THE PEER AND THE GANGSTER
A VERY BRITISH COVER-UP
DANIEL SMITH
History Press, 256pp, £20
In 1964, the Tory peer Bob Boothby sued the Mirror for an item that alleged (without naming either) a homosexual affair between a member of the House of Lords and an East-end gangster. As Boothby knew, he was likely to be identified as the peer in question, and Ronnie Kray as the gangster.
He had a point: as Peter Parker noted in the Spectator, ‘the Mirror’s mistake was to have suggested that there was a homosexual relationship between the peer and the gangster’. But Boothby, who retained the ferocious lawyer Arnold Goodman, also had a cheek: ‘Kray was instead acting as a procurer of young roughs for Boothby, whose sexual tastes he shared.’
And in support of his case he offered the ‘outright lies’ that he had never been homosexual and that he’d met Ronnie Kray on only a handful of times to discuss business. Nevertheless, the Establishment closed ranks to shut him up; the opposition leader Harold Wilson, for instance, knew that if he sought to make capital out of the scandal his own MP Tom Driberg, ‘a frequent guest at Ronnie Kray’s sex parties’, would soon come under scrutiny.
Smith argues that the cover-up set a precedent for the handling of later scandals such as those involving Jeremy Thorpe and Cyril Smith and, said Parker, his ‘lively and engrossing book’ offers ‘the clearest and most comprehensive account yet of this extraordinary saga’.
In the Mail, Roger Lewis delighted in ‘a sensational item or allegation on every page’. In the Times, Richard Davenport-hines was more cautious, finding some of the book’s sections ‘a fluently written hotchpotch of old, discredited press stories, deliberate Soviet misdirection and overexcitable guesswork’. Nevertheless, he said, ‘there are excellent contemporary resonances’ and ‘in the year of lockdown, it is good to read Smith’s indictment of political smartypants who fancy themselves exempt from the rules’.