Child Abuse Was happening Within The Care System

Illicit Relationship Was Hushed Up By The Pro-Tory Press.

Robert “Bob” Boothby was a Conservative party member as well as a BBC commentator on public affairs.
He entered parliament in 1924.
During his more than 30 years in parliament, Boothby had a protracted affair with Dorothy Macmillan, the wife of his Conservative colleague Harold Macmillan, beginning in the 1930s and continuing through Macmillan’s succession to Prime Minister in 1956.

Boothby also had a gay affair with notorious East End gangster Ronnie Kray,  who with his identical twin Reggie, dominated London’s underworld for twenty years.
That illicit relationship was hushed up by the largely pro-Tory tabloid press for years before being inferred by the Daily Mirror in 1964.
The revelations sparked an MI-5 investigation but did not derail the career of the now Baron Boothby, who continued to sit in the House of Lords until his death in 1986.

If Bob Boothby had entered politics a generation later, he may well have met the same fate as his Tory colleague John Profumo.
Profumo was British Secretary of State for War when he began an affair with 19-year-old model, Christine Keeler.
At the time of their relationship, Keeler was also involved with Soviet naval attaché and suspected spy, Yevgeny “Eugene” Ivanov.

Rumours of the affair and its potential security implications spread rapidly and, unlike Boothby’s underworld associations, did not stay quiet.
Profumo denied the affair to the House of Commons.
The police became involved and Keeler testified to the relationship, leading to Profumo’s resignation on June 5, 1963.
Profumo’s wife Valerie stood by him.
After his death, declassified M15 documents from the 1930s revealed Profumo had also had an affair with a Nazi spy.

Child Abuse Was happening Within The Care System.

Liz Davies remembers the moment when she realised that she had a scandal on her hands.
For several months she had been talking to groups of children she suspected were being abused.
Then, one day, two young boys walked into her small council office in Islington.
One of the boys looked afraid, but the other reassured him.
“It’s all right, she’s not one of them”, he said.
It was those chilling words that gave Liz Davies her first hint that much of the horrible child abuse she was uncovering was happening within the care system of Islington Council, the very organisation meant to protect the borough’s most vulnerable children.

That was in April 1990.
The scandal would eventually explode into the national consciousness two-and-a-half years later in a series of exposés in London’s Evening Standard.
They described a care system penetrated by paedophiles that had abysmally failed to care for scores of children.
The council, then led by Margaret Hodge, was appointed as the country’s first Minister for Children in 2003, initially condemned the stories, for which Liz Davies and several other social workers acted as anonymous whistleblowers.

Although police investigations dismissed claims of a paedophile ring operating in Islington, allegations of child abuse at the children’s home on Hodge’s watch were borne out by official inquiries.
Hodge’s name would forever be associated with one of Britain’s most notorious child abuse scandals.
Hodge’s appointment as Minister for Children sparked a furious campaign by the Standard and other newspapers to have her resign.
In 1990, Liz Davies’s colleague, David Cofie, raised the issue at a forum of local residents.
He also took his claims direct to Margaret Hodge, who was the local ward councillor.
Liz Davies asked for more resources to tackle the problem, but Hodge turned the request down.

They carried on their work.
They interviewed children as individual cases and privately built up a picture of widespread abuse, which they said was being carried out by a network of abusers.
They wrote 15 separate reports, but said their warnings still went unheeded, even as they uncovered appallingly serious allegations.
But, even as they uncovered stories of children being taken away by adults on weekend trips to the country or being placed in homes with suspected abusers, Liz Davies said her team’s work was ignored.
Margaret Hodge knows that as council leader she must ultimately shoulder the blame for what happened in Islington in the 1980s and 90s.
( Paul Harris and Martin Bright, 06.07.2003 )  ..  theguardian.com

A Succession Of Sex And Money Scandals.

While many admired Margaret Thatcher as the “Iron Lady,” others saw the Tories as the “nasty party.”
When John Major took over from Thatcher in 1990, he set out to change the party’s image.
In a 1993 speech, he famously declared that the country should go ‘back to basics’, returning to core values of “neighbourliness, decency, courtesy”.
The slogan came to be a source of ridicule for the government over the next few years as ministers were caught in a quick succession of sex and money scandals.
Chancellor Norman Lamont was revealed to have a sex therapist living in his rented-out London flat.

David Mellor resigned as a minister after sordid revelations of an extra-marital affair with actress Antonia de Sancha.
Transport minister Steven Norris was reportedly having simultaneous affairs with three women who did not know about each other.
Conservative MP Stephen Milligan was tragically found dead on his kitchen table as a result of auto-erotic asphyxiation.
Major himself denied an affair with Downing Street caterer Clare Latimer.
It was later revealed he’d had a four-year affair with fellow conservative MP Edwina Currie.

The Guardian newspaper brought the financial misconduct of certain ministers to light.
The newspaper accused two MPs of being paid thousands of pounds to ask questions in Parliament on behalf of Harrod’s owner Mohammed Al-Fayed.
Tim Smith resigned as Northern Ireland minister and later admitted to accepting the money.
Conservative MP Neil Hamilton lost his libel suit against Al-Fayed when the court was satisfied the Harrod’s owner had, indeed, made his case.
The Guardian and ITV’s investigative series both alleged that Conservative Cabinet minister Jonathan Aitken had improper commercial relations with Saudi businessmen.
Aitken sued the news outlets but was later jailed for perjury after lying under oath.
A far cry from the “decency” which Major had promised the British people.

The Legality Of The Invasion Of Iraq Was Heavily Contested.

Dr. David Kelly, a British weapons expert and UN inspector, was found dead in Oxfordshire on July 17, 2003, shortly after being exposed as the source for a BBC report that questioned the government’s justification for the Iraq war.
The official Hutton Inquiry concluded he committed suicide, though this verdict remains highly controversial among some medical experts and politician.
Many critics, including some physicians, notably Dr. Stephen Frost, have contested the suicide finding based on medical evidence, arguing it was an “impossible” case of suicide and suggesting other possibilities.

BBC journalist Andrew Gilligan said David Kelly was in no doubt the government had “sexed up” the Iraq intelligence dossier at the heart of the Hutton inquiry.
He told the inquiry it was Dr Kelly who had first raised the name of Alastair Campbell in relation to the “transformation” of the dossier and the scientist had first raised the controversial claim that Saddam Hussein could launch weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes.
The BBC Radio 4 Today programme’s defence correspondent added he spoke to two senior government sources and they did not deny Dr Kelly’s claims.
Gilligan’s notes show Dr Kelly suggested the dossier was transformed from something bland and “not very exciting” to something far more “sexy” in the week before publication.