Fury as Clegg washes his hands of Cyril Smith affair – because he was Labour politician at time
NICK Clegg made a desperate bid to distance his party from allegations about Cyril Smith yesterday by calling the paedophile MP a ‘Labour politician’.
He claimed the obese sexual predator did not belong to the Liberal Democrats at the time he was abusing scores of young boys.
In fact Smith took the party whip for four years in Parliament and was feted as a Lib Dem grandee in the years before he died.
Mr Clegg was accused on a radio phone-in of having ‘washed his hands’ of the issue by refusing to order a party investigation into Smith.
He insisted there would be no inquiry despite revelations in Sat- urday’s Daily Mail that the Liberal party – a forerunner to the Lib Dems – offered hush money equivalent to a month’s wages to an activist after she complained about Smith molesting a teenage boy in 1979.
Mr Clegg was confronted over the Smith scandal during a phone-in show on LBC radio yesterday. He was asked by ‘John from Bexleyheath’ why the Lib Dems had not investigated despite new details of Smith’s prolific paedophilia exposed in this paper’s serialisation of Labour politician Simon Danczuk’s book about the late Rochdale MP.
Mr Clegg attempted to distance the Lib Dems from Smith and said ‘any political party’ should co- operate with the police inquiry.
He said: ‘As it happens, Cyril Smith, as you may know, the allegations surrounding him, actually go right back to the time when he was a Labour politician, back, well before I was even born, I think.’
Mr Clegg accused Mr Danczuk of choosing ‘to airbrush out the fact that Smith was a Labour politician when he was alleged to have started abusing young children’.
He added: ‘Cyril Smith was active in politics, by the way, in a party which no longer exists – the Liberal party.
‘So he was a Labour politician, and then he was a politician for most of his career, for a Liberal party, which no longer exists. All this happened well before the Liberal Democrats were even formed.’ Mr Clegg said the only way to get justice was for the police to investigate and blamed them for not having done so.
Mr Danczuk, the Labour candidate for Rochdale, said his book made it clear that Smith had started out as a member of the Labour party.
He added: ‘Nobody will be surprised to hear that Nick Clegg is being disingenuous in his comments.
‘I urge him to face up to the fact that one of his colleagues – somebody who he and other members of his party celebrated for very many years – was a paedophile.
‘I think it is a disgrace to try to avoid tackling this issue and to try to politicise this issue in the way that he is doing.’
Smith was elected as a Liberal MP in 1972, but after the Lib Dems were formed in 1988 took the whip of the new party until his retirement from Parliament in 1992. He remained a Liberal Democrat grandee up to his death in 2010 at the age of 82.
A gushing video tribute from Mr Clegg was played at Smith’s 80th birthday party at Rochdale town hall in 2008.
The Lib Dem leader told him: ‘I’m a great admirer of you personally, but also owe you a great debt of gratitude politically too.’ The Daily Mail’s serialisation of Mr Danczuk’s book, Smile For The Camera: The Double Life Of Cyril Smith, revealed that senior Liberals were made aware of the paedophile MP’s abuse.
Lord Steel, who as David Steel was Liberal leader from 1976 until 1988 and nominated Smith for a knighthood, was alerted in 1979 to claims that Smith had subjected boys to humiliating spankings but Smith denied any wrongdoing.
Senior Lib Dems including the Business Secretary Vince Cable and the former leader Charles Kennedy have insisted they heard nothing.
The party has been accused of ‘squirming’ over the issue.
WITH disgusting insouciance, Nick Clegg washes his hands of the Cyril Smith child abuse scandal, describing the vile paedophile as a ‘Labour politician’. Smith may have been a Labour councillor in the 1960s. But it was later, as a Liberal MP, that he carried out many of his sickening attacks.
And it was the Liberal Party leadership – under Lord Steel (who recommended Smith for a knighthood) – that turned a deaf ear to the rumours swirling at Westminster and complaints of those who witnessed his horrific assaults.
Mr Clegg has been in shameful denial since the moment the Mail and the campaigning MP Simon Danczuk began exposing the Smith cover-up last year, refusing to sanction a party inquiry.
But then we should never forget that, despite their sanctimony, the Liberals have a long and unedifying record – from Jeremy Thorpe to Lord Rennard – of hushing-up sex scandals.