SHAME OF THE LIBERALS
SEVENTY years ago, Sir Winston Churchill complained of ‘the persistent freemasonry of the House of Commons’ — a cynical readiness among MPs to protect their own. The Cyril Smith cover-up shows this freemasonry is still very much in evidence.
One of the most telling insights into why Smith’s political colleagues turned a blind eye to his abuse was given by Michael Meadowcroft, the former Liberal MP for Leeds West.
He acknowledged he’d heard rumours that Cyril ‘liked boys’, but said blandly: ‘I don’t think we did much about it. Maybe we should have done at the time, but we didn’t.
‘Essentially, as long as a colleague turns up and votes the right way, we don’t really do much about their own problems.’
This chilling confession, on Channel 4’s Dispatches spoke volumes about the rotten culture within politics. But so did an incident when the interview was over, while a cameraman was filming shots of Westminster as background for the programme.
A former Tory Cabinet minister from the Eighties walked up and asked what the film was for. When he was told, he shook his head and said: ‘We all knew, you know.’
Within the Liberal Party, many — including the leadership — did not like Smith. But they were prepared to tolerate his dark side because he had the electoral Midas touch.
In this respect, the party’s slow and shambolic response to the allegations of groping by Lord Rennard — the Lib Dems’ by-election tactician — suggests little has changed.
Smith’s own by-election win at Rochdale in 1972 kick-started a Liberal revival.
He became the most famous and popular member of a party that spent much of the Seventies reeling from the scandal surrounding its leader, Jeremy Thorpe, who was accused — though ultimately acquitted — of conspiring to murder rent-boy Norman Scott, his alleged lover.
The Liberals handled the Thorpe affair badly. An indication of how they might have dealt with the allegations against Cyril can be seen in a secret internal investigation into Thorpe carried out by David Steel and fellow Liberal MP Emlyn Hooson in 1971.
It was considered by many to be a sophisticated cover-up.
WHEN the Thorpe allegations became public a few years l ater, the politicians involved in the investigation blamed everyone except themselves. No one in the party, it appeared, wanted to know what was going on.
The same David Steel was leader of the party when rumours of Cyril’s paedophilia were raised. Yet he went on to ensure Cyril got a knighthood.
The Information Commissioner recently overturned a Cabinet Office decision to keep Cyril’s knighthood nomination papers secret, which would have prevented it being known that Steel put his name forward.
Furthermore, the Commissioner concluded that it was in the public interest for this to be known because the person who nominated Cyril would have been aware of rumours about him at the time.
To begin to even try to understand why Steel dismissed such serious rumours — satisfying himself with Smith’s denial of wrongdoing when he asked him about the allegations — you have to consider the zeitgeist of the Seventies.
There was a febrile mood in the party and a sense that British institutions were under threat. The Establishment was being battered by scandals and now the Liberals were in the firing line.
Peter Bessell, a former Liberal MP who gave evidence against Thorpe, captured the mood at the time.
Anyone with public prominence, he explained, automatically acquired a measure of immunity denied to everyone else.
One of the many Liberals who clearly had doubts about Cyril was Lord (Tony) Greaves, who served on Lancashire County Council for 25 years. He was asked to write an obituary for a national newspaper when Cyril died, but refused because of ‘political reasons’.
By this, I believe he didn’t want to criticise Cyril publicly for fear that it might be damaging for his party. When I spoke to him and listened to him squirming over the phone, the hypocrisy was obvious. Greaves despised Cyril and was quick to say that he hopes there will never be another politician like him.
But he was happy to allow the Liberal Democrats to bask in Cyril’s popular appeal in the immediate aftermath of his death, when party stalwarts queued up to praise Cyril as a national treasure.
I invited him to set the record straight and give an insight into the real Cyril Smith from the view of those within his own party. He politely declined, giving the same reason he turned down that obituary: ‘I don’t want to do it for political reasons.’
Truly, the Liberals have come to a sorry pass when senior figures are still reluctant to denounce child abusers for ‘political reasons’.
But denial runs deep. In 2012, after I first exposed his abuse, in the Commons, Rochdale’s former Liberal Democrat MP, Paul Rowen, went on TV to attack me. Liberal Democrats would actively avoid me in Westminster. Some got out of the lift when I got in. Others just stared ahead, bristling with indignation.
It’s worth recalling that on Cyril’s 80th birthday, Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg lauded him as ‘a beacon for our party in the Seventies and Eighties’, who continued to be ‘an inspiration to the people of Rochdale’.
When he died two years later, Clegg gushed that everyone in Rochdale knew Cyril ‘as a friend’.
Smith’s fall from grace affected many in the party. When I first approached Simon Hughes, a former deputy leader, to speak about him, his face dropped.
But he agreed to do it and, unlike some of his colleagues, made no effort to excuse Smith’s behaviour, calling it ‘very wrong and unacceptable’. At the same time, he made no attempt to hide his respect for Cyril. ‘I saw him as an uncle or godfather in the party,’ he admitted, saying Smith was always supportive to him and remained a great example of a type of MP that’s sorely needed.
‘For Cyril, Rochdale was his place. He was passionate and emotional about it. We need more people in politics like that.’ Hughes’s fervour for community politics is genuine.
I decided not to mention some of the other things I’ve found out about Cyril’s approach to his constituents: how he intercepted and burnt postal votes cast for his opponents; his willingness to hush up health concerns for working- class people in return for 1,300 shares in the town’s asbestos factory.
Nor did I ask how ‘community politics’ can be squared with Smith’s failure to put the needs of vulnerable boys ahead of his twisted sexual appetite. There was no point.
DEEP down, Hughes knows this. As we talked, he had the look of someone still coming to terms with the fact his mentor was a monster. Since our conversation, Hughes has become a Justice minister. He now has the opportunity to put right some of the wrongs of the system that failed Cyril’s victims.
To ensure history doesn’t repeat itself, it’s vital we take away the responsibility to root out abusers like Smith from a political establishment fraught with freemasonry. We have to ensure the police can pursue prosecutions free from political influence.
This change has to come. I only hope the uncomfortable spectre of Cyril Smith gives Hughes the motivation to drive this through.