Fag in hand, portrait of the ‘fantasist’ given starring role in the £100m child abuse inquiry
She’s shattered an MP and his family with her wild, unproven claims of ritual sex attacks. So why, on Monday, will this bookie’s clerk be helping influence the most controversial investigation of all?
ON MONDAY morning, a truly remarkable scene will unfold inside a hearing room at an office building just south of the River Thames in London.
Over 15 days, spymasters, top civil servants, government ministers and senior police officers past and present will be asked if they shielded paedophiles in the political world of Westminster over the course of six decades.
These matters will be examined as the next part of the sprawling multi-million-pound Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse. It was set up in 2014 by Theresa May, then the Home Secretary, to probe historical allegations of paedophilia in several walks of life — from the church to children’s homes — following revelations that TV icon Jimmy Savile was a serial paedophile.
So secret are the names of some shadowy figures appearing in the coming weeks — they include those from the security service MI5, its foreign counterpart MI6 and the Cheltenham spy centre GCHQ — that many of them will be given anonymity.
Some will be identified only by a digital cipher and will have their voices camouflaged as they tell their revelations. All will be flanked by teams of top lawyers, some of them on thousands of pounds a day, courtesy of the public purse.
Another aspect of these latest proceedings will be the honours system — operated by a powerful Westminster committee of 15 senior politicians and civil servants — which will be scrutinised after public concerns that those already suspected of child abuse, such as the late MP for Rochdale, Sir Cyril Smith, received knighthoods.
For these reasons, the inquiry, chaired by former social worker Professor Alexis Jay, will undoubtedly garner prominent headlines and prime- time TV coverage, which makes the involvement of one particular woman all the more puzzling.
Her name is Esther Baker, a chain- smoking 36- year- old blonde divorcee who works in a Liverpool betting office.
In 2015, Ms Baker claimed she was a serial victim of sex assaults as a child during the Eighties and Nineties. In lurid terms, she said she was abused in a Staffordshire wood by a group of men, including a judge, a now deceased political grandee (whom the Mail has chosen not to name) and a man who would later become a Lib Dem politician. All while police, some in uniform, stood watching or taking part.
SHE says she has memories of being assaulted at Dolphin Square, a block of flats near the Houses of Parliament used by politicians. It is a place where others have said they were abused as children, although, following police investigations, none of their allegations have been substantiated.
Ms Baker is unusual because she — unlike most of those speaking of such recollections — has elected to be named on television, both in the UK and Australia, and gave a series of interviews waiving her anonymity to a now-defunct investigative news website called Exaro.
On Australian TV, Ms Baker was shown photographs of people, and asked to identify two of her main abusers at Cannock Chase wood.
Although viewers could not see who was identified, it was soon to leak onto the internet that one of them was a multimillionaire businessman called John Hemming, who, until 2015, was Lib Dem MP for South Yardley in Birmingham. He has since publicly and flatly denied he has ever met Esther Baker.
Ms Baker’s interviewer, on an Australian 60 Minutes programme called Spies, Lords And Predators, asked her if she was certain that the two photographs were of the two men who abused her as a child. She answered yes four times, before finally saying, by way of explanation: ‘You don’t forget those faces, no way.’
She has since said her decision to go public was to stop her being attacked, either physically or on social media, by those who didn’t believe her.
The police have taken her claims seriously. In all, Ms Baker has been interviewed by a team of 11 officers over nearly 100 hours. There are more than 1,000 pages of transcript from those interviews and other material running to 7,000 more pages.
In other words, it has taken a huge amount of time and effort. Yet, after two years, the police have found insufficient evidence to charge Mr Hemming — or anyone else.
However, Ms Baker set a hare running. Mr Hemming, 58, has become the victim of significant abuse himself in the wake of her allegations. A year ago, a Birmingham man called Declan Canning was convicted of sending threatening and libellous emails to him which said he was a rapist and a paedophile.
In a settlement in January, Mr Hemming received damages and an apology from a child protection campaigner and an investigative reporter, who had each seemed to give credence on social media to allegations of serious sexual offences by him.
It’s been a nasty business. Mr Hemming has asked, unsuccessfully to date, for the police to investigate Ms Baker to see if she has perverted the course of justice. He has called her a ‘fantasist’, which she denies.
Meanwhile, she has become a campaigner in the fight to stop child abuse, and is preparing herself for a key role as a ‘core participant’ in the Westminster segment of the sex abuse inquiry.
Crucially, this means she will be one of 16 individuals and representatives of institutions allowed to ask questions of politicians and others who appear at the inquiry. She will also have the right to request free representation by a lawyer, as well as an early sight of sensitive documents relating to the inquiry.
GIVEN her position, she will play a part in actually moulding the proceedings, the cost of which, last year alone, was £17 million. By its conclusion in 2021, it is expected to reach nearly £100 million.
Her prominent role in the controversial inquiry comes as her bitter war of words with Mr Hemming continues.
In a recent High Court claim, Ms Baker is asking Hemming to pay damages for defamation for also calling her a fantasist. He, in turn, is counter-claiming, saying that her allegations are ‘malicious and deliberate lies’.
A key part of this legal spat are two distinguishing features of Mr Hemming’s body which Ms Baker has admitted to mentioning to police during their inquiries. They include a peculiarity in his private parts and a birth mark on his back.
In court papers, Mr Hemming’s lawyer states that the former MP and father of five ‘does not have either feature and never has.
‘He does have another prominent feature (a burn on his upper leg), which she did not describe and which was present in 1988-92, which is
‘I was not there when she says I was. I’ve never even met her’ JOHN HEMMING
at the time she said the events took place.’ The lawyer added, ‘Mr Hemming asks the court to conclude that Baker’s allegations against him are untrue.’
For her part, Ms Baker, in legal papers seen by the Mail, admits to making the ‘birthmark claim’ and insists that Mr Hemming has a ‘curve’ to his manhood. Fighting her ground, she says that he, and others who abused her, have caused her to suffer posttraumatic stress and psychosexual trauma disorder.
Mr Hemming, she adds, has damaged her reputation by insinuating she is not a ‘respected’ anti- child abuse campaigner. She rejects this, citing as evidence of her highly-regarded status, her visit in January 2016 to speak to special advisers to the then Home Secretary Mrs May; meetings with various crossparty MPs and Directors of Children’s Services; and her significant role at the upcoming inquiry.
A few days ago, she told the Mail, outside the bookies’ shop where she works, that she is looking forward to Monday’s hearing.
As for Mr Hemming, and his partner Emily Cox, 43, they say they have been through nearly five years of hell since Ms Baker pointed her finger at him.
Emily, who was close to tears when the Mail talked to her about Ms Baker’s ‘out-of-the-blue’ allegations, says: ‘Our young daughter says she dreads someone turning around at school and calling her father a paedophile.
‘Some families have pulled away from us. Children who used to come to visit don’t any more. Not because they don’t like my daughter, but because they don’t like her dad for something he hasn’t done. It is very hard on her.’
When Ms Baker’s accusations first emerged, Emily sat Mr Hemming, her long-time partner, down and looked him in the eye. ‘I asked him once. He said no, and that was enough. I immediately began to investigate myself. I wanted to prove he was telling the truth and feel I have done.’
John Hemming adds: ‘In the late Eighties and early Nineties, I was in London building a business. I have five huge
files of dated documents, from rail tickets to diaries, showing that I was not in Staffordshire when she says I was. I have never even met Ms Baker.’
At the worst moments of the past five years, he says he turned to ‘a bottle of wine and four beers a night for starters’, as he spent his days fighting to protect his reputation.
He is still bewildered as to why or how his name came to be mentioned by Ms Baker. He remembers, when he was an MP, that she approached him by email about her memories of child abuse, and that he advised her to go to the police with her worries, and wonders whether this played a part.
Against this background, the inquiry chair has ruled that Ms Baker has a ‘significant interest’ in the Westminster investigation. Her allegations against Mr Hemming will not form part of the hearing — although she has requested they should be — because of time considerations and legal constraints.
Instead, the probe will centre on the lives of six men, all of whom are now dead. First, there is Sir Peter Morrison, once deputy chairman of the Tory Party and Private Parliamentary Secretary to Mrs Thatcher, who was rumoured to have had a ‘dangerous sexual appetite for young men’. Then there’s British diplomat and intelligence operative Sir Peter Hayman, who is now known to have been a member of the Paedophile Information Exchange, a group promoting sex between adults and children.
There’s also Rochdale MP Sir Cyril Smith, reputed to be a predatory paedophile who, for more than four decades, used his influence to get into children’s homes in the North and prey on hundreds of boys, some of them as young as eight.
It has been claimed by victims and whistle-blowers that Smith was protected by his own Liberal party, as well as the police and even the security services.
As for the late Labour peer Lord Janner, he first faced accusations of sexually abusing children in 1991, but strenuously denied any wrongdoing. The claims against him reemerged three years ago, when the Crown Prosecution Service considered there was enough evidence to merit prosecution. Janner died before the allegations could be tested in court, and his family insist his ‘good name’ is about to be trashed, with no redress, during the ‘Kafkaesque’ Westminster inquiry.
The inquiry is also expected to dredge up the names of Sir Edward Heath, the former Prime Minister, and Lord Brittan, a former Home Secretary, despite the fact that both men are now dead and cannot defend themselves. Allegations against them of child abuse have been exhaustively investigated by police, who dismissed them after no corroborating evidence could be found.
The inquiry has stressed that it is not in the business of seeking to prove their guilt or otherwise — its purpose is to investigate whether those in Westminster’s corridors of power concealed or covered up allegations of child abuse. Secret reports, records and prime ministerial papers linked to the six have been called in from Parliamentary archives, the Cabinet Office, police forces, the intelligence services, Oxford University’s Bodleian library and retired politicians’ private homes. In short, no stone is being left unturned by the biggest statutory inquiry in British legal history. Amid all this, Esther Baker — with a highly-paid lawyer at her side — will be able to make opening and closing statements or suggest lines of inquiry that the investigation should pursue. What a curious position of power for a woman currently battling damning claims from a respected former MP that she herself is a fantasist.