Leon Brittan: What The Dickens?

Downing Street is facing fresh calls for an inquiry into allegations of child sex abuse among politicians after it emerged that Lord Brittan, a former home secretary, was given a dossier containing claims of Westminster paedophile activity in the 1980s.

Brittan is under scrutiny over his handling of the scandal after he said he was passed a "bundle" of claims by the former MP Geoffrey Dickens in 1983 and gave it to his officials to investigate.

Last year the Tory peer said he could not remember getting the dossier, but on Wednesday he released a statement saying he could now recollect a meeting with Dickens. He said he had asked officials to look into the claims and could not remembering hearing any more about it.

Sunday Mirror, December 2013.

But his account was undermined by a Home Office review from last year that found Brittan wrote to Dickens in 1984 saying the material was assessed as being worth pursuing by the director of public prosecutions and was "passed to the appropriate authorities".

Brittan released a second statement saying he had only just been made aware of the Home Office review from last summer, which proved that "appropriate action" had been taken. He said the report was "entirely consistent" with the action he set out in his first statement.

Earlier the Labour MP Simon Danczuk challenged Brittan to "share his knowledge" about the file prepared by Dickens. It contained information about the "Paedophile Information Exchange (Pie), about paedophiles operating a network within and around Westminster," Danczuk told the home affairs committee...

The Guardian.

Geoffrey Dickens - obsessed much?

Oh Mr Brittan, what tangled webs we weave. 

Politics watchers of a certain age may recall there was one senior member of the Thatcher government who was often rumoured to be a paedophile - though no evidence was ever given (Private Eye believed it was probably a far-right MI5 smear campaign).

They may also recall that the late Geoffrey Dickens MP was a notoriously nasty and obsessive homophobe. He also seemed to think Britain was in the grip of some secret homosexual conspiracy; 'I've got eight names of big people, really important names, public figures. And I am going to expose them in Parliament.
'One of these people is a friend of mine, but you have to be merciless protecting the young. These people must not be allowed to get away with it just because they are important in public life.'

He often tried to claim there was an obvious connection between paedpohilia and homosexuality.

This homo-hating hysteria helped pave the way for the introduction of Section 28.* 

Dickens promised to name his paedophile politicos using parliamentary privilege, but strangely never did.

Fagburn wouldn't by surprised if Mr Dickens' dossier was so dodgy and unconvincing in its accusations that anyone who read it thought it should be filed under 'B For Bonkers' and ignored it. 

*See Stephen Jeffrey-Poulter: Peers, Queers & Commons.: The struggle for gay law reform from 1950 to the present.