WITCH-HUNTER WATSON’S UNCLE IS CHILD ABUSER
Scoutmaster jailed for sex attacks on boy Did offences drive MP’s flawed vendetta?
TOM WATSON, the Labour deputy leader accused of leading a child abuse ‘witch hunt’, is related to a paedophile scoutmaster, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.
The politician’s uncle was last year jailed for indecently assaulting a nine-year-old Cub Scout five decades ago, in what was described as a ‘gross abuse of his position of trust’.
Watson is under fire for making ‘unfounded’ sex crime allegations about Lord Brittan during a cam- paign to expose an alleged VIP child abuse ring and Establishment cover-up.
But he has chosen never to speak of the crimes of his uncle, Peter Halliwell, who abused the boy ‘for his own gratification’.
Halliwell was sentenced to 27 months in jail after pleading guilty
to three counts of indecent assault when he appeared at Manchester Crown Court in March 2014.
The offences related to the ‘targeted’ abuse of a boy when he was a Scout leader in Cheadle Hulme, Stockport, between 1965 and 1967.
Halliwell, 78, has since been released but remains on the sex offenders’ register.
‘Halliwell used his role as a Scout leader to target a young boy in his care,’ the Crown Prosecution Service said at the time of his conviction. ‘This was a gross abuse of his position of trust in the Scouts and in the local community, whereby he persistently exploited the boy for his own gratification.’
In a statement to The Mail on Sunday last night, Watson confirmed he knew about his uncle’s crime.
He said: ‘I barely know Peter Halliwell. His victim deserved justice and I’m glad he got it.’
The senior MP declined to say when he first heard about the abuse carried out by his uncle and whether it had affected his campaign on the subject. It is believed Watson has not seen his uncle for more than a decade.
Watson’s high-profile campaign to expose VIP paedophiles has divided opinion. It has won praise for helping bring abusers to justice and for pressuring the Government into launching a public inquiry into claims of historical child abuse.
But others have claimed that he has sparked a witch-hunt that has smeared innocent people.
He has been criticised for making a false rape allegation against Lord Brittan, who went to his grave in January unaware that police had found there was no case for him to answer over allegations he raped a 19-year-old student in 1967.
Critics have claimed that Watson has used his campaign to score political points.
His name was conspicuously absent from a list of signatories call- ing for action against Labour peer Greville Janner in April.
Watson also once used the fact that a paedophile’s half-brother had worked in Downing Street to bolster his claims of a VIP sex abuse ring when he first raised the issue in Parliament in 2012.
To the best of The Mail on Sunday’s knowledge, Watson has never alluded to any family link to the subject of child abuse.
Watson’s mother, Linda, now 72, married Halliwell’s brother, Edwin Barry Halliwell, in 1997.
It was her second marriage, and both Peter Halliwell and the politician were there.
Last night, Halliwell, who was released from prison early in May after serving half his sentence, confirmed that he had met Watson on several occasions.
He told The Mail on Sunday: ‘I’ve met him yes. When my brother married his mother for once and a couple of other occasions but we’re going back to the 1990s. I don’t really see that much of my brother... living in different parts of the country.’
Asked whether he and his brother were estranged, he said: ‘No.’ And
‘A gross abuse of his position of trust’
asked to comment on Watson’s campaigning against child abuse, he said: ‘What he says about whatever is up to him surely. It doesn’t bother me. If he wants to talk about those sort of things it’s up to him.’
The revelations come after Watson was put under pressure over his campaign. He personally wrote to the Director of Public Prosecutions last year to try to get the Metropolitan Police to re-open an investigation into a claim that Brittan had raped a woman known as ‘Jane’ in 1967, who was then aged 19. The case had been closed over a lack of evidence, but it was re-opened last year after Watson’s lobbying, and the peer was interviewed under caution. Last week it emerged that police had found no evidence to charge Lord Brittan.
On Friday, Watson said in a blog that he was ‘sorry for the distress Leon Brittan’s family experienced as they grieved for him’ – but did not address concerns that child abuse witnesses have been coerced into making false allegations.
And Brittan’s brother, Sir Samuel, said that the qualified apology was inadequate.
Watson wrote: ‘I had been told of multiple allegations about Leon Brittan and I had met some of the people making those allegations. I did not and could not know if they were true but I did believe their claims should be fully investigated. I felt the testimony of one of those people was particularly compelling.
‘But it was for the police and the Crown Prosecution Service to reach a judgment on that after examining all the available evidence. That is the approach I have always followed when contacted by people who claim they are victims of child abuse or other serious sexual crimes.
‘I have said in the past that I am sorry for the distress Leon Brittan’s family experienced as they grieved for him. I still am.
‘But I wanted the claims made against him properly investigated.
‘I think most people would assume that when an individual is facing multiple allegations of sexual crimes from people who are independent of each other, the police would want to interview them.
‘As it happens, I think that Leon Brittan would have been interviewed even if I hadn’t intervened because the DPP made it clear in her reply to my letter that the police investigation into him was ongoing.’ Watson was the first MP to claim there was a ‘powerful paedophile network linked to Parliament and No10’ – and he used the fact that an innocent Tory MP had a paedophile relative to bolster his claims.
The Labour MP told the Commons in October 2012 that there was a child abuser who boasted ‘of his links to a senior aide of a former Prime Minister’.
Although he did not name either man, he was referring to Paedophile Information Exchange treasurer Charles Napier, whose half-brother is John Whittingdale, who was once Margaret Thatcher’s political secretary.
Months after Watson’s speech, Napier was arrested and last year he jailed for 13 years for sex abuse at a boarding school.