Lord Steel and Cyril Smith

Your readers will recall that in april you serialised a book by rochdale’s labour MP about the late Cyril smith, in the course of which under the repeated headline ‘monstrous cover up’ you published several photographs of me with smith which readers may have thought implied that i was part of that cover up.

indeed, to my mind you printed an allegation (not in the book) that i had deliberately covered up smith’s alleged activities because he was useful in projecting my party’s image in the north of england.

i take strong objection to this unfair and untrue portrayal. rather than turn this into a legal dispute, i am grateful for your agreement that i should explain what happened in this letter.

at the time of the 1979 election (when smith was elected for the fourth time as their MP), the rochdale underground newspaper published a report, later re-published in part by the magazine Private eye, that Cyril smith had been investigated by the police in the late sixties for misbehaviour with teenage boys.

i naturally asked smith about the allegations in Private eye and he admitted that the report was correct. He had at the time been a labour councillor with some supervisory role at a home for teenage boys. no charges had been laid against him.

My view was that these were 15-yearold reports concerning a time when he was not an MP, nor even a member of my party. subsequently, he had been elected labour Mayor of the borough, awarded an MBe for his services and later elected as liberal MP.

i saw no reason to pursue the matter — and nor did any investigative journalist, either from your own crusading paper or any other national media.

The Daily Mail is entitled to the view that i placed too much trust in the police non-action and could and should have done more, which i strongly refute; but it is going too far to suggest that either i knew more or was party to a cover-up of his activities. indeed, smith’s own words show that we were never close colleagues: he said he would not speak in any constituency which had voted for me as leader, and when i was forging our alliance with the sDP, he said the sDP should be strangled at birth.

The Home secretary has set up two enquiries into paedophile activity. i hope that they will be able to begin their work soon in spite of current chairmanship problems. We can surely agree that what is important is that anyone who had complaints against Cyril smith should cooperate with the enquiries, as i intend to do myself.

DAVID STEEL, House of Lords.