I’ll make you a baroness ... if you’ll go to bed with me

Peer, 82, faces record suspension over claims he told a lobbyist:

A LIBERAL Democrat peer faces a record suspension from the Lords after he was found to have offered a woman a peerage to sleep with him.

Lord Lester of Herne Hill, 82, allegedly became ‘obsessively attracted’ to a campaigner he met in Parliament and repeatedly pestered her for sex.

The prominent peer and leading human rights barrister – an architect of Britain’s race and sex equality laws – is said to have persuaded her to stay with him and his wife at their £3million home after she missed her train following a late meeting.

But she claimed that in the car journey there he repeatedly grabbed her thigh instead of the gearstick, leaving her so conSupporters

‘Corrupt inducements’

cerned for her safety that she later barricaded herself inside his guest bedroom using a chair. During a subsequent visit to the Lords, he reportedly told the woman: ‘If you sleep with me, I will make you a baroness within a year.’

The Lords privileges and conduct committee yesterday found that Lord Lester had breached conduct codes by ‘sexually harassing the complainant and offering her corrupt inducements to sleep with him’.

It recommended that he is suspended until June 2022, which will be the longest suspension from Parliament in modern times if it is approved by peers in a vote on Thursday. of Lord Lester last night suggested they could try to block the move in the Lords.

The peer also rejected the allegations as ‘completely untrue’ and denounced the investigation – conducted by the Lords’ Commissioner for Standards, Lucy ScottMoncrieff – as ‘flawed’.

The complainant, who is said to be well-known in Government circles as an expert in her field, made claims about Lord Lester last November following the Westminster sex harassment scandal.

The woman, thought to be in her 50s with a partner and adult children, claimed she was invited to the peer’s home in Herne Hill, South London, after a late meeting because she had missed her train home. She said she was groped in his car on the way there – and shown to a spare bedroom at his home, saying she was so afraid she put a chair under the door handle and slept in her clothes. ‘I feared Lord Lester might come into my room in the night,’ she added.

The next morning, after his wife had left, she said the peer grabbed her by the waist and chased her around the kitchen, telling her he had ‘strong feelings’. ‘I said that he should know better as he had a wife... He persisted and told me that he loved me and said he could not help himself,’ she added.

At a later meeting in the Lords, she said the Lib Dem offered to make her a peer if she was a ‘good

girl’ and did as he asked. ‘he made a number of further inappropriate sexual comments to me such as that he could see me becoming a demanding mistress,’ she said.

The woman said she did not make a complaint at the time as she thought her word against his was ‘not an equal contest’.

In his defence, Lord Lester dismissed the allegations as a ‘pack of lies’ and said the woman later signed a book for the peer thanking him for his ‘love and support’.

A report by the Lords’ sub-committee on conduct said the peer became ‘obsessively attracted’ to the woman to the extent that he ‘completely lost all sense of judgment and propriety’. The report also said a friend of the lobbyist advised her to contact Theresa May when she was home Secretary about the allegations because of her ‘commitment to issues affecting the abuse of women’.

The home Office last night declined to comment. Lord Lester was a special adviser to Roy Jenkins in the 1970s and moved with him from Labour to help found the Social Democratic Party in 1981. In a statement, Lord Lester last night insisted the allegations were ‘completely untrue’ and claimed the ‘investigation was flawed’.

A Liberal Democrat spokesman said the peer has been suspended from the party.