Heart of Darkness II: How the British Conservative Party Covered Up for Paedophiles in Its Ranks
Evidence shows that throughout the Thatcher years, known paedophiles were protected at the highest levels of government. It’s only the tip of the iceberg.
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As we’ve already seen in the first part of this series on institutional paedophilia at the highest levels of British society, the Royal Family has a problem, and very few people want to discuss it. Not only has King Charles frequently allowed child sex abusers such as Jimmy Savile and Bishop Peter Ball into his inner circle, but many other cases of abuse linked to members of the royal household barely get reported.
Indeed, as with the notorious Louis Mountbatten, Prince Andrew and others, there appears to have been concerted efforts by the likes of the security services, the media, and the CPS, to keep such allegations as quiet as possible. Of course, none of this is possible without the consent of the British government. It sounds like conspiracy theories, of course, yet the evidence that prominent individuals have operated with impunity is plain to see and a matter of public record.
Also, in our previous article, we touched briefly on Sir Peter Morrison, the Conservative MP for Chester, between 1974 and 1992. Between 1988 and 1990, he was also Parliamentary Private Secretary to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and confirmed by multiple sources to be a flagrant paedophile. Given his position, he’s a good place to start part two of this series.
For those reading from abroad with little knowledge of the British political system, the country runs on a multiparty system, with Members of Parliament (MPs) sitting in the House of Commons. These parties include the right-wing Conservative Party (frequently nicknamed simply “the Tories”), often suggested as the default choice of many middle and upper-class Britons. Much like the American Republican Party, they swung from traditional conservatism to neoliberalism in the 1980s and lately toward the far-right. The other side of the spectrum was once traditionally the Labour Party. Formerly a socialist party, they have also moved into a staunchly right-wing position. In a distant third place is the Liberal Democrats, with other regional parties such as the Scottish National Party (SNP) also being significant. Part four of Heart of Darkness will cover the Labour Party.
Peter Morrison: Thatcher’s Personal Paedophile
As mentioned, Peter Morrison was the Tory MP for Chester from 1974 to 1992 and an ardent supporter of Margaret Thatcher. He was one of the first MPs to urge her to run for leadership in 1975 and, by 1986, he’d become Deputy Conservative Party chairman under Norman Tebbit, one of the most prominent and right-wing Tories of the entire Thatcher era. By this point, it was already known within the Conservative Party that he was a paedophile.
“I began to hear allegations, coming from his constituency, when he was with me at [Conservative Central Office]; that he was excessively interested in schoolboys,” Tebbit was later quoted in Margaret Thatcher: The Authorised Biography. “I faced him. He swore absolutely that there was no truth in it. I wasn’t absolutely convinced.”
Indeed, Morrison’s child abuse seems to have been almost an open secret within the Conservative Party, with levels of abuse reaching the prolific level. The Guardian has reported that Morrison received a caution for cottaging (having or seeking sex in a public toilet) with underage boys, a fact confirmed by police. As such, it will have been known to the security services and Thatcher. Another former MP, Edwina Currie, stated that Morrison regularly had sex with 16-year-old boys when the age of homosexual consent was 21 and went as far as to call him a “notable paederast” in her own 2002 autobiography.
The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse in 2019 took evidence from Morrison’s long-time friend and former director-general of MI5, Eliza Manningham-Buller, who said she may have provided the cabinet secretary, Sir Robert Armstrong, with information that Morrison had a “penchant for small boys.”
“By the end of the 80s … my friendship with Peter Morrison was withering. He was seeking to give the impression that I was his girlfriend, which was not accurate. The allegations [of paedophile activity], which I did not know the truth of … made me uncomfortable.” — Eliza Manningham-Buller
In November of 1986, Sir Antony Duff, then Director-General of MI5, wrote to Margaret Thatcher’s Cabinet Secretary, Sir Robert Armstrong, to state that several sources had made child abuse allegations against Morrison.
Rather than the welfare of children, this conversation centred on the size of the security risk as far as blackmail by the Soviet Union was concerned. Duff believed the threat was minor as Morrison had little access to valuable secrets. Morrison was advised not to travel to the USSR in case the KGB should blackmail him. Duff concluded, “At present stage … the risk of political embarrassment to the Government is greater than the security danger.”
After leaving office, Armstrong confirmed this and his disinterest, stating: “Clearly, I was aware of it at the time, but I was not concerned with the personal aspect of it.”
Meanwhile, Barry Stevens, a former bodyguard to Thatcher, says he warned the Prime Minister directly that Morrison was engaging in underage orgies. Despite the warning, and seemingly a bar put on him rising to be Chairman of the Conservative Party, Morrison was still shockingly given the role of Parliamentary Private Secretary to Thatcher herself in 1990. He was then made leader of her campaign team for the leadership challenge against her that same year, the challenge that she eventually lost, ending her reign as Prime Minister.
In his role leading Thatcher’s campaign team, Morrison utterly failed to gauge the mood of MPs, believing that the leadership was a foregone conclusion. On one occasion, MP Alan Clark even found him asleep on the job. Despite this incompetence, he was, of course, knighted by the late Queen Elizabeth in 1991.
Despite the explicit knowledge of the security services and senior Conservatives, including Thatcher, nothing was done about Peter Morrison, and he was allowed to continue his pattern of child abuse. Indeed, far from being arrested or even ostracised within the party, Morrison was moved even closer to the Prime Minister and given the immense responsibility of maintaining her position, a job he barely seems to have been competent for. The willful blindness and organised cover-ups of establishment paedophilia, it appears, were standard policies.
However, Morrison’s offending may have been even worse than was known within the Conservative Party at the time. In October 2012, the leader of the Welsh Conservatives, Rod Richards, implicated Morrison in the North Wales Child Abuse Scandal, stating that he and other big Tory names were inexplicably listed amongst visitors to the children’s homes at the centre of the scandal.
Between 1974 and 1990, coincidentally almost the exact years Morrison was an MP, children at several Welsh care homes, including Bryn Estyn in Wrexham, were subjected to physical and sexual abuse. Over a hundred allegations of abuse were made, likely just the tip of the iceberg given how often such abuse goes unreported.
Once again, the allegations were not new. An internal investigation was made as far back as 1979, and in the mid-1980s, Alison Taylor, then manager of a home in Gwynedd, began to hear stories from children about abuse at other homes before they reached her care. Upon delving into the allegations, she discovered that complaints had already been made, but nothing had been done. Taylor unsuccessfully attempted to raise the issue before going to the police in 1986. Again, nothing was done, and in January 1987, she was sacked.
Taylor was eventually forced to go to the media. In 1990, an investigation was opened that was later found to have been thorough but stifled at every turn by the non-cooperation of Children’s Services and Social Services. Further enquiries were undertaken, and eventually, six care workers were prosecuted, three having worked at Bryn Estyn in Wrexham. One of those jailed for sexual abuse was Peter Howarth, the deputy head, with his offences ranging “from indecent assault to buggery.” He received a ten-year sentence in 1994 but died in 1997.
However, there were still many questions unanswered, primarily about how the abuse could have gone on for so long and why over a hundred legitimate complaints were ignored. There were allegations that police had covered up the abuse and that elite names were involved.
Clwyd County Council commissioned John Jillings to produce a report to deal with the allegations of a cover-up. Once again, the police essentially refused to cooperate. The North Wales chief constable refused to meet with the panel of inquiry, 130 boxes of material handed to the police were not made available, and the council banned the board from appealing to the local press. Eventually, The Jillings Report found up to 200 victims had been abused, that beatings, indecent assault and rape were common in the Welsh care system, and that at least 12 former residents had died from unnatural causes. Despite being aware of the allegations, it was judged that claims against prominent names were beyond the scope of the inquiry and should be heard separately.
The report’s findings were suppressed, officially for fear of libel, with council insurers warning that the results would encourage lawsuits and compensation claims. Money was put before the welfare of children, with every single copy of the report believed to have been destroyed. Luckily, they weren’t, and a surviving copy was eventually published 19 years later, in 2013. It was heavily redacted.
“What we found was horrific and on a significant scale. If the events in children’s homes in North Wales were to be translated into a film, Oliver Twist would seem relatively benign. The scale of what happened, and how it was allowed, are a disgrace, and a stain on the history of child care in this country.” — John Jillings
But what of those allegations against prominent members of society who, it was alleged, had partaken in the abuse? In 1997, the then Secretary of State for Wales, William Hague, ordered another inquiry into the allegations headed by Sir Ronald Waterhouse. The Waterhouse Report found no evidence “there was a wide-ranging conspiracy involving prominent persons and others with the objective of sexual activity with children in care.”
However, what wasn’t revealed then is that the Waterhouse enquiry hadn’t heard key evidence. Speaking in 2012, a former ITV journalist said that Waterhouse had been surprised that former Deputy Director of Bryn Alyn, Des Frost, had not been called to give evidence.
“More and more, instead of it being a conversation between the two of us, it was me telling him things, and my impression is that he was stunned, shocked, by the Des Frost allegations,” the unnamed journalist would later say. “I got the impression he knew nothing about it.
Not only was Frost not called, but the enquiry didn’t have access to key information as they could not view the files of Bryn Alyn Community Holdings. The files had been destroyed in an unfortunate and convenient fire in 1996, the circumstances of which remain uncertain. There were said to be “80 files of the key players missing.”
In the wake of the Jimmy Savile revelations, former victims of the abuse in Wales complained that The Waterhouse Report had focused too much on care workers and not enough on their allegations against prominent public figures. Channel 4 subsequently reported that Peter Morrison had visited Bryn Estyn several times, and witnesses had seen him drive away from the home with a young boy. One victim, Alan Leyshon, would say on record he had been taken from the house by “people in power.” In contrast, on the BBC’s Newsnight, another victim, Steve Messham, alleged that the circle of paedophiles using care homes for abuse went far beyond Jimmy Savile, with businessmen, MPs and police officers all involved, with him being abused multiple times by a prominent Thatcher-era politician.
The name that came up was that of Tory Lord McAlpine. A Thatcher loyalist, McAlpine was a big deal in the Conservative Party and coincidentally had been the man responsible for ensuring Norman Tebbit became chairman. McAlpine began to trend on Twitter despite being unnamed By Newsnight, leading to a denial. Subsequently, the victim recanted their accusation, saying it had been a case of mistaken identity. The Guardian and Telegraphlater reported that McAlpine’s cousin, Jimmie, was likely the correct abuser, with the two showing a strong family resemblance, and that he had certainly visited the home, while Lord McAlpine, it appeared, had only ever been to Wrexham once.
Over 100 names of abusers were given to the police, with 49 possible suspects eventually being investigated. 18 were arrested. None of them were recognisable names. However, perhaps some small vindication came in 2016 when former police chief Superintendent Gordon Anglesea was given a 12-year sentence for the sexual abuse of two teenage boys, one of them from Bryn Estyn.
The Bryn Estyn victim said he had been trafficked around various locations and passed around “like a handbag.” Equally, while Lord McAlpine may not have been involved in abuse, his cousin’s apparent offending again shows how prominent these people were. While perhaps not a household name, Jimmie was chairman of Alfred McAlpine Ltd, the family business and one of Britain’s leading building and civil engineering companies, making him a multimillionaire many times over.
“The Peter Morrison case is a shameful saga of institutions avoiding responsibility despite widespread rumours about his ‘penchant for small boys. It appears [the] police knew of the allegations but did nothing. Security services knew. [The] Cabinet secretary knew but thought it was for [the] prime minister and Tory party to deal. The prime minister took no action. The Tory party did nothing. What we see here is buck-passing across the board and Morrison escaping scrutiny because of his connections.” — Richard Scorer, solicitor to the victims, represented at the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse
From the Top Down: Thatcher, Savile and Heath
Margaret Thatcher’s willingness to cover up paedophilia within her party may be somewhat surprising, but it is something that is seen time and again throughout this article. Not only was she well aware of Peter Morrison’s offending, but time and again, over the coming sections, we will hear of she blocked investigations that ensured child sex offenders remained both at large and part of the Conservative Party. Why this might be is open to debate.
Indeed, like Prince Charles in our previous article, Thatcher seems to have been surrounded by offenders, not least Jimmy Savile, the notorious former television personality and paedophile.
Like with Charles, the right-wing tabloid press in the UK tries to portray their friendship as Savile weaving his Svengali-like influence to put poor Mrs Thatcher under his spell, worming his way into her confidence for his evil ends. It is a view that does too much service to Savile and would have us believe that “The Iron Lady” was for fooling. Besides the obvious absurdity of the suggestion, it also defies logic. Are we to believe that everyone wasn’t thoroughly vetted at the height of the Irish troubles and the Cold War with the USSR? MI5 could have told Thatcher what Jimmy Savile had for breakfast in 1972.
It seems that Thatcher and Savile came into contact as he did with Prince Charles through charity work. Letters released in 2012 confirmed a “close friendship” between Savile and Thatcher, with him publicly describing her as “marvellous.” However, these letters remain heavily redacted. What could need redacting in letters between the Prime Minister and a television presenter? The redactions, six in all, will last for another thirty years and include a note of a telephone message and an entire letter from Savile to Thatcher.
Such was their relationship that there had been constant reports that Savile spent eleven consecutive New Years at Chequers, the Prime Minister’s country retreat. This was denied by Thatcher’s daughter, Carol. Equally, throughout her time in office, the Prime Minister lobbied hard for Savile to get his knighthood, despite being warned about his behaviour by Sir Robert Armstrong and his successor Sir Robin Butler.
However, Thatcher isn’t the only former Prime Minister with potential skeletons in the closet. No pun intended.
Serving as Prime Minister between 1970 and 1974, Edward Heath led Britain in a tumultuous time, with his reign at the top coinciding with some of the worst fighting of the troubles in the North of Ireland and the imposition of direct rule. Equally, his war against the unions ended in a miner’s strike and a three-day working week to conserve energy supplies. Despite this, he was seen for decades afterwards as the friendly face of old-school conservatism, being bitterly opposed to the “greed is good” capitalism of the Thatcher years.
Heath was a lifelong bachelor, and there has long been debate over his sexuality, with many suggesting he was a closeted homosexual. However, there has never been any strong evidence of this, with no partners having revealed themselves, even long after legalisation and acceptance. For her part, Thatcher believed Heath was gay, and later in his life, he voted to lower the age of consent from 21 to 18 and then to 16., unusual for a Tory. Many believe that he deeply repressed his sexuality to ensure his career was successful. However, many others also think Heath to have been asexual and genuinely had little interest in either men or women.
Sadly, those opposed to homosexuality have often made unfounded accusations of paedophilia against gay men, much like trans women currently suffer from the same kind of abuse. As always happens, singular incidents are pushed to provide a narrative that all community members are alike. We see it with race, we see it with religion, and we see it with sexuality. As such, we must be careful to separate genuine and legitimate cases from simple homophobia against a man who appears to have been closeted.
That said, the accusations against Ted Heath are staggering and go beyond what anyone could expect from homophobia, political vendettas, or pure fantasy. The former PM died in 2003, but the Westminster Child Sex Scandal brought his name forward as somebody who had been involved with abuse in his lifetime.
Heath had been the subject of online rumours and talk for a long time. Unfortunately, some well-grounded accusations were mixed with Q-Anon-level nonsense about Heath being a practising Satanist who sacrificed children. It was straight out of the American Satanic abuse playbook and served only to discredit other allegations that sat alongside them. These rumours, common fodder for the likes of the David Icke forums, found their way to hoaxer Carl Beech, who, as one of the police’s star witnesses, repeated them to investigators, making it into the papers.
We’ll look far deeper into Carl Beech and his allegations in our next article on Elm Guest House. Suffice it to say his ludicrous statements served only to crush any real potential for investigating the claims surrounding Heath. Popular consciousness will forever link the allegations made to Beech, despite there being many more people standing up than one hoaxer.
Indeed, at one point, alongside the Metropolitan Police, the police forces of Gloucestershire, Hampshire, Kent, Wiltshire, Thames Valley, and Jersey were all investigating allegations against the former Prime Minister. In all, there were 42 allegations by 40 individuals. Police stated that if he had been alive, there would have been enough for them to interview him in seven of the 43 allegations, yet that shouldn’t infer any guilt.
The Dickens Dossier
Moving back to the Thatcher years, possibly the biggest cover-up involved the infamous Dickens Dossier. It was on November 24, 1983, that Geoffrey Dickens, the Conservative MP for Littleborough and Saddleworth, handed then Home Secretary Leon Brittan a dossier that he had compiled on what he alleges was an organised child sex abuse ring operating in government and the British establishment, including Buckingham Palace. Brittan confirmed 2014 that he had been handed a “substantial sum of papers” by Dickens and handed them to the Home Office.
The dossier was three years of work by Dickens, who had investigated the claims of high-placed paedophile rings since 1981 when he named the former British High Commissioner to Canada Peter Hayman as a paedophile in the House of Commons. Since that point, Dickens came to believe, seemingly backed by abundant evidence, that “big, big names — people in positions of power, influence, and responsibility” were actively engaging in child abuse at the top levels of the establishment.
It would be a dangerous belief to hold.
“The noose around my neck grew tighter after I named a former high-flying British diplomat on the Floor of the House. Honourable Members will understand that where big money is involved and as important names came into my possession so the threats began. First, I received threatening telephone calls followed by two burglaries at my London home. Then, more seriously, my name appeared on a multi-killer’s hit list.” — Geoffrey Dickens
The contents of the dossier and the names within have become a mystery. So, have the official reasons why the dossier was never actioned or investigated. A Home Office review in 2013 claimed that the dossier was passed on to the police by Brittan but not retained by the Home Office. Despite the claims, Scotland Yard has said it has no record of any investigation into the allegations, and the Home Office has “no record of specific allegations by Mr Dickens of child sex abuse by prominent public figures.”
Lord Macdonald QC, the former Director of Public Prosecutions, recommended an official inquiry into the fate of the dossier, stating that its vanishing was “alarming” and that an investigation into the circumstance of the disappearance and what action the police did or did not take was required. None was forthcoming.
While no official reason for the vanishing of the dossier has ever come to light, unofficially, the grounds are pretty clear given the fact that Dickens had asked Brittan to investigate the diplomatic and civil services and the activities of Buckingham Palace. As with the allegations against Mountbatten, the names that would have been revealed would have done irreparable damage to the British state and the establishment, igniting a social powder keg that would have fuelled public anger and disdain for decades.
Sir Peter Hayman, presumably the first name on Dicken’s radar, had been identified as a threat to national security as far back as the 1960s through “sexual perversion” and the “explicit records of his sexual activities and fantasies” that he kept, some of them relating to children. Hayman was a career diplomat and, quietly, an intelligence officer with MI6. The Guardianstated in 2014 that he was as high as a deputy director.
Hayman taking up a post in the mid-1970s would mean he’d have worked directly under MI6 chief Maurice Oldfield, who served as the head of MI6 between 1973 and 1978 and had worked in intelligence ever since the Second World War. In 2012, it was reported that Oldfield was one of the names linked to the notorious Elm Guest House, where allegedly underage children were procured for important clients. Subsequent investigations revealed that the allegations were seemingly false. Again, we’ll look at that in our next article.
However, what wasn’t false was that in 1978, Peter Hayman accidentally left a package of violent child pornography on a bus. Other material was discovered after a raid on his West London flat by police. Amazingly, he was never charged with any offence, and the decision not to prosecute was said to have come “from high up.”
That same year, the homes of several members of the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE) were raided, with Peter Hayman being a member. As those who read last week’s article will recall, PIE was a pro-paedophile “activist group” active between 1974 and 1984, campaigning to abolish the age of consent and to legitimise paedophilia in mainstream circles through public exposure. The quite open group was frequently utilised by paedophiles to network and exchange child pornography and other illegal material.
Members of PIE included the notorious Peter Righton, a serial child molester who was a consultant at the National Children’s Bureau, Director of Education at the National Institute of Social Work, and lecturer in child protection. Righton, amongst others, was the author of several pro-paedophile pamphlets, and in 1992 he was convicted of importing child pornography from Holland. Despite this, he was allowed to live on the Thornham Magna estate of Lord Henniker, another former diplomat. The estate was also an educational and recreational centre for children, used by the Islington Suffolk project that gave children from inner city London holidays in the picturesque countryside. Again, we’ll discuss the Islington Abuse scandal in a future article. Still, it’s interesting that one involved in that abuse was Robert Coghlan, a senior diplomat and British envoy imprisoned for three years for smuggling abusive images of children into the UK. Police found sacks of videotapes showing children as young as 11 years old being abused.
When confronted with the charges against Righton, Henniker claimed that his son ran the estate and he wasn’t responsible for him, with his daughter-in-law saying Righton had come through an estate agent. Despite the warnings and conviction of public record, Righton lived on the estate until he died in 2008. Survivors have claimed that children were brought to Righton there. For an interesting little fact, Lord Henniker’s wife, Osla Benning, had once been Prince Phillip’s girlfriend and was Lord Louis Mountbatten’s goddaughter.
Other members of PIE included Tom O’Carroll, who sat on the National Council for Civil Liberties (now Liberty), Charles Napier, who had been a gym teacher and later an English Language Trainer at the British Council, and Douglas Slade, who in the 1960s and 1970s ran a “helpline” for paedophiles to get advice on their criminality.
Then there was Geoffrey Prime. Prime was a spy who worked for Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), perhaps best described to readers as the British NSA. He was also a double agent who passed information to the KGB throughout the 1970s after approaching the Soviet Union himself in 1968. Frighteningly, Prime was also a paedophile with extensive records on over 2000 children. An index he created featured notes on each young girl, photographs, their parents’ routine, and when the girl could be found alone. Between 1981 and 1982, after he left GCHQ, Prime sexually assaulted three young girls and was arrested, being sentenced to 38 years. That was 35 years for spying and three for the sexual assaults. He was released in 2001 and is still alive today.
After the trial back in 1983, Geoffrey Dickens asked Margaret Thatcher in parliament about Prime being a member of PIE. Thatcher denied that his membership of PIE had been known and, in a subsequent letter to Dickens, denied Prime had been a member. In August, The Sun newspaper reported otherwise, revealing that American officials were angry at the denial, telling the newspaper that the Attorney General, Sir Michael Havers, had held back the information “to avoid embarrassing security chiefs.” At the time, the Americans were investigating child sex links among British diplomats in Washington. They believed they had evidence to also link Prime with the North American Man Boy Lovers Association (NAMBLA), the American answer to PIE.
For the record, when Leon Brittan was under pressure to outright ban PIE, he failed to do so as he, the Home Secretary, believed the law concerning the incitement of sexual activities with children to be “not so clear.”
When Dickens used parliamentary privilege to name Hayman in the House of Commons back in March of 1981, again, Michael Havers was there to keep things quiet, begging Dickens not to reveal the name. When he did, Dickens’ fellow Tories condemned him for it, suggesting the naming was an abuse of process and damaged the government’s reputation. Havers would attempt damage limitation, claiming that Heyman was never a member of the executive committee and his “collection [of child pornography] was not extreme and had not warranted prosecution.”
This was a lie.
“The detectives also learnt that he was a member of a group of seven men and two women who were corresponding with each other and swapping photographs. One of them shared fantasies about torturing children to death with yet another paedophile. The police prosecuted two of the group but let the others go because they were consenting adults who were not making money from pornography. Hayman was given a warning not to send obscene material through the post.” — The Anglo-Irish Vice Ring, Joseph de Burca
A file released in 2015 following public pressure entitled “SECURITY. Sir Peter Hayman: allegations against a former public official of unnatural sexual proclivities; security aspects” reveals that government officials were briefed on “lines to take” should they be questioned about the affair. Margaret Thatcher had been told about Hayman in 1980. A Cabinet Office spokesman said, “This file was originally kept closed as it contained information from the security services and advice from the law officers.”
Hayman was caught red-handed in a public lavatory in 1984 and convicted of gross indecency. Despite this, he was only reprimanded, with Margaret Thatcher threatening that if it happened again, he would be stripped of his honours. Given her reputation as “the Iron Lady,” it’s a pathetic response to a man she knew to be a paedophile.
Hail Boothby
By this point, Margaret Thatcher blatantly ignoring the fact that an MP and former senior member of MI6 were paedophiles should come as no surprise. In our previous article, we saw how wilfully those in royal circles had been to ignore child sex crimes and just how willing the security services were to ensure that prominent names were kept out of both the courts and the press.
Perhaps the best example of this is Lord Boothby. Robert Boothby, Baron Boothby, often simply Bob Boothby, was one of those uniquely British people called “a character.” He’d read history at Oxford before becoming a stockbroker, entering politics in 1923 and becoming a Conservative Party MP the year afterwards. He served as the Parliamentary Private Secretary to then Chancellor Winston Churchill, later serving in his war cabinets as a junior minister. Boothby could even boast of being one of the few British parliamentarians to have met Hitler, having regularly visited Weimar Germany. Invited to dinner, the unimpressed Boothby had a tale to tell.
“[Hitler] sprang to his feet, lifted his right arm, and shouted ‘Hitler!’; … I responded by clicking my heels together, raising my right arm, and shouting back: ‘Boothby!’” — Lord Boothby
Such tales were what Boothby was all about. There was often a willingness to see him as a colourful and entertaining individual, who, as years wore on, was something of a throwback to an earlier era. It was fairly well known that Boothby seemingly didn’t believe in monogamy, having a long-standing affair with Lady Dorothy Macmillan, wife of the Conservative politician and future Prime Minister Harold Macmillan. The matter was so well known that the Queen Mother was reported to have said, “The press knew all about it.” If they knew, they certainly didn’t report on it. Equally, when Lady Macmillan’s sister died in the presence of John Bodkin Adams, a suspected serial killer, the police are said to have been hesitant to act for fear of drawing the gaze of the press to the infidelity.
The press and police covering for Boothby’s affair opens up questions about what else they were covering up, with Macmillan not being the only individual in his private life. While he was discreet, it was known that Boothby was bisexual and enjoyed “rough trade.” In other words, despite his elite status, he wanted sex with working-class men, a particular form of exploitation.
In 1963, Boothby began another affair with Leslie Holt, an East End burglar with links to the notorious Kray twins, Ronnie and Reggie. The Krays were London’s most well-known gangsters of the 1960s, responsible for multiple murders, robberies and widespread racketeering. While both were brutally violent, Ronnie was by far the worst, with psychiatrists later saying he was “educationally subnormal, psychopathic, schizophrenic and insane.” Despite this, he and Boothby became great friends.
What could they have in common? Being paedophiles, of course.
Lord Boothby was part of a cross-bench circle of friends in parliament that were all homosexual or bisexual at a time when it was still a criminal offence that could end careers. Unfortunately, several of those involved were less than savoury. There was the Nazi praising American Henry’ Chips’ Channon MP, who once dropped his pants to be thrashed by the paedophile occult scholar Montague Summers. There was Tom Driberg, whose dalliances with the KGB will need a whole section in the coming Labour Party article.
Worthy of an expanded mention is Victor Montagu, perhaps better known as Viscount Hinchingbrooke. Hinchingbrooke was the Conservative MP for South Dorset between 1941 and 1962, later being associated with the infamous Conservative Monday Club. He was the eldest son of the 9th Earl of Sandwich, steeped in British aristocratic tradition. He was also a paedophile who “was let off with a caution by police and the director of public prosecutions in 1972 for indecently assaulting a boy for a duration of nearly two years.” His son, Robert Montagu, has also said that he was sexually abused by his father daily between the age of seven and eleven.
While he was never charged with any sexual offence, it was widely known that Ronnie Kray was not only gay but liked young boys and was willing to pimp them out. Kray organised orgies and not only had sex with Boothby himself, but kept the peer supplied with children in return for favours. Repulsively, in 1997, Kray biographer John Pearson revealed in The Independent that one account of Boothby at these orgies told of how he liked young boys to defecate on him, with another describing him as being found naked, surrounded by criminals and boys, with anal beads “protruding from his anus.”
The press was kept silent for a time, with the Conservative-supporting Express refusing to publish the story. Eventually, the Sunday Mirror ran with “The Peer and the Gangster” in 1964, and while no names were published, it was obvious who was involved. However, Boothby wasn’t alone in his associations with the Krays, with Driberg also in their circle. As such, the story continuing to run did nothing favourable for either Labour or the Tories. Under pressure from all sides, including threats from the Krays, The Mirror backed down and retracted the story with an apology, paying Boothby £40,000. As a result, the press became unwilling to talk about the Krays, meaning there was little scrutiny of their activities for years to come.
Yet, that’s not all there is to the story as, once again, the spectre of MI5 lurks in the background.
Documents released in 2015 revealed that MI5 had investigated the association between Boothby and the Krays in 1964, confirming that orgies were held, which attracted members of the clergy and that concern over the affair had gone right to the top and Prime Minister Alec Douglas-Home. However, that’s not all.
Over the past two articles, firstly on Lord Mountbatten’s activities and last week on the Royal Family, we talked about how MI5 had used care homes in Ireland to pimp out children and gather compromising evidence to use for blackmail. This idea wasn’t new. For the majority of the 1960s, homosexuality was still illegal and something that would end a career if it came into the public domain. As such, the security services loved nothing more than to have hard evidence they could use for blackmail. Eventually, as homosexuality became more acceptable, they moved on to child sex abuse instead.
As such, the 2015 documents revealed that MI5 had used the Krays to gather evidence against homosexual politicians, with Driberg, who was linked to the KGB, presumably being one of them. However, given that we know Ronnie Kray was a paedophile and that many of his orgies and sex trafficking involved young boys, it’s almost certain that the service knew about the paedophilia of Boothby. Perhaps that’s why the services of Arnold Goodman, later Lord Goodman, were employed to cover everything up. Goodman was a solicitor and advisor to politicians such as Harold Wilson and was portrayed as the “power behind the throne” of the British establishment by Private Eye. Much was made of the fact that he was “never married,” frequently a press euphemism for being gay.
Speaking in 2015, a former associate of the Krays, David Teale, felt used by both the police and MI5. Teale had been part of the Krays’ network, and the twins were increasingly imposing on him after the murder of a rival, George Cornell. Teale says that given what was known about Ronnie, he feared for the safety of young men and boys in his family, agreeing to inform the police.
“My life has never been right since. I want someone to say sorry for what they put me through. I want them to look into what happened. It was a miscarriage of justice and the files are there for the police to read,” Teale told The Mirror. “MI5 and the government were protecting the Krays, it was all crooked. Getting information was all they were interested in so they just had us away.”
Instead of going after the Krays as they feared exposing Boothby, the police arrested Teale and his brothers, with each being jailed for three years after a trial held in camera, meaning the press and public were banned from hearing the evidence.
Indeed, such was the fear that the Boothby-Kray connection would turn out to be another Profumo-style affair, MI5 made sure that they had a mole on the inside, recruiting ‘Mad’ Teddy Smith to gather intelligence and seemingly protect the Krays from exposure from within. Like Ronnie, Teddy Smith was seriously mentally ill, spending time inside Broadmoor, Britain’s most notorious asylum for the criminally insane. He was also the on-off boyfriend of Ronnie, meaning he couldn’t be closer to what was happening.
“Thinking back, I suddenly realised it had to be Teddy. It was the only thing that made sense. Teddy was always hanging around, always listening to everything that was going on. Every time he got nicked, the case would mysteriously collapse, letting Reggie and Ronnie walk.” — David Teale
The Scottish Connection
Boothby wasn’t the only “character” to be a paedophile. Occasionally seen wearing a Highland smock in parliament, or at least his blue baronial tartan, Sir Nicholas Fairbairn lived in a 13th-century castle, had numerous affairs, and would carry around two ceremonial revolvers that he would fire when drunk on whisky, which was frequently. If he had been a character on television, he would likely have been called a stereotype.
However, there was nothing funny about Sir Nicholas Fairbairn, and as a due warning, the coming passages are particularly disturbing.
Fairburn, who was appointed Solicitor General for Scotland by Margaret Thatcher, making him one of her closest allies, was a child rapist, repeatedly raping a girl from when she was aged just 4.
The revelations came to light after Fairburn died in 2014, when Susie Henderson, the daughter of Scottish QC Robert Henderson, went public. Henderson and Fairborn were friends, with the pair taking turns raping Susie.
“I hated that man. More than I hated my father. He just really wasn’t a nice man,” she told The Daily Mail. “I want it acknowledged that my father and Fairbairn did something very evil. Not just to me. There are other children out there.”
Aged just 5, Henderson would arrange her dolls around her bed to try and protect herself and keep the men away: “I put them there thinking that, when my father came for me in the night, he wouldn’t know it was me and he would take one of my dolls instead. But he never did.”
Henderson first approached the police to tell her story in 2000, but, as you may expect by now, her allegations were ignored. Her allegations included multiple rapes and sexual assaults by the pair over many years, alongside accusations that she had been trafficked to sex parties for other people in the legal profession.
“We were in the kitchen. I was maybe four years old. I had a skirt on, and Nicholas and my Dad had been drinking, and my Dad told me to sit on Nicholas’s knee. I sat on his knee, and he put his hand up my skirt and abused me. My Dad just stood there laughing.” — Susie Henderson
The two both living in Edinburgh, Robert Henderson QC was also linked to a paedophile ring in the city, one containing prominent men in the legal profession. After coming forward, Susie gave another name — John Watt, who raped her on a couch. Still alive, Watt was found guilty of five charges against four victims in 2022.
Speaking to the BBC, Susie said, “It was like I’d been believed… That was always my fear that nobody would believe me. I knew that I’d been believed, and that I’d got justice at last.”
While the rest of Henderson’s activities, including the so-called “Magic Circle” affair, are beyond this article’s scope, we see powerful individuals getting away with their crimes, with victims simply being ignored. What isn’t beyond the remit, however, is Nicholas Fairbairn, and next time we’ll look further into the allegations he was linked with Elm Guest House.
As a final note in this section, just three days before the publication of this article, it was revealed that Susie Henderson and other survivors of the Edinburgh paedophile ring were to be excluded from an inquiry into child abuse in care homes. While the Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry (SCAI) was set up to examine “institutional” sex cases, Henderson says that victims of her father and others have nowhere else to go.
“I knew it was primarily about children in care but where do people go that have been abused by the Faculty of Advocates, one of Scotland’s most powerful institutions? Do we pursue a separate inquiry? Or are our voices not worth hearing? It makes me feel as though I’m somehow less important or that my suffering is not as bad because my abusers were my father and his friends. Members of the Faculty of Advocates clearly knew because several were involved. Some of them worked as prosecutors in the Crown Office. Is that not a matter of national significance that should be investigated by the inquiry?” — Susie Henderson
Even today, it seems that victims are still not being heard.
Institutional Paedophilia
Sadly, with this article already running to nearly 8000 words and much still to cover from Labour and the Lib Dems in the coming weeks, choices must be made about what information to include and what not to. For example, Henderson was a Conservative Party candidate for Inverness in the 1970s. Yet, he was far from prominent, and the “Magic Circle” was seemingly largely unrelated to the Conservative Party, even if many of those involved were probably members. Readers are, however, urged to read more on that case.
We also barely have time to talk about Sir Ian Macdonald Horobin. Horobin was the Tory Member of Parliament first for the now defunct Southwark Central in the 1930s and then for the equally gone Oldham East throughout most of the 1950s. He was arrested for indecency with young boys under 18 in May 1962. At trial, he admitted ten assaults and was sentenced to four years in prison. After prison, he moved to Tangier, Morocco, a popular haunt for sex tourism for Western paedophiles.
Let’s not ignore John Macnamara, the MP for Chelmsford, who, between 1935 and 1936, had Guy Burgess as his assistant. Burgess was one of the Cambridge Five Soviet spy rings alongside paedophile Anthony Blunt. Macnamara, meanwhile, was part of the Anglo-German Fellowship organisation that sought friendship with Nazi Germany, with many members being fascists. The group had around 350 members, with a shocking number of Tory MPs and Lords being in support. With Burgess, Macnamara travelled to Germany on a series of sex tours involving orgies with members of the Hitler Youth. Burgess was gathering information on Germany’s foreign policy intentions.
Covered extensively in the recent national press, there’s also little space to be wasted on Imran Ahmad Khan, the Conservative MP for Wakefield, between 2019 and 2022. That same year, Khan was convicted of indecently assaulting a 15-year-old boy in 2008 and sentenced to 18 months in prison. After his conviction, his fellow Tory MP Crispin Blunt said the sentence was a “dreadful miscarriage of justice” and “nothing short of an international scandal,” claiming the conviction “relied on lazy tropes about LGBT+ people.”
Equally, away from Tory MPs and Lords, there’s no shortage of paedophile councillors and mayors. Perhaps chief among these is Freddie Emery-Wallis, a major of Portsmouth, a county councillor between 1974 and 2001, and Deputy Lord Lieutenant for Hampshire, amongst other accolades. He was jailed in 2001 for two indecent assaults against boys.
Indeed, the list of Tories involved in child sex abuse is mind-boggling.
2010: John Barnett, former Maghull Conservative Club chairman.
2011: Ronald Chalmers, former chairman of the Eastwood Young Conservatives Association. Peter Hill Jones, parish councillor. Martin Fisher, councillor. John Butcher, councillor.
2012: Stephen Holmes, Hertfordshire County Council. Andrew Lamont, former Conservative councillor. David Lee, former Tory mayor of Chelmsford. John Smart, Conservative candidate for the Scottish parliament. Robert Bate, Tory councillor in Wycombe. George Lord, former leader of Worcestershire County Council.
2013: Nicholas Beaumont-Dark, son of Sir Anthony Beaumont-Dark.
2014: Angus Burgoyne, former chairman of the Folkestone and Hythe Conservative Association. Julian Mineur, ex-councillor. Martin Fisher, former councillor and Sheriff of Canterbury. David Whittaker, Isle of Wight and Newport parish councillor. Julian Mineur, councillor.
2016: Matthew Lock, ex-Conservative councillor. John Reaney, another councillor, this time from Colwyn Bay. Peter Allott, a former Tory councillor and teacher. Bob Bate, a district councillor.
2017: Richard Willis, councillor. Arthur Hodgson, former East Riding councillor.
2018: Rene Kinzett, a former councillor in Swansea. Michael Jamieson, former Perth Tory councillor. David Boswell, ex-mayor of Pembroke. Matthew Sephton, councillor. David Byrne, a Tory councillor in Yeovil.
2020: Mark Lerigo, former Conservative Party campaign manager.
2021: John Humphreys, former mayor of Exmouth.
2022: Edward Mordaunt, brother of Penny Mordaunt. Paul Davies, former Tory district councillor. David Smith, former Tory councillor.
2023: Daran Hill, advisor to the Welsh Conservatives.
What’s even worse is that this was just a selection.
The Quiet Part
Once again, as in our previous article, we begin to see the sheer scale of the problem when it’s laid in black and white. As with the Royal Family, child sex abuse at the very top is echoed by similar offences right down the chain. When this kind of offending was seen within the Catholic Church, it was called institutional paedophilia and a major international scandal. As with the church, we see that supreme efforts were made to cover up the abuses from the highest level, and as with the royals, the security services and police were more than culpable.
The attitude of the Conservative Party was simple — the party is all. No matter what the scandal was, preserving the name of the Tory Party was paramount. This is made clear from Michael Havers’ attempts to keep Geoffrey Dickens from publically revealing the name of Peter Hayman and trying to keep a lid on the full facts surrounding Geoffrey Prime. The Dickens Dossier was likely “lost” for the same reason. However, this behaviour was nothing new.
As part of a 1995 BBC documentary entitled Westminster’s Secret Service, Tim Fortescue, a whip under Heath between 1970 and 1973, revealed that the Chief Whip keeps a little black “dirt book” to ensure that MPs obey the party line.
“[MPs] might be debt, or it might be a scandal involving small boys. They would come and ask if we could help, and if we could, we did, and we would do everything we could because we could store up brownie points. That’s one of the reasons we would get a chap out of trouble — because he’d then be ours forevermore.” — Tim Fortescue
That is what they call saying the quiet part out loud.
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