THE RAPE OF JUSTICE
Prosecutors insisted that Lord Janner should not face charges of sex crimes against young boys because he has dementia. Consider this devastating report and then decide for yourself if they’ve got it right...
THE middle of the night at a large family home in one of North London’s most genteel residential neighbourhoods. In one of the upstairs bedrooms, a teenage boy lies awake. It’s eerily quiet, and he’s a long, long way from the children’s institution that has in recent years been home. The house is dark and shadowy. Scary, even. He feels frightened, confused and very much alone. But this boy is not alone. In the gloom, he picks out an unmistakable figure shuffling across the carpet. It’s the middle-aged father-of-three who owns this house where he is staying.
‘He sat on my bed and asked me if I was all right,’ the boy later recalled. ‘I told him that I was frightened because I was in a strange house, and at this he cuddled and kissed me . . . and said that I could sleep in his bed if I wanted to.’
The boy and the middle-aged man, whose wife and children are away for the weekend, tiptoe to the marital bedroom.
‘He took off his dressing gown and I saw that he was wearing boxer-type shorts. [We] got into his double bed together. He again cuddled me and said that if I was warm I could take my pyjamas off, which I did.’
With sickening inevitability, this vulnerable and frightened child, who only recently reached his 14th birthday, is then subjected to a sexual assault. ‘He touched my penis and asked me to touch his. He then simulated sex with me as I could feel his penis rubbing against my body, but after a while he got up from the bed and went out of the room. I must have fallen asleep, because when I awoke it was morning.’
This attack, carried out in December 1974, is one of several described in chilling detail in a ten-page witness statement prepared several years later by a firm of Leicester solicitors called Greene D’Sa. According to the document, which was passed to me this week, it marked the start of an abusive ‘full sexual relationship’ that endured almost two years.
The attack was also the culmination of a lengthy grooming process which had begun when the boy’s abuser, a high-profile MP, visited a secondary school in his Leicester constituency. That MP was Greville Janner, then 46, a Labour backbencher who would achieve minor celebrity as a lawyer, author, broadcaster — and tireless campaigner f or t he r i ghts of Holocaust victims.
Today, aged 86, t his f ormer President of the Board of Deputies of British Jews is properly known as Lord Janner of Braunstone, having been ennobled in 1997 by Tony Blair.
Janner is also, rather less prestigiously, the veteran Parliamentarian now mired in a murky scandal over widespread allegations that he was for decades a prolific abuser of young boys.
Earlier this month, England’s Director of Public Prosecutions, Alison Saunders, announced that police have uncovered sufficient evidence to charge the peer with 22 paedo- phile offences, including 16 indecent assaults and six acts of buggery.
She added, however, that he will not face trial on a single one of the charges, against nine separate children from 1969 to 1988, ‘because of the severity of his dementia, which means he is not fit to take part in any proceedings’.
Amid the rumbling controversy over her decision, the boy’s written statement represents an important piece of evidence, providing eyeopening insight into Janner’s alleged modus operandi.
It tells how the MP, a keen amateur magician and member of The Magic Circle, had first met the boy earlier in 1974, when he came to perform a conjuring show at the King Richard III secondary school in Braunstone. Janner took an interest in the wiry child after discovering he was highly vulnerable: taken from his parents at birth, and in care ever since, the boy at that time lived at the nearby Station Road Children’s Home.
‘When I was introduced to Mr Janner, he seemed impressed by me, saying I “was bright”,’ the boy later recalled. ‘Following his initial visit, Mr Janner [then] visited the school on a number of other occasions.’
Over the course of these encounters, the vulnerable boy and the MP would form an i ncr ea s i ngl y warm relationship. Then, one day that summer, they arranged to meet outside normal school hours.
‘Mr Janner told me he was opening a fete at Braunstone Park the following weekend, and asked if I would like to come and watch, ’ the boy said. ‘He took me in his car, which was a red Jaguar XJ6.’ The boy was given sweets and taken to a playground. So began a close friendship in which ‘Mr Janner rang me most weeks at the children’s home’, the boy says.
‘ We exchanged l etters almost weekly, and I would see him at weekends . . . I was the first child at the home that Mr Janner had spoken with, but he later became acquainted with other children there.’
Soon, their relationship would, of course, take a darker turn.
That development is extensively chronicled in the document, which was written in 1992, when the victim was a married, middle-class father, living in South Yorkshire.
So, too, is a staggering — and deeply scandalous — culture of negligence, incompetence and even corruption, across several public sector organisations which were supposed to be protecting the boy.
It tells how his relationship with Janner was known to everyone, from his friends, to his social worker, children’s home manager and the then- director of Leicester’s social services. Yet nothing was done to stop it.
In London, the Establishment seemed similarly toothless.
For two years, the boy says he was a regular visitor to the married MP’s home, and office. He was taken to the Labour Party’s headquarters, to Janner’s constituency surgery and, on several occasions, to the Houses of Parliament.
The boy recalls being repeatedly driven around London by Janner’s driver, and taken to dine at the House of Commons.
‘On other occasions . . . we went to the address of a friend of the family and swam naked together in the swimming pool,’ he claims. ‘Sexual activity took place between Mr Janner and myself and we touched each other’s private parts whilst in the swimming pool.’
Yet political friends, colleagues, and acquaintances of the MP apparently turned a blind eye.
The boy says he regularly shared a bed with Janner at both his North London home and a Leicester hotel, where staff would think nothing of letting them share a room.
‘Sexual activity took place either at his address in London when I visited, or at the Holiday Inn in Leicester,’ he says. What is more, the conspiracy to cover-up his abuse continued long into adulthood.
In a second, 1993 witness statement, again passed to me this week, the same boy recalls in 1989 and 1991 meeting detectives investigating a historic paedophile ring said to have included Janner.
The r el atively j unior police i nvestigators were apparently convinced that this man had, indeed, been ‘buggered by Greville Janner’ during childhood. ‘They needed me to include that information in my statement before they could arrest Janner,’ it notes.
But, soon afterwards, the two junior detectives were forced to drop their investigation into the MP, apparently at the behest of senior figures within the Leicestershire constabulary.
The boy isn’t the only person to make this claim. Indeed, his 1993 statement appears to confirm a similar version of events made public last year by one of those two officers, Mick Creedon.
Should you wonder about the veracity of Mr Creedon’s recollection, it is illuminating to learn that he is now Chief Constable of Derbyshire.
Mr Creedon has said that the police decision to stop investigating Janner at that time ‘was taken by people more senior than me’.
The alleged victim’s 1993 document also claims Mr Creedon once told him that ‘all mention of Janner had been removed from my [ social services] file’. Mr Creedon declined to comment on that alleged cover-up this week.
The police chief is understood to believe that much of the boy’s statement is accurate. However, although there was, indeed, no mention of Janner in the boy’s file, informed sources say he does not recall having said that incriminating papers were ‘removed’.
Either way, the boy’s two witness statements provide a chilling insight into the sort of evidence Janner might have faced in court had the CPS chosen to prosecute him.
In a statement released last week, on April 16, the Director of Public Prosecutions admitted that the former Labour grandee ought to have been brought to the dock on at least three separate occasions.
The first was after the 1991 investigation, which Mr Creedon worked on, and to which the boy whose statements are quoted here was central.
The second came after a 2002 police inquiry into a Leicester children’s home, called Operation Magnolia.
‘He kissed me and said we could sleep in his bed’ ‘We were naked together in the swimming pool’
Detectives were ordered to drop the case
The third i nvolved Operation Dauntless, a 2006 investigation into ‘ allegations of serious sexual offending’ by three individuals, including Janner.
Little is known about the detail of the second two operations. But we are, nonetheless, finding out more and more about the allegations at the centre of them.
In recent days, several of Janner’s purported victims have come forward to share their experiences. At least 30 are now in contact with police.
Many of their stories share common themes. Vulnerable children who met Janner when he toured children’s homes and schools (often to perform magic shows) say they were showered with gifts and affection, before being sexually assaulted.
Like Jimmy Savile, Janner appears to have used his record of public service and charity work as a smokescreen to hide abuse; like Cyril Smith, he used political power to remain almost untouchable.
All of which brings us back to that witness statement.
Consider the means by which Janner was allegedly able to conduct a two-year relationship with that teenage resident t of the Station Road Children’s Home i in L Leicester.i t Th The document claims he would make contact with the child by telephoning the facility’s manager, Barbara Fitt, or her husband Raymond.
‘They would call me into their office, where I would speak to Mr Janner over the telephone’ to arrange a meeting, the boy says. Janner would then post return railway tickets to the boy so he could travel to London.
Quite why this bizarre arrangement was condoned is unclear. But eventually, the boy says he ‘confided in Mrs Fitt and told her of the sexual relationship that had been taking place between Mr Janner and myself over a fairly lengthy period of time’. Rather than call the police police, however however, Mrs Fitt decided to deal with the allegation — one involving serious criminality — by calling the boy’s social worker, Dick Beak. He also failed to call the police.
‘My impression was that Mr Beak suspected Mr Janner was having an improper relationship with me,’ the boy says.
Elsewhere, the boy says ‘it must have been fairly obvious to staff and residents at the children’s home that I was having a special sort of relationship with Janner’, not just because of his visits to the MP’s house, but also ‘the gifts of money and other material things that Mr Janner gave to me’. Reports of the relationship even reached the ears of Dorothy Edwards, director of Leicestershire Social Services.
Mrs Edwards ‘spoke to me about my friendship with Mr Janner’, the boy claims, and at one point she received a ‘complaint’ from a local children’s home manager that the MP was abusing him.
It was clearly not acted on. And al l paperwork detailing that complaint would appear to have been lost or destroyed.
Meanwhile, social worker Dick Beak died in 1998, and Dorothy Edwards is also thought to be dead. The children’s home manager Mrs Fitt died in 1991, but her husband, Raymond Fitt, appeared to confirm some details of the boy’s story when the Mail tracked him down this week.
‘Barbara was very concerned about the nature of their relationship. She feared Janner was having sex with [the boy] but she couldn’t prove anything,’ he recalled.
‘She reported it to the [social services] department, but no action was taken and it seemed to be swept under the carpet, presumably because of who Janner was.’
There was, in other words, widespread knowledge of Janner’s alleged crimes almost 40 years ago. But status protected him. It would, in the event, be more than 15 years before the local police even began to look at the MP.
In the late Eighties, Leicestershire detectives, including Mr Creedon, were tipped- off that a paedophile ring led by Janner and a man called Frank Beck was operating in local children’s homes.
They duly launched an inquiry, carrying out (among other things) the interviews detailed in the boy’s second witness statement.
Yet at some point the detectives were, as we know, told to drop inquiries into Janner. Exactly who gave this order is unclear, a nd t hat may now be a matter for the Independent Police Complaints Commission.
The investigation did not en end, however. Instead, the police went after Beck, a children’s home manager. In 19 1991, he was put on trial at Le Leicester Crown Court, where he was given five life se sentences, plus a further 24 ye years, after being found guilty of 17 counts of abuse. The trial was shocking for tw two reasons.
Firstly, there was extent of the alleged crimes: police sources let it be known that they believed he had abused up to 200 minors.
Secondly, it marked yet another missed opportunity to bring Janner to justice, thanks to a sensational side-plot in which Beck claimed he was being prosecuted as part of a conspiracy to protect the MP.
Central to his claim was the boy quoted ab ov e , who appeared as a defence witness, providing what appears to be ample evidence of a sexual affair with Janner. He gave a detailed description of the MP’s London residence and showed the jury letters Janner had sent him on Commons notepaper in the mid-Seventies.
Several were signed ‘love Greville’. One, seemingly sent after they’d stayed together at his home, declared: ‘It feels strange not to have you flipping around like a friendly flea! In fact — I miss you.’
The boy also told how he had been raped by the MP in a swimming pool at Leicester’s Holiday Inn.
Such revelations drew gasps in court. They ought to have been frontpage news. But for much of the trial, the boy’s sensational allegations (and the evidence supporting them) remained out of the public eye. The reason was a strange decision by Edwin Jowitt, the judge, to ban the Press from pre-verdict reporting of the trial. He also intervened, early in proceedings, to prevent Janner being named by a witness.
Justice Jowitt’s reporting ban was eventually overturned at the Court of Appeal, after being challenged by the Press Association and four newspapers, including the Mail.
But not before it had seriously reduced the number of column inches devoted to Janner.
So what lay behind that attempt to censor coverage of the trial? The judge, Edwin Jowitt, who is now 85, is unable to recall. When the Mail visited his home this week, he said: ‘There’s no point in asking me about that case, I barely remember it.’
The boy’s claims, nonetheless, presented a problem for Leicester police, who found themselves required to be seen to be investigating the MP.
It was at this stage that Janner turned up, unannounced, at Leicester police station in the company of his solicitor, Sir David Napley, who was famed for representing a string of high-profile figures caught up in sex scandals, including Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe, Tory MP Harvey Proctor and Sir Peter Hayman, a diplomat and member of the notorious Paedophile Information Exchange.
In a two- hour interview, the Labour MP answered ‘no comment’ to every substantive question put to him. Shortly afterwards the CPS, then run by an interim Director of Public Prosecutions, David Gandy, announced that he would not face charges.
Mr Gandy’s decision has, of course, been vehemently criticised this month by the current DPP Alison Saunders. He was on holiday this week and, therefore, unable to respond when the Mail called.
Janner then returned to London, and at the Commons, in December 1991, made a ‘personal statement’ describing the allegations of abuse as ‘disgraceful and totally untrue’.
It met with widespread applause and warm words from such Labour allies as Whip Derek Foster, who passed on party l eader Neil Kinnock’s ‘tremendous support’, and Keith Vaz, who described Janner as ‘a brave man’. With delicious irony, Mr Vaz is now chairman of the Home Affairs Select Committee, the panel of MPs tasked with overseeing historic child sex investigations.
Currently seeking re- election, he has declined all recent invitations to discuss his support for Janner.
In the following months, Frank Beck’s conviction led to the establishment of the Kirkwood Inquiry into abuse in Leicester children’s homes. Again, however, there was a whiff of Establishment cover-up.
The Press and public were controversially banned from the inquiry, and it took evidence in secret, including from Janner, who appeared before it in June 1992.
As a result, his evidence to Kirkwood — the late judge, who presided over the 1987 Cleveland child abuse inquiry — has never been published. And when the report came out in 1993, it made no mention of Janner.
Just another deeply disturbing twist in a story which has now surely become one of the biggest scandals of recent times.