Smith allegations ‘tittle tattle’ says peer
ALIB DEM grandee has dismissed child abuse allegations against the late Rochdale MP Cyril Smith as ‘tittle tattle’ and ‘scurrilous hearsay’.
former party leader Lord Steel has said ‘nothing has been proved’ yet about Smith, who is alleged to have sexually assaulted boys at Rochdale’s Knowl View residential school, which closed in 1992, and at the town’s privately-run Cambridge House children’s care home, which closed in 1965.
A ‘valuable opportunity’ was missed to prosecute Smith during his lifetime in the late 1990s, the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse found earlier this year.
But Lord Steel told BBC Two’s Newsnight: “It’s all been scurrilous hearsay and, so far, we are waiting for the final outcome of the inquiry.
“So, it’s wrong to categorise him in that way.”
Asked if he believed Mr Smith was guilty of abuse, he said he did not know.
“I don’t think it’s right to suddenly say that he was just because of tittle-tattle,” the peer added.
When allegations against Smith were first made public in 1979 in a article published by the Rochdale Alternative Paper, Lord Steel’s then spokesman responded: “All he seems to have done is spanked a few bare bottoms.”
Smith, who died in 2010 aged 82, was originally a Labour councillor in Rochdale and later a Liberal then Liberal Democrat MP for the town from 1972 to 1992.
Lord Steel led the Liberal Party, and then the Liberal Democrats, between 1976 and 1988.
October’s hearings of the IICSA heard from several alleged victims of 29 stone Smith.
One former Cambridge House resident described being denied urgent medical attention for a ruptured appendix until the politician had finished ‘fondling’ him, adding: “He was Cyril Smith - what could I do? I was 15 years old. I was scared **** less.
A former Knowl View pupil, who attended the school in the 1980s aged 12 or 13, told how one night a member of staff ‘pulled him out of bed’ and ‘frogmarched’ him to a flat, possibly a staff accommodation area, where Smith was sitting on the bed.
He said Smith, a governor at the school, made him take off his pyjamas and performed a sex act on him before raping him.