Lord Tebbit: there 'may well' have been a (UK) Government cover-up of child abuse

By Georgia Graham, Political Correspondent

06 July 2014

The veteran former minister says it was the instinct of people at the time to protect ‘the system’ and not to delve too deeply into uncomfortable allegations.  Lord Tebbit says he thinks there may well have been an establishment cover-up of child abuse in the 1980s

A veteran former Conservative minister who served in the cabinet with Lord Brittan has said there “may well” have been an establishment cover-up of child abuse in the 1980s.

Lord Tebbit, who served in a series of ministerial posts under Margaret Thatcher at the same time as Lord Brittan, the former Home Secretary, said the instinct of people at the time was to protect “the system” and not to delve too deeply into uncomfortable allegations.

His comments come as Francis Maude, the Cabinet minister, said a probe was necessary to finally “lift up the drains” on who knew what about historic allegations of child abuse.

The Home Office announced a fresh review into what happened to a file alleging paedophile activity at Westminster which was handed to the then home secretary Leon (now Lord) Brittan by the Tory MP Geoffrey Dickens.

Appearing on BBC1’s The Andrew Marr Show, Lord Tebbit said: “At that time I think most people would have thought that the establishment, the system, was to be protected and if a few things had gone wrong here and there that it was more important to protect the system than to delve too far into it.
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“That view, I think, was wrong then and it is spectacularly shown to be wrong because the abuses have grown.”

Asked if he thought there had been a “big political cover-up” at the time, he said: “I think there may well have been. But it was almost unconscious. It was the thing that people did at that time.”

Speaking on Pienaar’s politics on BBC Radio 5 live Maude added that “nobody can be above the law” and “justice has to be done” over the allegations of child abuse.

Nigel Evans, the Conservative MP, said that someone “within the Home Office” must know what happened to the file.

He told Pienaar’s politics: “There will be more than one person who would know that that file existed and has read that file and took the decision either to destroy it or if it’s not been destroyed, it is somewhere, and I think that they really do need now to turn the Home Office upside down.”

He added: “If nobody comes forward then they really do need to look absolutely everywhere to ensure that as Francis Maude said, nobody is above the law, we need to make sure that the people inside that file are properly investigated, and the question is, why weren’t they investigated in the first place?”

Lord Brittan, now a Conservative peer, was challenged over what he knew about the dossier detailing an alleged Westminster paedophile ring that was passed to him when he was home secretary and later disappeared.

Lord Brittan confirmed that he was handed a “substantial bundle of papers” when he was Home Secretary, an office he held from 1983 until 1983.

The papers were compiled by Geoffrey Dickens, then a Conservative MP, who had investigated child abuse networks.

Simon Danczuk, the Labour MP for Rochdale, has said that the Dickens papers contained details of paedophiles operating a network around Westminster.

Lord Brittan said that he passed the papers to Home Office officials and asked them to “look carefully” at the material they contained to see if any action was needed.

That investigation found that Lord Brittan had acted appropriately, the Home Office said. It also “found no evidence of Mr Dickens expressing dissatisfaction about the action taken in respect of the information he had passed on”.

The Home Office investigation “shows that appropriate action and follow up happened” in relation to the papers, Lord Brittan said.

An internal review of hundreds of files last year found 13 previously undisclosed “items of information about alleged child abuse – including four implicating Home Office officials”.

Mark Sedwill, who has been appointed by David Cameron to investigate claims of a Whitehall cover-up of political paedophiles, revealed that 114 potentially relevant files” were “presumed destroyed, missing or not found”.

An independent legal figure, expected to be a promised QC, is to be appointed to conduct a review of the Home Office’s handling of the case.

The news comes as it emerged that Lord Brittan had been interviewed by police over a historical rape allegation.

The Independent on Sunday reported that Mr Britton was accused of raping a 19-year-old female student in 1967. He was not an MP at the time of the alleged incident at his London flat.

According to his lawyers Lord Brittan will not be making a comment today, but it is understood he strongly denies the allegation.

In a statement, a Metropolitan Police spokesman said a man in his 70s had been interviewed under caution.