How the Establishment hid the monster in their midst

As MPs demand an inquiry into the covering-up of a VIP child abuse ring, chilling proof of how this depraved diplomat was protected by the great and good

Sir Peter Hayman’s life was one decorated with worthy acronyms and exclusive memberships. By the time of his retirement from ‘the Diplomatic’, the Stowe and Oxford-educated former rifle Brigade officer had been a Home and Foreign Office mandarin, working closely with the intelligence services at the height of the Cold War: it has even been suggested he was a senior figure in Mi6.

His final posting was as High Commissioner to Canada.

As a result of these labours he was made a Knight Commander of the Order of St Michael and St George (KCMG), Commander of the royal Victorian Order (CVO) and an MBE.

Off duty he also belonged to the MCC and the Army and Navy private members’ club (The rag). Like Sir Peter, both were pillars of London’s old-school-tie Establishment.

Yet unlike t he MCC, t here was no distinguishing neckwear at Sir Peter’s rather more discreet third ‘club’, to which he seems to have devoted most physical energy and expense as a pensioner newly returned from post-colonial duties in Ottawa.

His membership number was ‘330’ and this organisation of similarly minded if not gilded i ndividuals was called the Paedophile information Exchange. it had been formed almost exactly 200 years after the MCC.

PIE supported and encouraged illegal sexual relationships between adults and children. in other words, child abuse.

Sir Peter lived with his wife of 40 years in a lovely home in South Oxfordshire where, in a parallel existence, he was deputy chairman of the Conservative Association. He acted as a churchwarden’s assistant, and opened the local fete.

Everyone there thought he was marvellous. Who was to know otherwise?

That was because his official PIE literature and graphic correspondence with fellow paedophiles was by squalid necessity sent to a flat at 95 Linden Gardens, Notting Hill Gate, London, some 50 miles away.

The ex- diplomat had rented it for that purpose — as well as extra-marital sexual liaisons —

His stash of child porn revolted police

under the name of Peter Henderson. The fact that the flat was almost across the road from the Soviet embassy was simply an irony. How the KGB would have loved to have made blackmail use of his peccadillo.

Then Sir Peter made a mistake. He left a packet of paedophile material i n an envelope on a London bus. it was addressed to Mr Henderson at Linden Gardens in Notting Hill. A fellow passenger was curious. The package came into the possession of the police.

Soon afterwards, in November 1978, they raided the Linden Gardens flat.

What they found was a huge trove of revolting paedophilia and other extreme pornography. Among it was a library of 45 substantial diaries in which Sir Peter had recorded i n detail his sexual experiences and fantasies, the latter including sex with minors.

There was also substantial correspondence with other PIE members — 111 pages in one instance — in which they shared their otherwise secret desires and other graphic paedophile material.

Police later found that two of the dozen or so paedophiles in Sir Peter’s epistolary circle had been writing to each other about their interest in the extreme sexual torture and murder of children.

Even the hardened cops of the Obscene Publications Squad were ‘revolted’ by the Linden Gardens haul.

When interviewed, Sir Peter — a man who had been deputy commandant of the British zone in Berlin and later tasked to tear a strip off the Soviet ambassador to London after Moscow crushed the Prague Spring of 1968 — broke down and wept.

He would surely be exposed and his reputation ruined. All those official laurels would be for naught. And yet he wasn’t. Much to the anger and disbelief of the Obscene Publications Squad he was let off with a caution. The grounds for this decision certainly seem extraordinary to contemporary eyes. The Director of Public Prosecutions deemed that as the paedophile material sent through the post by Sir Peter and his friends had not been ‘unsolicited’ nor traded for profit, no offence had taken place worthy of prosecution.

The result? Save among a few officers at Scotland Yard, Sir Peter’s reputation remained intact and might have remained so until his death in 1992 had he not been later exposed in parliament.

The Hayman affair came back into the spotlight this week, amid growing pressure for an inquiry into an alleged cover-up of a VIP paedophile ring which included leading figures in Westminster and Whitehall.

The matter was raised by campaigning MP Simon Danczuk, and centres on a dossier of child sex allegations involving senior establishment figures, which was handed to t he t hen Home Secretary Leon Brittan by fellow Tory MP Geoffrey Dickens in November 1983.

Lord Brittan says that he passed the documents on to Whitehall officials. But no action was taken and the Home Office has admitted that the Dickens dossier was subsequently destroyed.

The peer faces increasing