Are the vile paedophile allegations against Leon Brittan a sinister MI5 smear plot?

1

During a drinks reception at the Home Office in the summer of 1984, political journalist Chris Moncrieff felt a tap on his shoulder. Turning round, he saw it was a civil servant, who said: ‘Follow me. I’m taking you to meet the Home Secretary. He’s got something very important to tell you.’

Are the vile paedophile allegations against Leon Brittan a sinister MI5 smear plot

To the visible envy of fellow journalists, Moncrieff, political editor of the influential Press Association news agency, drained his glass and followed the official out of the function room. A few minutes later, he found himself standing in the private office of Home Secretary Leon Brittan.

Moncrieff recalls this week: ‘Very forcefully, Brittan looked me in the eye and said: “It’s all lies!”. Then he produced a copy of an article from the latest edition of Private Eye and told me to read it.’

'Deeply upset': In 1984, Private Eye claimed that staff at the spy agency MI5 had targeted Brittan because they were upset about reports that he was planning a ‘big shake-up’ of their operations

‘Deeply upset’: Private Eye claimed that staff at the spy agency MI5 had targeted Brittan because they were upset about reports that he was planning a ‘big shake-up’ of their operations

The article in the satirical magazine described the so-called Cabinet Minister Scandal, which had been mentioned repeatedly in the Press and involved Westminster gossip that an unnamed senior member of the Thatcher government had pursued sexual relationships with two teenage boys.

One boy, based in the North-East, had been abused before the minister was appointed, it was alleged. Another was still at school and his alleged abuse had been more recent.

Speculation about what some newspapers were calling ‘the most damaging government sex scandal of the century’ had grown to fever pitch after an explosive Downing Street lobby briefing on June 19.

Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s press secretary, Bernard Ingham, had been asked if No 10 believed there was ‘substance’ to the rumours that one of the government’s most senior ministers was a predatory paedophile.

Not surprisingly, Ingham had hit the roof. Not only were the child sex allegations untrue, he stormed, but ‘anyone publishing a word of them would receive a libel writ on the instant’.

Nevertheless, several newspapers kept the controversy going by running stories which said that talk of an ‘alleged sex scandal’ at the heart of government had been angrily ‘dismissed’ by Downing Street.

As the tone of such coverage grew increasingly hysterical, The Times noted: ‘The Commons tearoom, the hub of Westminster gossip, has been informed that the story is going to “break” this weekend.’

It was against this feverish background that Leon Brittan handed Chris Moncrieff the Private Eye article, which had yet to be on widespread sale.

The magazine had broken ranks and named the Cabinet minister at the centre of this alleged paedophile scandal. It was none other than Leon Brittan. However, the article stressed that all the child sex allegations being levelled against the Home Secretary were false.

It explained that untrue rumours about Brittan had been circulating ‘around in Fleet Street’ for some time. But after lengthy investigations, several newspapers, including the News of the World, had concluded that there was absolutely ‘nothing’ in them.

The Elm Guest House (pictured), in Barnes, is alleged to have been the scene of paedophile activity and sex parties attended by politicians and other prominent figures in the 1970s and 1980s

The Elm Guest House (pictured), in Barnes, is alleged to have been the scene of paedophile activity and sex parties attended by politicians and other prominent figures in the 1970s and 1980s

It went on to say that there was a cynical motivation for such a smear.

Private Eye claimed that staff at the spy agency MI5 had targeted Brittan because they were upset about reports that he was planning a ‘big shake-up’ of their operations following failures in the lead-up to the fatal shooting of WPC Yvonne Fletcher outside the Libyan Embassy in central London.

There was also poisonous prejudice against Brittan because he was Jewish, the magazine suggested. Rogue officials, therefore, had decided to work up a paedophile scandal in an attempt to force Brittan from office.

‘The MI5 spooks and loonies who object to having a Jewish Home Secretary … [have] retaliated by resurrecting the Brittan smear and spreading it around the Street of Shame.

‘On June 19 the Prime Minister’s press secretary, Bernard Ingham, “briefed” the lobby hacks, threatening “slander” writs if anything was published. In the meantime, newspaper editors were phoned by the Home Office press officer, and Downing Street, and warned not to publish anything.

‘All this only created an atmosphere of hysteria which has not helped in any way to kill the smear.’

Having read the Private Eye article in Brittan’s presence, Moncrieff says the two men discussed its contents, Brittan saying he was very pleased that the magazine had come to his defence and clearly wanting its contents given a wider audience.

The Home Secretary had obviously been deeply troubled by the rumours that he was guilty of child sex abuse. But he felt the Private Eye report had not only scotched those rumours but given a credible explanation of why they were a smear.

‘Brittan told me that if Private Eye was saying this, then the allegations must be a load of codswallop,’ recalls Moncrieff, who is now 83. ‘He was as pleased as punch that a magazine which would never normally side with the Establishment was choosing to do so on this occasion.

‘He then said something along the lines of “These awful allegations have always been totally false, and now people will finally stop making them”.’

Moncrieff duly filed a full report of their meeting, which was carried in most of the next day’s national newspapers. They all claimed that the Home Secretary had been ‘smeared’ by members of the security services.

And there the great Cabinet Minister Scandal of 1984 ended. Save, that is, for a brief hoo-hah a couple of days later when the Labour MP Harry Cohen attempted to refer to the Private Eye article in Parliament during a (seemingly unrelated) debate about the Representation of the People Act.

It has been suggested that MI5 smeared Leon Brittan because he wanted to 'shake up' operations by the spy network after the fatal shooting of WPC Yvonne Fletcher outside the Libyan Embassy

It has been suggested that MI5 smeared Leon Brittan because he wanted to ‘shake up’ operations by the spy network after the fatal shooting of WPC Yvonne Fletcher outside the Libyan Embassy

However, his blundering intervention was described as ‘reprehensible’ by the Commons Speaker, Bernard Weatherill, and within a few months the affair had been widely forgotten. Barely a whiff of it has appeared in the mainstream media in the 30 years that have passed since.

But now the story has shot back to the top of the political agenda — for two main reasons.

First, Labour MP Jim Hood, in the same way that Harry Cohen did 30 years ago, used Commons privilege to try to link 75-year old Brittan — now a peer — to allegations of child abuse. During a completely unrelated parliamentary debate about the miners’ strike in the 1980s, he suddenly alleged that Brittan was suspected of ‘improper conduct with children’.

He claimed that during the early 1980s: ‘Miners were saying in the dock, in all the magistrates’ courts throughout the strike, that they objected to the instructions coming from the Home Secretary when there were reports of child abuse linked with that same Home Secretary.’

Hood was quickly asked by the Commons Deputy Speaker to ‘be very careful about what we say’, but the MP unrepentantly declared: ‘I am just repeating what I read in the papers.’

The outburst met with an angry response from Conservatives.

Lord Tebbit, a former Cabinet colleague of Brittan’s, said this week: ‘If somebody wants to make these allegations, they should do it outside the Chamber where they can be tested — if necessary in a court of law … if this gentleman has some evidence which causes him to believe this, why not make these comments outside?’

In any case, Mr Hood’s comment that he was ‘just repeating what I read in the papers’ isn’t exactly right, since no newspaper has ever reported that Brittan was guilty of ‘improper conduct with children’. Quite the reverse, in fact.

There does not appear to be any documented case in the archives of a miner, taken to court during the strike, using that opportunity to accuse the Home Secretary of such crimes.

That is not to say that scurrilous stories don’t exist. In the unregulated Wild West of cyberspace, Brittan’s name has, over the years, been repeatedly and recklessly linked to a string of alleged sex scandals which would be laughable if the allegations weren’t so serious.

To cite one example, it is alleged that, while a Cabinet minister, Brittan was arrested by customs officials for smuggling child pornography in his luggage. The crime, it is further alleged, was covered up by the authorities.

You can look in vain for a shred of credible evidence to support this outrageous charge. Or, indeed, for any explanation of how, in an era when crime reporters had close contacts with immigration agencies, such a big story might have been kept out of the newspapers.

Many websites, invariably without proper evidence, wrongly link Brittan to a range of scandals.

These include the story that detectives seized a list of names of high-profile alleged visitors to the Elm Guest House in Barnes, South-West London — a gay-friendly establishment.

The list included the names of several senior MPs, a high-ranking policeman, a leading tycoon, figures from the National Front and Sinn Fein, an official of the Royal Household, an MI5 officer, two pop stars and the traitorous Soviet spy Anthony Blunt. 

Cyril Smith, the late Liberal MP, was named as a regular at the guest house, where he allegedly met teenage rent boys when the homosexual age of consent was 21.

The guest house has also been linked to a now-defunct Tory fringe group that promoted homosexual rights.

But none of the websites that claim Brittan was on such a list of visitors has produced on-the-record testimony from a single victim who will support their serious charges.

Late Liberal MP Cyril Smith has been named as a regular at the Elm Guest House, where he is alleged to have met teenage rent boys who were under the age of consent

Late Liberal MP Cyril Smith has been named as a regular at the Elm Guest House, where he is alleged to have met teenage rent boys who were under the age of consent

Business Secretary on Cyril Smith ‘cover up’ allegations

In fact, a close reading of some of them suggests they are motivated by an unpleasant anti-Semitism which Brittan, whose parents were of Lithuanian-Jewish descent, faced throughout his career.

For example, when Brittan was forced to leave the Cabinet during the Westland affair — when ministers were divided over how best to rescue a troubled helicopter firm — the Right-wing Tory backbencher John Stokes crudely said Brittan should be replaced by a ‘red-blooded, red-faced Englishman, preferably from landed interests’.

The second reason why Brittan is back in the headlines is because he was Home Secretary during the time-period that is central to the major official inquiry set up by the Government into historic child abuse across all sections of society.

It has been alleged, in particular, that the Home Office was responsible for a cover-up of sexual abuse allegations.

The former Home Secretary himself, it is alleged, failed to act properly on a dossier about VIP paedophiles handed to him by the Tory MP Geoffrey Dickens in 1983.

Brittan initially claimed never to have received such a dossier, but is later said to have asked Home Office officials to ‘look carefully’ at it.

And then, of course, there are Brittan’s links with the woman chosen to head the Government’s sex abuse inquiry, Lord Mayor of London Fiona Woolf.

Mrs Woolf was forced to resign yesterday because she had been seen to be too compromised, living in the same street as Brittan and being a friend of his wife.

Mrs Woolf had to quit after it was revealed that a letter between her and Home Secretary Theresa May, aiming to play down Mrs Woolf’s links with Brittan, was rewritten seven times with Home Office assistance.

‘Whatever the rights and wrongs of Woolf’s appointment, this has left Brittan in an awful position,’ says a family friend. ‘The public will understandably think it’s all a stitch-up.’

It doesn’t help, either, that there is widespread concern that the Establishment does not really want to address claims of historic child abuse because its complicity might be exposed.

For the Home Office has a shabby record in the 1970s and 1980s, as exposed by the Mail, of tolerating and even promoting the paedophile agenda — not to mention covering it up.

Personally, Lord Brittan and his wife Diana are clearly deeply upset by what is happening.

‘He’s now an old man,’ said the source close to the family. ‘He isn’t well. He hasn’t spoken in the House of Lords since the end of 2013 and has been in hospital this week. He can’t easily deal with these allegations.’

Labour MP Jim Hood linked Leon Brittan to sex abuse allegations in a House of Commons debate this week

Labour MP Jim Hood linked Leon Brittan to sex abuse allegations in a House of Commons debate this week

One parliamentary colleague added: ‘We are supposed to have a system where you are innocent unless proven guilty. So isn’t it incumbent on those making allegations of this sort against Leon Brittan to prove they are true, not for him to prove they are untrue?’

Indeed, friends have compared his ordeal with that of former Tory party treasurer Lord McAlpine, who was wrongly accused of paedophilia after a BBC programme on the subject, without any evidence.

They have also highlighted a major flaw in many of the wilder allegations against Brittan: like any senior minister, he had Special Branch protection from the time of his appointment until he left the Cabinet in 1986.

‘Is it really credible that he could regularly slip his security cordon and carry out child sex abuse?’ one friend asks. ‘Is it really credible that Special Branch would drive him to a brothel in West London, wait outside, then drive him home again? Are we seriously to believe this?’

Meanwhile, key figures in the ‘Cabinet Minister Scandal’ of 1984 said this week that they continue to believe Leon Brittan was a victim of MI5 smears.

Sir Bernard Ingham, now 82, told me that lobby reporters who, in 1984, put allegations to him about an unnamed minister being involved in child sex abuse were simply ‘on a fishing trip, trying to get me to slip up, which is the sort of thing that was happening all the time’.

Richard Ingrams, then the editor of Private Eye, told me this week that his magazine’s report about the case, which Brittan seized on as evidence of his innocence, was written by Paul Foot, the late Left-wing investigative reporter who had written extensively about Secret Service attempts to undermine other frontbench politicians.

‘This rumour about Leon Brittan was very widespread,’ Ingrams said. ‘We went to great lengths to try to stand the story up, but there appeared to be no evidence to support it at all. Paul concluded that it was being put about to discredit him.’

Foot had earlier exposed how, in Northern Ireland in the 1970s, the security service mounted an operation called Clockwork Orange to persuade the Press to report spurious claims that politicians such as Harold Wilson were being paid by the IRA. This was part of an attempt by Right-wing elements in the security services to stage a coup d’etat to force Wilson’s Labour government out of office.

To complicate matters, Leon Brittan has since been dragged into another unsavoury story.

In 2012, a woman went to the police claiming that 45 years previously, when she was a 19-year-old student, she had been raped by Brittan in his London home. At the time, he was in his late 20s and a rising Tory star.

Detectives duly interviewed Brittan about the allegation under caution, and the story was eventually leaked to the Independent on Sunday by a Labour MP in July of this year.

Brittan released a statement strenuously denying the allegation, which he called ‘wholly without foundation’. For its part, the Crown Prosecution Service is said to have concluded that there were ‘gaping holes’ in the woman’s account and no action has been taken.

Whatever the truth, 30 years after horrible rumours first emerged about his alleged links with child sex abuse, Lord Brittan must wish that he could have the opportunity at last to be exonerated — but fears he is in a position where he simply cannot win. One thing is sure: the fiasco over Fiona Woolf certainly hasn’t helped him.

Source: DailyMail

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One Response

  1. Squodgy says:

    Well then, there must be smoke without fire after all………erm…NO!

Leave a Reply

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