail to report abuse by a colleague but to throw the net of protection around them so that they can carry on regardless.
This is a situation that applies to all parties and has nothing to do with political allegiances, party politics or as you seemed to imply in statements post-Savile exposures, a “gay witch-hunt”.
In my original letter I listed the issues surrounding Mrs. Thatcher’s relationship with Savile, his relationship with Prince Charles and many more which will need to be the subject of an Independent Inquiry as well as the scenario I first contacted Tom Watson MP, about in October 2012, ie the link between a powerful paedophile ring and No. 10 which very much remains a live and ever increasing Police investigation.
Will you now accept that it is time to honour your original promise of October 2012 that every institution MUST look at itself in the part it played in the protection of significant paedophiles or are you going to persist in the belief that ALL institutions exclude your own, and in effect tell us as the electorate that Parliament and politicians are above the law and you, as our political masters rather than as our public servants , will never be accountable for the “abhorrent” behaviour of a small but significant minority of your institutions.
An Independent Inquiry on a Hillsborough model is the only thing survivors will accept and then they can begin to trust that the worse scenarios, which have not yet come out, can be spoken about and they will be believed and that the wall of fear that they have hidden behind for decades will have been knocked down and no one is above justice and prosecution for the future.
Yours sincerely
Peter McKelvie
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