Steel quits Lords (and Lib Dems) in disgrace over Smith scandal
FORMER Liberal leader Lord Steel quit his party and the House of Lords yesterday after being censured over his failure to pass on his suspicions about paedophile MP Cyril Smith.
He announced his decision to quit public life after the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) report accused him of an ‘abdication of duty’ over his dealings with his former parliamentary colleague.
Last year, Lord Steel told the IICSA inquiry that he had failed to act on allegations against Smith, who died in 2010, even though he believed them to be true because it was ‘past history’.
He later recommended the former Rochdale MP for a knighthood ‘without confronting him to ask if he was still committing offences against boys’, the inquiry said in its damning report yesterday.
The report added: ‘ Lord Steel should have provided leadership. Instead he abdicated his responsibility. He looked at Cyril Smith not through the lens of child protection but through the lens of political expediency.’
The party grandee, who as plain David Steel led the Liberals between 1976 and 1988, fired a broadside at the child abuse inquiry as he announced his decision.
Lord Steel said: ‘Knowing all I know now, I condemn Cyril Smith’s actions towards children.’ But he added that with the inquiry ‘not having secured a parliamentary scalp, I fear that I have been made a proxy for Cyril Smith’.
His decision to quit came amid reports he could face a fresh investigation into his behaviour – despite the Scottish Liberal Democrats last year concluding there were ‘ no grounds for action’ against him.
He said: ‘I have received indications that some in the Liberal Democrat Party wish me suspended and investigated again, despite a previous disciplinary process in Scotland which concluded that no further action was required. I am told that others are threatening to resign if a new investigation is started.
‘I wish to avoid any such turmoil in my party and to prevent further distress to my family. I have therefore thanked my local party secretary for their stalwart support through the whole IICSA process, and have informed the local party that my resignation is with immediate effect.’
He said that, with ‘considerable personal sorrow’, he would be leaving the House of Lords ‘as soon as possible’, to spend more time with his wife and ‘enjoy a quiet retirement from public life’ – some 55 years after his first election as an MP.
The inquiry found political institutions ‘significantly failed in their responses to allegations of child sexual abuse’. Lord Steel’s evidence to the inquiry was cited as an example of this.
But he insisted yesterday that Smith did not admit ‘the truth of the allegations’ to him. ‘He admitted there had been an investigation by police of acts alleged against him whilst he was a councillor in another political party, as was reported,’ he said. ‘Smith and I did not discuss further what IICSA counsel himself correctly described as “a very, very brief conversation” in 1979.’
But he added: ‘Nowhere do IICSA explain what powers I was supposed to possess to investigate 14-year-old allegations against someone, who at the time of the actions alleged was not even a member of my party.’ Lord Steel was also critical of the way the child abuse inquiry was conducted. He said: ‘ My legal advisers have expressed concern to me that the inquiry should have delayed my appearance until they had sorted their failed “loop” hearing system for my hearing aids. They are right, and I did not have legal representation when giving evidence to IICSA. I should have asked for a delay.’
During the inquiry, Lord Steel denied ‘hiding his head in the sand’ over allegations against Smith but said he ‘assumed’ he had abused teenagers at a hostel dating back to the 1960s.
He told the IICSA of a conversation he had with Smith in 1979, in which the then MP for Rochdale admitted he was investigated a decade earlier. The IICSA report concluded: ‘Lord Steel, as lead of the Liberal
Party, and the party at Westminster, had a responsibility to inquire into the allegations and the risk that Cyril Smith posed to children as a powerful Westminster MP.’ A spokesman for the Liberal Democrats said last night: ‘Cyril Smith’s acts were vile and repugnant. We have nothing but sympathy for those whose lives he ruined.
‘[We] take the issue of vigilance and safeguarding seriously and constantly work to improve our party processes, including the introduction of a new complaints process last year.... ‘Following the publication of the report, David Steel has resigned from the party and retired from public life.’