After months of speculation Leon Brittan has finally been publicly named as one of the politicians at the centre of sexual rape allegations from the 1970s and 1980s. Two men have come forward to say they were abused by the former Home Secretary, who died last week.
He is accused of having attended paedophile sex parties at the Elm Park Guest House in West London. With one former Social Worker claiming she saw photographs of the peer with naked boys sitting on his knee at the hotel, which was ultimately closed down for being a brothel.
Brittan also stands accused of being involved in yet more sex parties at the exclusive Dolphin Square apartment block, a stone’s throw from the Houses of Parliament.
The former Defence Minister, Tom Watson MP, claims to have spoken to two men who say they were attacked by Brittan. The Labour MP told the Independent he believed the men to be “sincere”. One of them is ‘Nick’ who has been described as a “credible witness” by the Metropolitan Police, which is now taking allegations he has been making for decades seriously.
The Westminster Village has been well aware of the allegations against Lord Brittan for months but publication would have risked prejudicing his trial. Now the peer has died there will be no trial, so allegations can be published.
Brittan had always denied the allegations against him, and friends suggested he would have made a far fuller public explanation had be been well enough. For months the 75-year-old was stricken with cancer and had been rendered unable to appear in public.
Prior to his death the only public allegations against him were those related to the ‘loss’ of files regarding exposing Westminster paedophiles, handed to him by Geoffrey Dickens in 1984. Dickens was the Conservative MP for Littleborough and Saddleworth, which includes part of the Borough of Rochdale where the serial paedophile Sir Cyril Smith was MP for many years.
Dickens spent half an hour with Brittan when we was Home Secretary detailing a suspected paedophile ring. The files mysteriously disappeared, leading to conspiracy theories that Brittan had either destroyed them, or allowed them to be destroyed. It is now unlikely the real fate of the documents will ever come to light.
Although the credibility of Dickens has been disputed he had already accurately named the former British High Commissioner to Canada, Sir Peter Hayman, as a paedophile. He used Parliamentary Privilege in the House of Commons so he could not be sued for slander. Hayman owned a flat in Dolphin Square, and had been arrested after a large quantity of Child Pornography was found addressed to him on a London bus.
Dickens’s seat also included the area stalked by the Moors murderer Ian Brady, who was convicted in 1966 of a series of sadistic and sexually motivated child killings. The borough of Rochdale became even more notorious in recent years after it was uncovered that Muslim gangs had been allowed to abuse 1,400 children without any interference from the Police.
The present Home Secretary, Theresa May, set up an inquiry into historic child sex allegations but the chairman Alderman Fiona Wolfe was forced to resign when victims discovered she had been to dinner parties with Leon Brittan. They feared her neutrality might be called into question because of her relationship with him.
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