Paedophiles In Parliament (2018)

In autumn 2012, the world finally got to hear what had been a much-discussed media rumour for years. Jimmy Savile, popular entertainer, friend of royalty and politicians and so-called national treasure, was, in fact, a serial abuser and paedophile. Savile, we were told, had used his charitable deeds as a front to access and abuse vulnerable and at times sick young people. Following this revelation, campaigning MP Tom Watson stood up in the Houses of Parliament and addressed the then Prime Minister David Cameron. He referred to the files of a convicted paedophile who he said was well connected.

But if the files still exist, I want to ensure that the Metropolitan Police secure the evidence, re-examine it and investigate clear intelligence suggesting a powerful paedophile network linked to Parliament at number 10.

In the five years since Tom Watson made this statement, a number of police investigations have been held, a national inquiry into child abuse has been launched, alleged survivors have been smeared and discredited, and no politicians have been charged and convicted. I'm Sonia Poulton. As a journalist, I've followed events since Tom Watson stood in the Houses of Parliament.

This film will examine whether there is any truth to the rumours of paedophiles in Parliament, whether it was concocted by fantasists or whether this is something that will remain covered up by the British establishment. The 2012 revelations about Jimmy Savile had stunned a nation. For many, Savile was considered a national treasure for his work with numerous charities.

A consummate showman, Savile had enjoyed fame and all the trappings for decades. He was at the heart of the media establishment, having been one of the BBC's stars, and he was also a great friend of royalty and politicians. Many people were shocked to learn that Savile had used his position to be a serial sex abuser and paedophile, much of it conducted in plain sight. When exposed, a year after his death, many of his former colleagues said they had heard backstage rumours about him, but they did nothing. At least eight UK police forces over 50 years heard reports of his perverse and entitled behaviour. A report later concluded that Savile had at least 450 victims.

No small number. And yet somehow, the man now described as Britain's most prolific paedophile seemed to fly under the radar of public exposure and criminal prosecution. The question for many remains, why wasn't Savile caught when he was alive? Simple, he was protected by the British establishment. There is no doubt that Jimmy Savile, a working-class DJ from the north of England, had formidable influence in royal and political circles. Some insight into his power can be gleaned from his interviews. Here he is, during a popular 70s chat show, explaining how, without official permission, he took a young girl into the Queen's London home for his TV show, Jim'll Fix It.

So I went to see Amanda and said, that I've got this situation and I'm bringing a friend in. So he said, listen, who's going to object to you? So I said, all right.

This is a key insight and should not be underestimated. Even though Savile was a notorious name dropper, it also reveals that his power was such that even the Queen's security would not stop him doing what he wanted in her house. That tells us something about Savile's influence in royal circles. and beyond.

I've seen nothing to suggest that the people in Savile's social circle, including royalty and politicians, didn't know something about his inappropriate sexual behaviour and the endless rumours surrounding it. Certainly, it's the job of the secret services to check out everyone around royalty and politicians in the interest of national safety and security.

There is every reason to believe that the royal family, including Queen Elizabeth and Prince Charles, knew about Jimmy Savile, and still he was their friend. Here he is in the same interview. He is now describing taking the girl into Buckingham Palace. Listen to his familiarity with Prince Philip.

“And we walked up the steps and into the room where the reception was, in a room called the Bow Room. And fantastic luck! Prince Philip, who was a marvellous geezer, happened to be just standing inside the door, parroting to somebody. So I went, ‘Psst!’”

“It’s a prearranged signal no doubt.” LAUGHTER

“Well, no, there's not a lot of people who go, ‘Psst’, inside the palace. So he's swung a butchers, right, like this.. see me, and I do the nod for the kid, I went.. (*gestures) So he doesn't know where this young lady's appeared from [indistinct: but he's a long coat on with bumpy (?)] but, he has give her the beautiful smile - and she's gone..” (*gestures)

It wasn't that Savile was hiding who he was, but his charitable sheen and celebrity status, coupled with his establishment influence, made him untouchable. But was that also because if, as he once wrote, if he went down, so would others? Or was it even, as many people insist, Savile procured children for establishment paedophiles, and thus his secret was also theirs? So the Saville TV exposé aired in October 2012 and Tom Watson's address to David Cameron followed, as did a tsunami of accusations and a media frenzy to get the best scoops.

It wasn't a strong foundation for accurate reporting, given that some of the accusations were 40-plus years old and evidence of child abuse is hard to find in current cases, much less in the deep past. It was a fertile ground for an assortment of agendas and not all of it designed to get to the truth.

All of this piqued my curiosity and I began researching and then writing and broadcasting about what I had found. I've talked with a wide range of people from survivors to the convicted, from police to whistleblowers, from MPs to social workers. In this report, you will find contributions from people who have been smeared, discredited, convicted of crimes in their absence, jailed and forced to flee from their homes. many having worked inside the establishment and left, having blown the whistle on some illegal activity within it.

I make no judgment about these people, but I include them because they have been part of the narrative of paedophiles in Parliament since 2012. I also know, having experienced it firsthand, that the establishment uses its force against those who actively pursue the allegations of paedophiles within its midst. And they use all forms of persuasion to prevent people from speaking out to silence people - threats, intimidation, blackmail, financial deprivation - all types of harassment such as being put under intensive surveillance, telephone tapping, all of this. They pull out the stops and they have a limited funds because those funds are supplied by the taxpayer.

So I leave it to you, the viewer, to decide whether people are valid voices or mischief makers who are deceiving the rest of us. I set out to make sense of the glut of myths and disinformation online and in the mainstream media. The aim was to create as well-rounded a piece of work around this issue as possible. This is my journey.

But first, let's go back.

30 years before Prime Minister David Cameron was asked about paedophiles in Parliament, another MP had attempted to uncover the truth.

Maverick MP Geoffrey Dickens believed there was widespread and unreported child abuse taking place in England. He also believed, and had gathered names and information, on alleged paedophiles operating with impunity in politics and the secret services.

Dickens had, on at least two occasions, been led by the heart and he directly approached people in constituencies without going through the parliamentary formalities of doing so, i.e. running it past the Member of Parliament, whose territory it included.

One of these constituencies was the domain of Jeremy Corbyn, now the leader of the Labour Party.

Corbyn expressed his horror at Dickens talking to his constituents and the local press about allegations of child sex abuse on the estates in Islington, North London, Corbyn's territory.

Dickens was not prepared to be scolded by Corbyn or anyone, and during a parliamentary debate, they clashed.

Geoffrey Dickens caused his fellow parliamentarians a great deal of irritation. He was seen as a loudmouth and an attention seeker who, given he had spent part of his childhood in foster care, had rigid views about traditional family values. He claimed to have suffered break-ins and intimidation when he started his paedophile-exposing campaign.

None of this deterred him, and during a 30-minute meeting with the Home Secretary of the day, he handed over a 40-page dossier of names, including politicians, who he alleged were paedophiles. For some researchers, this was curious. After all, the Home Secretary, Leon Britton, was alleged, right up to his death in 2016, to have been a paedophile while in Parliament.

30 years later, the whereabouts of the dossier could not be ascertained. It turned out that somewhere between Leon Britton, the Home Office and the police, the dossier had disappeared. Some people wondered, had Dickens given Britton a list with his name on it?

“There were two Dickens files. File number one, I've seen someone who, because of the Official Secrets Act, has not come forward. We saw the first Dickens file. There were approximately 16 names on it. They were cross-party. They weren't all well-known names. Some of them were. That was research done by Geoffrey Dickens. I don't know whether it's true or not. I do know that he gave it to Liam Britton in November 1983.

On the 18th of January... 1984, a second person gave a second file to Geoffrey Dickens. I have a copy of that file. It's what I call the second Dickens dossier. The police have a copy of it. Though, and I should stress that for any journalist, Mr Leon Britton is fairly obviously not in this file or the other Dickens file. Geoffrey Dickens wasn't stupid. He didn't give a file to Leon Britton naming Leon Britton.”

Geoffrey Dickens was ridiculed throughout his public life, but was that because he was delusional or because he was exposing those around him? Either way, he left a legacy of his work. he used parliamentary privilege, the ability of an MP to say what they want within Parliament without fear of prosecution, and he used it to name a senior British diplomat as a paedophile.

Dickens was derided for doing so. Years later, he was proved right. Peter Heyman, knighted by the Queen, turned out to have quite a charge sheet, including his secret diaries containing fantasies of sexual activity between him and children.

A file documenting his sexual proclivities was prepared for Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. It was then filed away in National Archives under security rules until its discovery by an academic researcher almost 40 years later.

As we shall see, it was not the first or last time that Margaret Thatcher's government would be aware of paedophile accusations and do nothing about them.

Geoffrey Dickens died in 1995 and with him, to a certain extent, went the political drive to expose child sex abuse. As a public show that the establishment intended to address the issue, child abuse inquiries followed in the 90s, compensation was paid to children who were in care and had been let down by the system and “lessons were learned”.

But, in reality, little had changed over the years. Children were just as vulnerable as ever, and while the paedophile accusations dogged some politicians for many years, they remained only rumours to be shared in campaign groups around the UK and on the internet.

That is, until the Jimmy Savile revelations and the subsequent question to the Prime Minister and Pandora's box was about to be prized open for inspection by a new generation of news-hungry people.

And so, in October 2012, mainstream media began airing stories of alleged survivors claiming to have been abused at the hands of powerful men from the British establishment. The BBC, still reeling from accusations of enabling and covering up the crimes of its one-time star entertainer Jimmy Savile, hit the ground running with one of the first television reports about parliamentarian abuse of children.

Newsnight on the BBC ran a highly publicised story that an unnamed senior Conservative had been involved in abusing children in a North Wales care home in the 70s.

Having previously stopped a story exposing Jimmy Savile, who was, of course, a BBC asset, Newsnight produced an appalling piece of journalism in which a survivor of care home abuse, Stephen Measham, claimed to have been a victim of Baron McAlpine, a former senior member of Margaret Thatcher's government, and latterly a peer in the House of Lords.

Although Misham didn't name or identify McAlpine in the programme, promotion surrounding the show added to online speculation that it was indeed Alastair McAlpine who had been identified by Stephen Misham, to the team.

The programme aired and the furore kicked off. Misham later retracted his allegation. Misham's humiliation in mainstream and on social media was an early indicator of what could happen to those alleging that they had been abused by members of the British establishment.

But there was a deeper history to accusations of child sexual abuse at the hands of Alastair McAlpine when political magazine Scallywag had accused him of such in the 90s. Observers, who had followed events since the 90s and believed in the old adage of no smoke without fire, turned to the words in McAlpine's own book about how to manipulate the public.

The autumn 2012 pedophile hunting climate intensified and less than a week after the BBC's debacle, a presenter from a popular mid-morning TV show in the UK handed the Prime Minister, David Cameron, a list of alleged parliamentary...

“You know the names on that piece of paper. Will you be speaking to those people? I think, Philip, this is really important, right, because there is a danger, if we're not careful, that this could turn into a sort of... a sort of witch hunt, particularly against people who are gay.

And I'm worried about the sort of thing you're doing right now, giving me a list of names that you've taken off the internet.”

But this was not about homosexuality, but about child abuse, and Cameron conflating the two was not only an outdated stereotype, but also somewhat deceptive and misleading. It enabled the notion of a gay witch hunt in Parliament, and one that other people, who would later be accused, would draw on.

For campaigners who had fought for years to have claims of establishment abuse listened to, Philip Schofield's action was welcomed as one way to break through the gatekeeping that surrounded allegations of parliamentary paedophiles. Others still were concerned that this would serve to put back the search for truth. Time would tell.

Nonetheless, Philip Schofield in this morning was rounded on and criticism came in swiftly. It was another presenter, Ruth Langsford, who was given the job of apologising on air.

“Unfortunately, there may have been a misjudged camera angle for a split second as I showed the Prime Minister some information I'd obtained from the internet. I asked for his reaction to give him the opportunity to make a point, which he very clearly made, about the dangers of any witch hunt. That's Philip's statement. ITV have also issued an apology...”

So who was this person who may have been momentarily identified as an alleged paedophile? Like Newsnight, it turned out it was Lord McAlpine again. Lord McAlpine sought and received damages from the BBC and ITV, even though neither had named or identified him. Further damages were received from a newspaper columnist and the wife of the Speaker of the House of Parliament, who had made a reference to McAlpine in a tweet.

In a further move, his solicitor issued threats to Twitter users not to repeat claims. It was as clear an indication as any that those who made allegations and those who sought to highlight them would not be tolerated by wealthy and connected members of the British establishment.

And so from 2012 a climate was forged, one in which people claiming to be survivors of establishment and institutional abuse rose up and began to create their own narrative on the internet.

By far the most influential and prolific of this new movement was Exaro, an online news agency. Staffed by experienced journalists, Exaro had emerged somewhat timely in the year leading up to the Jimmy Savile revelations. Journalists were highly critical of Exaro's stock in trade, of selling alleged survivor stories to newspapers and TV companies, and the stories were put out unchallenged and largely uncorroborated.

Clearly, this was a system open to manipulation, were people fabricating stories for attention?, and was Exaro exploiting these vulnerabilities for money and failing, with journalistic due diligence, in the rush to be ever more ahead of the pack?

“There's going to be a lot more, even more shocking than we have exposed already.”

“and I was told that there was a place I'd never heard of called Dolphin Square, and that's one of the places where there were parties where those boys were going, involving Members of Parliament. And I refrain from the detail that I was given. That was given to the police at the time. It's been given many times since, and the police told me about a year into that investigation that somebody on high had curtailed the investigation and stopped it.”

One alleged survivor to come through at Exaro's doors was Esther Baker, who waved her anonymity to give an interview to Sky News about she claimed a Member of Parliament.

“This man was part of it for over four years. I know every part of that face. He was one of the.. I'd say one of the core members. He was there quite often. I was one of his favourites.”

Some sections of mainstream media in the UK loathed Esther Baker and she was deemed a fantasist and worse. The identity of the politician was unknown until the police investigation was dropped and the MP outed himself on his blog as the man at the centre of the mystery.

As a journalist, I was familiar with John Hemming for his campaigning work with troubled families and single parents whose children were taken into care and some put up for adoption. His parliamentary work was characterised by fighting for the underdog and challenging power and authority.

But in this post-Savile era, where good deeds and charity have been used as the perfect cover for abuse, I began to wonder, had Hemming gravitated towards the benevolent work primarily because of the vulnerability of the families involved? It's no longer unreasonable to ask that, although it is somewhat disheartening to have got here.

I've talked with both John Hemming and Esther Baker and my mind remains open. However, people are divided online and in particular on Twitter, where Baker tweets regularly and defiantly against those who doubt her. She's been savaged in the media and at the hands of online trolls, but she remains staunch that she is telling the truth.

In July 2018, in a turning-the-tables mode, John Hemming announced that the police would now be investigating Baker's allegations against him. In 2013, I interviewed John Hemming about corruption and paedophilia on the island of Jersey. What he said about that case could equally now apply to his own.

“Now, the truth of the allegations has not been tested in court. They haven't looked at that. So what you have is a situation where they've got a court order initially a super injunction, a proper super injunction. I know what they are. They got a court order that says you mustn't make allegations about these people because they deny them. Now, that stops all journalism, anyone making any negative comment about anything anywhere. And there's a sort of the point at which one should be concerned. And one shouldn't say this is just something to sweep under the carpet.”

Some people around Esther Baker tell me she would welcome a day in court with the man she has accused of being her childhood abuser, but Baker herself responded with only this:

But Esther Baker was not alone in going from being the accuser to the accused. Another alleged survivor was also facing his own court proceedings. Nick, who claimed to have been abused by a number of political and military men, was charged with 12 counts of perjury in July 2018.

Nick, whose identity remains anonymous, detailed shocking stories for various media outlets. The police described what he said as credible and true, a stance they later regretted when a report slammed their conduct of automatically assuming that Nick was telling the truth.

As Nick's case is live during the making of this film, we will adhere to reporting restrictions so as to avoid any danger of subjudice. However, we will address what is already in the public domain.

Former Member of Parliament Harvey Proctor was one of the politicians at the centre of child abuse allegations. He was interviewed over six hours by police.

In August 2015, Proctor took the unprecedented step of organising a press call at a central London hotel where he delivered a gasp-inducing and graphic speech for the assembled journalists.

“Nick stated that he was the victim of systematic and serious sexual abuse by a group of adult males over a period between 1975 and 1984.”

But Mr Proctor was about to get even more graphic for the waiting press as he went on in detail about the alleged assaults.

“Mr Proctor then stripped the victim and tied him to a table. He then produced a large kitchen knife and stabbed the child through the arm and other parts of the body over a period of 40 minutes. A short time later, Mr. Proctor untied the victim and anally raped him on the table. The other male stripped Nick and anally raped him over the table. Mr. Proctor then strangled the victim with his hands until the boy's body went limp.”

Outrageous and frightening, no doubt, to be falsely accused, which is what the police finally concluded, thus opening up the way for Harvey Proctor to sue.

But the Harvey Proctor accusations had not come from nowhere. Certainly, Harvey Proctor, a member of Margaret Thatcher's government in the 80s, had a reported desire for young, prostituted men who dressed up as young boys.

Unquestionably, much of the mid-80s media in England had a great deal of problems with Harvey Proctor, and one newspaper editorial stated that he was unfit to pass laws to protect the young, a troubling and somewhat pointed charge to aim at a Member of Parliament.

It's important to remember that England in the 80s was coping with the moral panic that accompanied AIDS, and there was a great deal of homophobia for public figures to contend with.

Of course, being gay did not make Proctor a paedophile or a murderer, and Nick was not the only person to make serious allegations against him. Indeed, for the last three years, I've had regular contact with another man who claimed to have been abused by Proctor as a child, but he's not faced charges, despite making his claims public in national and international media.

Some media commentators have taken Nick's discrediting and subsequent charges as confirmation that the idea of paedophiles in Parliament is mere fiction. Such a stance might only be relevant if the case hinged entirely on Nick. As a long-time researcher of establishment corruption, I'm in no doubt that the case for paedophiles in Parliament does not depend on the testimony of one or two people.

It should be noted that this is not the first time someone claiming to have been sexually abused by a politician has ended up in the dock themselves. In 2015, former child actor Ben Fellows was cleared of perverting the course of justice after he claimed over a period of years that he had been groped as a 19-year-old by MP Ken Clarke.

In 2014, I encountered Ken Clarke outside Parliament. It was Budget Day and Clarke was on his way to an Easy Ride interview with one of the mainstream news presenters. I asked Mr Clark about austerity and the budget, and he said poppycock and words to that effect, because he's part of the system and so cannot admit that austerity was ideological. Anyway, he proceeded to walk towards College Green, where compliant journalists were cordoned off from the rest of us, and then I asked him to comment on Ben Fellows. At the mention of Ben's name, Clark lost his famous bluster, and when I mentioned a second time, he ducked under the rope that surrounded the media to get away from me.

So Ben Fellows, he had his day in court and he was cleared. According to the jury, he had not lied, which begs the question, why then was Ken Clark never prosecuted for allegations of groping a teenage boy?

But let's look at the climate that led to alleged survivors finding themselves in the dock. Following the Saville revelations, a number of police investigations began. London's Metropolitan Police launched Operation Yew Tree, which began by focusing only on Saville. By the time Yew Tree's report was published in January 2013, 450 victims of Saville, a man once considered a national treasure, had been identified.

Operation Yew Tree also secured a number of convictions, most of them from Saville's era of popular entertainment. However, Yew Tree was also criticised for ignoring at least two allegations of child abuse at the hands of former politician Clement Freud, another so-called national treasure.

Freud, the grandson of psychotherapist Sigmund, came from the highly influential Freud family. In fact, Clement Freud's funeral was attended by famous names from his showbiz lore and politics. Clement Freud had also befriended Kate and Jerry McCann in Portugal in 2007 following the disappearance of their daughter Madeline, a friendship that would be explored by police in their inquiries.

Other investigations followed Operation Yew Tree.

Operation Fairbank was launched by the Met Police in late 2012 and developed into a full criminal investigation months later, centering around an unassuming property on a southwest London street. Elm Guesthouse, as it was formerly known, was run by Carol Kasir and her husband Haru.

There were rumours that powerful people, including politicians, took part in paedophile parties, and in 1982 a police raid, in which hours of obscene videos and the guestbook were seized, resulted in a high-profile court case at London's famous Old Bailey.

The trial opened with the announcement that the trial time would be slashed from five weeks to just two or three weeks. partly because video evidence had been cut from 8 hours to 45 minutes. What did those videos contain?

That mystery still remains.

During the trial, the prosecution claimed that the Kasir's child may have been buggered, while the defence expert responded that it could just have been constipation. Bizarre defence, perhaps, but there was a great deal about this case that set it apart from just being about a run-of-the-mill brothel.

I've traced people who lived and worked in the area at the time, and there was potential evidence that they believe was destroyed by police protecting Elm Guesthouse and the powerful people who visited it often for the Sunday night sauna parties.

Certainly, at least 12 boys gave the police evidence that they had been abused by men at the guesthouse, but this was not pursued. Onlookers said it was as if an invisible hand was guiding proceedings to ensure the truth of the guesthouse was not revealed.

The trial concluded with convictions of running a disorderly house. Carol Kazir was said to have committed suicide with an insulin overdose in 1990, but cynics said she was suicided.

But what was the truth? In recent years, an infamous list was circulated online. It was said to have originated from people who worked with children in the South London borough and was of famous people who were alleged to have attended the Elm Guesthouse and for child abuse purposes.

The man who compiled the list, Chris Fay, later expressed his concerns about the list having been made public as the names of people, including intelligence agents, politicians and pop stars, could not be verified.

Fay, it would later evolve, not only had served time for fraud, but was not above coaxing alleged survivors into telling stories to journalists, as this video reveals.

“It's an old police officer's house that's been made into a ..”

“And you were later taken to London, weren't you? When they took you on that walk?”

“Couldn’t have been.”

“Earl's Court. In the offices at Earl's Court, yeah?

“Maybe. I don’t know.”

“Oh, right.”

So Fay, who had informed much of the debate about Elm Guesthouse, was discredited. But did that also mean that there was no basis to his allegations? No, it did not. And my research suggests that there was a great deal of establishment activity at Elm Guesthouse and which had been successfully denied since the original case in the Eighties.

Certainly, while much of the Elm Guesthouse list cannot be verified, the police have confirmed that at least one member of Parliament did visit the house, Cyril Smith, later revealed to be an extensive abuser of children, was known to be a guest.

Equally, the list does contain a number of people who now have convictions for child sexual abuse, including original BBC Radio 1 DJ Chris Denning. But there is more that police believe, although have been unable to prove in the intervening years, like, for example, the links between brutal paedophile Sidney Cooke and the Elm Guesthouse.

Was Cooke also involved with the murder of an eight-year-old boy who disappeared near Elm Guesthouse in July 1981 following a celebration to mark the wedding of Princess Diana to Prince Charles? Certainly, the parents of Vishal Mehrotra believe there may be truth to the rumour that their child was abducted and murdered to do with the perversions of visitors to Elm Guesthouse.

On the day of the royal wedding, there were at least two fairgrounds in close proximity to Elm Guesthouse, and Cook, a fairground worker which enabled him to easily befriend young boys, could well have been working there. I am told that there are ongoing investigations into Vishal's murder. But there is more strangeness surrounding Elm Guesthouse and which tells me that the full story is yet to be told.

In researching, I've talked with people who worked in the London Borough of Richmond at the time of the Kasirs' trial, including police and people working for the council. A witness statement from a child who was found at Elm Guesthouse on the night the police busted the place appeared to have been heavily censored and did not include the name of Leon Britton, who was mentioned by the child.

I have obtained some of Kasir's inquest documentation, but much of it has been withheld. Does it reveal information that would further confirm the presence of politicians abusing young boys at Elm Guesthouse?

Mary Moss, like Chris Fay, was involved in the original case. She actually implicated politicians for being at Elm Guesthouse.

“It's really strange being outside here. This, of course, is the former Elm Guesthouse, of which people have heard many, many stories. But the truth remains, nobody has been brought to justice. And was it the case that the perpetrators who visited Elm Guesthouse are just too powerful to be brought to book? “

As we have heard, in 2013 the search began again for Geoffrey Dickens' initial dossier. Home Office Review concluded that the dossier, which was certainly linked to information on Elm Guesthouse, had not been retained.

A missing dossier full of alleged paedophiles had gone missing. No wonder public confidence in politicians had sunk to an all-time low. It should be noted that paedophile allegations are not limited to one political party, but across all parties. Some have been investigated by the police, while others were curtailed by police, secret services and government. And sometimes the Crown Prosecution Service, whose job is to decide which cases stand the best chance of successful prosecution, decide not to carry on with the charges after all.

Lazy media and columnists with agendas have too often created a flawed assumption that no charge equals innocence, but that is not true. The case has just not had a chance to be tested in a courtroom. A significant number of political figures, either as influencers or leaders, have faced serious allegations and even police investigations but have failed to proceed beyond that, sometimes even with multiple people alleging abuse.

The case of Greville Janna is perhaps the most extraordinary in this regard, but there are others too that we shall look at.

For almost 30 years, Greville Janna was the Member of Parliament for Leicester in England. A proud Jew, he fought long and hard to bring Nazis to justice. He believed that no one was too old or too sick to be prosecuted for German Holocaust crimes.

In an ironic twist, Janna was accused over a number of decades of being a paedophile, but in recent years he was deemed too sick to be charged. Even though it was announced that there was enough evidence for a prosecution, his rule that people should face their accusations no matter their personal circumstances did not, it appeared, apply to himself.

Lord Janna, ennobled in 1997 by his friend Prime Minister Tony Blair, was facing more than 30 accusations against him, according to police. These dated back to his involvement with a Leicester children's care home in the 80s.

In 1991, after accusing Greville Janna of paedophilic behaviour with a teenage boy, Frank Beck, a care home manager from Leicester, found himself arrested and charged with physical and sexual abuse of children in his care. At his trial, Beck stated that one child has been buggered and abused for two solid years by Greville Janna.

The child, Paul Winston, by now a grown man, testified in support of Frank Beck, alleging that Beck had helped him extricate himself away from the abusive and controlling Janna. Other witnesses who were formerly in the care home Beck managed equally supported Beck.

However, despite glowing testimonies and an uneasy sense that working-class Beck was being trounced by a respectable and influential middle-class MP, Beck was found guilty and sentenced to 24 years in prison. He died two years later, still protesting his innocence.

During my research, I spoke with Mick Creedon. He was a detective sergeant in Leicester in 1989 and involved with the original investigation, and he said credible evidence existed that required further investigation. However, he had been blocked from pursuing child abuse questions that surrounded Greville Janna. Creedon's bosses issued him with explicit orders regarding Janna, including forbidding a search on his home address, constituency office or his office in the House of Parliament.

Of course, in issues of paedophilia where evidence of proclivities can often be found in the environment the suspect inhabits, being prevented from going into these places unannounced or otherwise limits the choice of securing a prosecution.

Following the court case, Janna visited police headquarters in Leicester in the carefully controlled way that Mick Creedon now describes several decades later. The director of public prosecutions, Alan Green, said that Janna would not be charged for lack of evidence. Green, it should be noted, was later the subject of a national sex scandal when he was forced to resign after his arrest for curb crawling in the prostitute-dense King's Cross in London.

Following formal clearance from prosecution, Janna drew on the great fortunes of his workplace and took advantage of a protected personal statement in the House of Commons to deny all accusations against him. Parliament affords its inhabitants the ability to say exactly what they like and sometimes to exonerate themselves from questionable behaviour.

“There was, of course, not a shred of truth in any of the allegations of criminal conduct made against me during a trial by Beck.”

Janna's personal statement, covered by parliamentary privilege, meant that his announcement was exempt from any interruptions or questions from his peers. He denied the accusations of abuse, it was accepted into Parliament and that was it. No questions asked. The attendant press, familiar with the ruse of MPs excusing themselves or manner of iniquities via parliamentary privilege, invited Janna to make a statement to them knowing full well that they would be able to ask the questions that the MPs had been prevented from doing.

Greville Janna declined the invitation. Consequently, it was somewhat disingenuous for Janna to claim each time these allegations have re-emerged that he had been cleared by Parliament of all accusations. Cleared and unchallenged, as I'm sure that the lawyer Greville Janna was aware, are two very different things.

Fast forward to 2013 and Baron Janna, by now an active participant in the House of Lords, is turning up regularly to participate, even though Lords are not obliged to, and collecting the generous £300 daily clocking-in amount awarded to them.

That was until police once again renewed their interest in the historic abuse allegations against Greville Janna and officers spent two days searching the 85-year-old's London home. Police then refused to confirm if anything was seized, but confirmed that their search was part of an ongoing investigation.

Despite his prior enthusiasm for House of Lords attendance and even a recent renewing of his intent to contribute there, Greville Janna, we were told, was ruled unfit to face the accusations against him.

An independent review concluded that there was sufficient evidence to prosecute him on allegations of child sexual abuse. The case went backwards and forwards. Eventually, it was left to a judge to decide if Jana was fit to deal with a legal case, and as a result of dozens of boys and men claiming he'd abused them over the decades.

In December 2015, the judge ruled he was unfit to stand trial. His death was reported later that month.

He was never cleared of abusing children.

One of the most vehement defenders of Greville Janna has been MP Keith Vaz. In fact, during Janna's speech in Parliament in the 90s, it was Vaz who rose to assure fellow MPs that his friend was the victim of a cowardly and wicked attack. At the same time, Vaz suggested that the law be changed so as to protect prominent people being named in court.

Fast forward three decades and Keith Vaz saw the partial realisation of his desire when politicians voted for the public not to know when they were under investigation. Overnight, names under investigation vanished from the parliamentary website. The first to go was one Keith Vaz, whose actions with male prostitutes was captured on a Sunday front cover and who had further outstanding allegations of impropriety against him.

In 2015, Wiltshire Police announced that they would be investigating multiple allegations of child sex abuse at the hands of former British Prime Minister Edward Heath.

Edward Heath was perhaps most famous for taking England into the European Union in 1971, an act that parliamentary contacts insist was a result of him being blackmailed as a child abuser. privately he was rumoured to be gay, and at a time during which being so had only just been decriminalised, but he was mostly portrayed as asexual by the British media.

Members of the establishment media were not best pleased and vented a great deal of frustration in newspapers and on TV, forcing the police chief involved to release an extraordinary video message.

“I'm Mike Veal and I'm the Chief Constable of Wiltshire Police. Today, Friday 2nd December 2016, I have published an open letter in relation to the ongoing investigation into Sir Edward Heath, known as Operation Conifer. As many people know, Operation Conifer is a national investigation led by Wiltshire Police on behalf of the Police Service into allegations of non-recent child abuse made against Sir Edward Heath.

Over the last few weeks particularly, there has been much speculation about this case. Whilst it is not commonplace for us to comment on a live ongoing criminal investigation, which of course Operation Conifer is, I really am very concerned and profoundly disappointed about the impact of this speculation on the public's confidence in the police. the potential prejudicial impact upon live criminal investigations, not to mention the confidence of persons who come forward with information.

It is therefore time for me to set the record straight and ensure the current facts are entirely and unequivocally clear about this case. Fact. As some may expect, I'm often challenged over the decision to pursue this investigation and I understand the reasons why these challenges are made. But it's important to ask the question, if the force had received allegations of non-recent child abuse against a former prime minister and done nothing, what would the reaction have been?”

Campaigner Robert Green, who has been smeared by mainstream media, has this to say:

“But I couldn't quite understand why they were actually attacking the police at this point, because surely if there had been no evidence about Sir Edward, he would have been exonerated, and that would have pleased presumably all the people who thought he'd done no wrong. So I couldn't understand why this pre-emptive strike was made on the Chief Constable, who was only acting in accordance with his duties as a police officer.”

It wasn't just newspapers the chief constable was referring to, but potential attempts at political interference from a man who has been known to jump in before. Yes, indeed, Keith Vaz was up to his old tricks. In the early stages of Operation Conifer, Vaz wrote to Mike Veal, inquiring about details that the experienced policeman found highly unusual and highly inappropriate.

In order to understand the climate at the time, this recording captures how politicians were protected and their indiscretions covered up while brownie points were stored.

“With any sense who was in trouble would come to the whips and tell them the truth and say, I'm in a jam, can you help? It might be debt, it might be... scandal involving small boys or any kind of scandal which a member seemed likely to be mixed up in, they'd come and ask if we could help. And if we could, we did. And we would do everything we can because we would store up brownie points. I mean, that sounds a pretty nasty reason, but it's one of the reasons. If we can get a chap out of trouble, then he'll do as we ask forever more.”

“The really nasty thing about the Savile ring is that boys were disappearing off the yacht. And we assume they were thrown overboard because there are only two. When the yacht was recovered, Morning Cloud, there were several Morning Clouds, I think it was Morning Cloud 4. Morning Cloud 4 was recovered. I think remains of two young lads were discovered. So there were some remains of the yacht. But we've got missing boys, we've got a paedophile ring, a paedophile prime minister, we've got boys going onto the yachts, boys not coming off the yachts. Only partial remains of two young males were discovered when the yacht was recovered. The implication is clear, that they were being murdered and thrown off the side of the yacht.”

Allegations against Heath introduced a new element to proceedings, that of the suggestion of satanic ritual abuse, a cause of a great deal of controversy whenever it is mentioned. Indeed, many people actively deny it exists, although Dr. Joan Coleman was not one of them.

At the top of her game in the 80s and 90s, Coleman was a highly respected psychiatrist who increasingly found that many of her clients detailed abuse that they had suffered. She claimed there was silence because the abusers were freemasons and much of what took place with the children she believed fell under the auspices of satanic ritual abuse. For this, she was savaged by the establishment.

Dr Coleman drew up the RAINS List, a highly controversial document that features hundreds of names attached to allegations of being part of ritualistic abuse, mostly involving children and animals. The RAINS list remains the subject of much debate.

Some question how safe it is to trust a list of names without any supporting evidence to back up the outrageous allegations attached to them. They wonder, is it fair to trust the say-so of young people with apparent traumatic experiences who were sent to Dr Coleman? But there are some who truly believe in its validity. Campaigner Robert Green was responsible for ensuring that Operation Conifer had a copy of the RAINS list. He has this to say about it:

“As you know, Dr Joan Coleman is probably the leading expert on this field in the country and acknowledges as such and is a person of great integrity and personal courage and is a very, very fine professional in her field. There was no reason to doubt that. Why would Dr Coleman possibly put that together, a leading professional, If it were not the case? It is, of course, important to say that Dr. Coleman herself was getting information from witnesses. She was not an eyewitness to these terrible events, or alleged events. But of course, people came to her because they were victims of ritual abuse and gave their information to her.

Now, I would say also about the list is it is far from being a complete list. Obviously, Dr. Coleman couldn't possibly interview all of the people who suffered. What she did do is, before she published any of the names, and the names are on this list, she had to have information from two entirely independent witnesses. Witnesses who did not know each other and couldn't possibly have colluded in providing the information to her.”

I spent two to three hours with Dr. Joan Coleman. It was nine months before her death. Her long-term partner had invited me to meet her after I rang their home inquiring about the RAINS list. Tony met Joan in the 80s when his apparently troubled younger sister ended up as a patient at Joan's psychiatry practice.

Over time, Mooch, as Tony affectionately called her, told Dr. Coleman that a family member had initiated her into a ring of paedophiles who were also Satanists, and they practised satanic rituals including child and animal abuse. According to Dr Coleman and Tony, Edward Heath was one of Mooch's abusers.

Joan and Tony told me about Mooch and Heath. I didn't record them. It wasn't appropriate because even though I found Joan to be welcoming, engaging and fairly energetic, there was no denying that she was also dealing with a degenerative issue, including memory loss. I had gone to talk with her, not just about Heath, but about the RAINS list. But for Joan, much of it was consigned to a deep and dark history.

At times, Dr Coleman's memory was still sharp, like recalling how a professor had befriended her and then went on to produce a hatchet piece for the Conservative government of 1994 about how satanic ritual abuse was a myth.

Equally, her memory appeared incisive in recalling the ridicule that followed. I reminded her that another government report several years later dismissed the earlier report and validated what her patients were describing to her. She smiled a lot as she recalled being vindicated.

At other times her memory wasn't so good, like when I was asking her about the details of the RAINS list and how it had come about and whether she still stood by it. I left with a sense that Dr Coleman had perhaps fulfilled her life's purpose. I didn't know that she only had a few more months to live.

In contributing Dr Coleman's RAINS list to Operation Conifer, Robert Green wanted investigators to know about Heath's alleged fetish.

“There was a strange fetish that Dr Coleman, who had put the list together, explained that... Sir Edward had apparently been using elongated hands, sort of like claws, steel claws, to hold his victims whilst he was abusing them. I mean, I know that's a rather horrible thing to actually mention, but that is the evidence that we had. Dr Coleman told me he had a number of cases, there were apparently five independent witnesses who had given details about Sir Edward and obviously this rather unusual fetish that he had. I thought, well, this is interesting because I did understand at that point that Chief Constable Lee was getting information from other police forces. And I thought it logical if different independent witnesses had described this strange fetish that he had, it would be logical to expect that complainants in other parts of the country would describe the same fetish.”

“One of David Icke's earliest books, The Biggest Secret, actually referred to Edward Heath on Jersey. And Heath was made aware of these allegations seven years before he died, and he did absolutely nothing about it.”

“There's a common misunderstanding. There's no law against telling the truth.”

“But was it also really easy for Heath to sidestep what David Icke had said? Because David had already been portrayed in a certain light anyway. We can dismiss what he's saying. Do you think there was a degree of that?”

“Yes.”

“I'm Mike Veale, Wiltshire Police Chief Constable. Today, Wiltshire Police have published its report into Operation Conifer, the investigation into allegations of non-recent child abuse against Sir Edward Heath. Wiltshire Police, on behalf of the National Police Chiefs Council, took on this investigation knowing that due to the public prominence of Sir Edward Heath, both during his life and after his death, there would be significant public interest, comment and intense scrutiny.

There have been many views expressed as to whether the police should investigate alleged offences committed by a deceased suspect. Notwithstanding the guidance, I believe this was the right moral thing, ethical thing and professional thing to do but I appreciate that every case needs to be judged on its own merits. I am satisfied that there were compelling and obvious reasons to investigate allegations made about Sir Edward Heath. The allegations against him were of the utmost seriousness and from a significant number of people.

I hope people will understand that, given these circumstances, it would be an indefensible dereliction of my public duty as a Chief Constable not to have investigated such serious allegations against a former Prime Minister, even though he is deceased. People who are victims of abuse in the past, now or in the future should be reassured. Reassured by the way in which Wiltshire Police have listened to victims and survivors, and reassured that no matter who the alleged perpetrator of abuse is, we will take your allegations seriously.

We will investigate, no matter how difficult that may be. That said, I will remind you again that this investigation has drawn no inference about Sir Edward Heath's guilt or innocence in this case. Operation Conifer has now come to an end and the ICSA's terms of reference are clear. This watershed moment regarding investigations of people connected to the establishment should not be underestimated.”

Decent and empathetic people struggle to imagine an adult harming a child, much less in a sexual way, even more so in a way that is described as satanic and ritualistic. However, this, as Geoffrey Dickens discovered, is part of the problem. In fact, it is that very disbelief that has served to protect paedophiles in British politics for decades, even when insiders have publicly told us what is going on.

Peter Morrison was one of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's closest confidants and aides while she was in 10 Downing Street. They were close personally and professionally. So it was when her long-serving personal protection officer Barry Streven informed her that Morrison may be holding sexual parties with underage boys, Thatcher not only failed to act on this information, but she promoted Morrison shortly afterwards.

Streven's words to Thatcher were witnessed by Archie Hamilton, Thatcher's personal secretary. Hamilton has since denied hearing that the conversation involved underage boys. Peter Morrison was to Margaret Thatcher a highly regarded member of her staff, so much so she later vouched for his knighthood.

Given her enduring relationship with Savile and Morrison, as well as other men in her government who were accused of having a sexual interest in children, It's reasonable to ask, why did Margaret Thatcher appear to enjoy the company of men accused of being paedophiles?

In 2013, I found myself in the curious position of reporting a former Member of Parliament to the Metropolitan Police. I told them that she had important information that could aid paedophile allegations against a senior aide of Margaret Thatcher. Former MP Edwina Currie, who these days makes her living as a right-wing media commentator, was on record with such knowledge having proudly declared it. in her autobiography.

Shortly after, I was invited, alongside Edwina Currie, to do a newspaper review on BBC Radio. This segment is taken from a heated exchange between Edwina and myself, in which we are discussing further legal powers for Britain's secret services to spy on more people than ever before. Edwina believed in the idea that if you have nothing to hide, it shouldn't be a problem, but I disagreed.

“You can have every bit of information about me. If it helps somebody else, if it helps keep our country free, I'm delighted.”

But that's where people go wrong. They make this assumption that if they've got nothing to hide, then they should be, you know, it's OK, snoop on me. No, don't snoop on me. What MI5 and what MI6 need to start actually doing is A) being more accountable for their actions, B) stop covering up what's actually taking place in Parliament…”

“They're secret services. That's what they're supposed to do.”

“Secret services who have routinely and repeatedly hidden various things that have taken place in Parliament, including various paedophile rings that have taken place. You know this, Edwina. I don't need to tell you this.”

“What are you accusing me of, Sonia?”

“Who's accusing you of anything? Do you know what, Edwina?”

“I've never hidden anything.”

“She's not accusing you.”

“I'm not accusing you of anything, Edwina, but I do remember a really interesting tweet that you tweeted.”

“Do you know what? We're not going to start talking about paedophile rings on this programme... It's got nothing to do with what we're talking about here.”

Later, I learnt that Edwina Currie, according to my Metropolitan Police contacts, was never a serious consideration for interview. Her words about paedophiles in Parliament enabled her to make money from her book, but little else. Of course, Currie being married to an ex-Metropolitan Police detective had nothing to do with her not being interviewed about allegedly knowing about paedophiles when she was in Parliament.

During research, I have come to understand that there are too many people who want to make sensationalism out of the story of paedophiles in our Parliament, and people have swayed from one extreme to another, either denying all existence of paedophiles or claiming that everyone is at it. But the fact remains, most children are abused in a home setting. Some 90% of child abuse is at the hands of someone known to the child.

The most recent figures tell us there was approximately 53,000 recorded sexual offences against under 16-year-olds in the UK for 2016 to 2017. This is believed to be a conservative figure as people working with survivors know that a significant amount of allegations go unreported. Certainly, the treatment of Esther Baker and others who have made allegations public will not have encouraged people to come forward. One has to wonder, is that the aim?

But the fact is, children have been left vulnerable and unprotected by the very people in Parliament whose job it is to protect them.

For the last five decades, there have been various interest groups that have sought to influence the lawmakers in Parliament. perhaps none more so than the outlawed group, the Paedophile Information Exchange, who heavily campaigned and with political backing for the reduction in the age of consent, thus making it legal to rape minors.

“The point is that this has been going on for a long time. For the last 30 years, there's been one focus group after another which have been trying to get this, and they've all got an agenda. It started with the Paedophile Information Exchange. They've all got an agenda. They want to bring that age down, and it is to make children even more vulnerable.”

British diplomat Sir Peter Heyman, who Geoffrey Dickens exposed as a paedophile, was a leading member of the Paedophile Information Exchange, also known as PIE. Dickens fought to have PIE banned, while other parliamentarians were revealed to have helped the group gain respectable status.

In the last six years, there have been many accusations of historic abuse in our national institutions, some more convincing than others. Nonetheless, it became apparent that this time this issue was not going to go away. So the British government were forced into action to attempt to quell the rising public anger and a review of information held was ordered.

Unquestionably, the British government, both under David Cameron and Theresa May, have sought to control the narrative right from the beginning of these most recent events.

In July 2014, a year before announcing the child abuse inquiry, Theresa May, then Home Secretary, organised a report to be co-authored with the director of the NSPCC.

The Wanless and Whittam report was limited from the outset. The terms of reference were limited strictly to what the Home Office knew about child abuse accusations regarding parliamentarians in the 70s and the 80s.

Given what we now know about how the Prime Minister's Cabinet stored up brownie points by hiding politicians' indiscretions, the authors should have been given a free hand to look across any relevant government departments.

When the report was published, the authors rebuked Parliament for failing to disclose information. It was clear that the British government had been forced kicking and screaming into examining the allegations of child abuse within its own ranks, and anyone given the task of uncovering what appeared to be multiple cover-ups would be obstructed and hampered in their job.

“Well, it's really difficult to piece together in a systematic way, yes, and so we make clear that there are a considerable number of caveats about what one can conclude about what the Home Office did or didn't receive during this period and what was done about it.”

“But you do conclude that this wasn't a deliberate cover-up?”

“There's nothing to show that it was a deliberate cover-up. We put the caveat in, it's very difficult at this remove of time.”

As cynics expected, the review found nothing to support a concern that files had been deliberately or systematically removed or destroyed to cover up organised child abuse. But the authors concluded that it was not possible to say whether this may have happened due to the systems in place at the time.

Part of these systems it would evolve included how children's accusations were dismissed as being of no consequence. Far more important, file notes tell us, was the reputation of those involved.

Certainly, suspicions about politicians, even outright evidence, was quashed and suppressed to protect the reputation of the politicians and the political parties they represented.

Knowledge of political abuse of children has been filed away in files held in the National Archives in Kew, South West London, where over a thousand years of government records are stored. Will we ever know the full truth? Unlikely.

Not only are paedophiles naturally cunning and leave a little trace of their behaviour, but only 5% of government records are permanently preserved anyway. Some are available to the public, but many others are closed for sometimes 100 plus years, either on the basis of national security or personal data. This alone creates a sense in people that the truth will never be told in our lifetimes.

From the moment in July 2014 when Theresa May, the then Home Secretary, announced that there would be a child abuse inquiry, much of it has been textbook bad and has served to confirm what cynics already believed about the government and the alleged cover-ups.

As it stands, there are estimates that it could cost up to £100 million and last perhaps a decade. A decade where potential perpetrators, be they in government, local authorities or in the church, will either die off, as we have potentially seen with other alleged abusers, and where the momentum of rage that accompanied the initial idea of children being abused by powerful people in the British establishment has subsided. and been replaced by something else to be angry about.

Many campaigners and interested parties have expressed deep reservations about this child abuse inquiry, which has witnessed senior resignations, accusations of sex assault, and shifting and changing how the inquiry would conduct itself before even one survivor testimony was heard. The truth is, for all its different shapes, it's still a government-appointed inquiry, and yet people expect it to reveal the misdeeds of the establishment. It's a tall order.

Whether by design or fault, Theresa May made a series of questionable appointments right from the start. The first chairperson, Elizabeth Butler-Sloss, was a retired judge and was at one stage the highest ranking woman judge in the UK. She lasted in the inquiry all of six days. Campaigners were alarmed to hear of the potential conflict, given that Butler-Sloss's brother, the now deceased Baron Michael Havers, was not only the Attorney General for Margaret Thatcher's government, but also the Solicitor General for Edward Heath's. Clearly, two governments that have been subject to serious child abuse allegations that would need to be explored by the child abuse inquiry. It was clear that Elizabeth Butler-Sloss was a no-no if there was any hope of convincing people that the child abuse inquiry was anything but an inquiry to ensure an alleged cover-up continued. She stepped down.

“Well, obviously, a number of discussions were held about the appropriateness of Baroness Elizabeth Butler-Sloss to head this inquiry. I myself believe that it was not only her integrity, her experience as a High Court judge, as President of the Family Division, but also as the individual who oversaw the Cleveland Child Sex Abuse Inquiry as well. So therefore bringing a historic expertise or expertise of historic issue into the inquiry that I felt was absolutely appropriate for her to be appointed to this role. - We absolutely defended Baroness Butler-Sloss's appointment. Of course we did put the name forward and made the appointment for her and I continue to believe that she would have done an excellent job given her experience, her expertise and her absolute integrity.”

Campaigners increasingly fearful that the truth would not be told campaigned throughout for a judge who would be less establishment. Elizabeth Butler-Sloss outlined her concerns at such a suggestion.

“I worry that the victims, for whom I have the most enormous sympathy, but for them to be deciding who should become the person chairing it creates real problems. Because if you do not have a position of authority, how are you going to be able to run the inquiry? You need someone who knows how to run things. And if you get someone from an obscure background with no background of establishment, they'll find it very difficult and may not be able actually to produce the goods.”

Critics considered this an extraordinary statement given the fact that it was people in authority who were part of the alleged cover-up in the first place. That Theresa May had chosen such a well-placed establishment figure as the first chairperson said rather a lot about the intentions of the inquiry.

Butler-Sloss was replaced by the next chairperson, Fiona Wolfe. Wolfe lasted a month and a half before pressure kicked in sufficiently for her to step down. Wolfe had set out to persuade the public via mainstream media that she was quite unlike Butler-Sloss and not part of the establishment at all, but this was a farce.

Wolfe was not only Mayor of the City of London, a place historically that has brought various pressures to bear on any sitting government, but she also lived in the same street and had socialised with Leon Britton, the former Home Secretary who had not only been accused of being a paedophile, but whose actions would be examined by the inquiry.

It was becoming increasingly harder to argue that the child abuse inquiry was anything but a cover-up for crimes against children, and then the third chair arrived.

“I can tell the House that I plan to appoint Justice Lowell Goddard as the new chairman of the independent panel inquiry into child sexual abuse. Mr Speaker, Justice Goddard is a judge of the High Court of New Zealand. She will bring a wealth of expertise to the role of chairman and crucially she will be as removed as possible from the organisations and institutions that might become the focus of the inquiry.”

“The naming of people who have been responsible for the sexual abuse of children or institutions that have been at fault in failing to protect children from abuse is a core aspect of the inquiry's function. The 2005 Act makes it clear that while a statutory inquiry cannot determine criminal or civil liability, it can make findings of fact about alleged conduct that would amount to a crime or a civil wrong. That distinction is reflected in paragraph 10 of the terms of reference of this inquiry. Let me make it perfectly clear that this inquiry will use its fact-finding powers to the full and will not hesitate to make findings in relation to named individuals or institutions where the evidence justifies this.”

Lowell Goddard lasted all of six months but her resignation left the most questions. She was forced to deny accusations of bullying and racism and she refused to submit to a committee for questions.

Contacts within the inquiry have told me that they wish to move on from issues about Lowell Goddard, and I inquired about the money that Goddard was paid and for doing very little, plus the accompanying perks, and yet she was able to leave without explaining fully why.

I have met many people during this story, but I have yet to meet anyone who truly believes that the child abuse inquiry will get to the bottom of what has been going on.

“All these inquiries are set up to fail. They're designed to fail.”

Perhaps despite the good intentions of its current chair, Alexis Jay, who did great work as a social worker uncovering child trafficking and abuse in North England, this may be too big a secret to uncover.

Some people argue that Britain is not ready to face the crimes of our establishment, for to do so would shake the bedrock of what many have believed to be the truth, when in fact we may have been living a lie. Where does it leave us if politicians can too easily be divided into those who have abused children and those who have historically turned an eye or ear to it?

But is there no hope? Well, some interesting developments have emerged from the inquiry, including the revelations about former MP Cyril Smith and how his crimes were covered up not only by his political peers, but by the secret services too.

The child abuse inquiry has heard that the British secret services knew about the extensive allegations to do with Cyril Smith. Why on earth did nobody act on it?

I have little hope for the inquiry. There has already been so many issues attached to it, including data breaches of witness identities, and there is that ever-present fear that it is toothless when dealing with the mighty establishment determined to keep up a facade of decency.

An inquiry contact keen to prove that it was in fact a genuine attempt at uncovering the truth told me that Prince Charles would be compelled by the inquiry to questions regarding his friendship with the paedophile church leader. It was not to be.

In the end, a letter from Prince Charles was read out at the inquiry. It meant that he would not have to be cross-examined about what he did or did not know about his child-abusing friend. Most observers expected no better. After all, in some ways, it was merely a repeat of the Royal's friendship with Jimmy Savile. Again, a serial abuser in their midst and no one appears to have even detected it, even when there have been police cautions and investigations surrounding both the pervert bishop and the DJ. Charles, the next king of England, has yet to answer questions about why he has paedophiles as friends.

Most journalists are in no doubt that sympathy and interest towards alleged survivors changed following the BBC's documentary in 2015 into the VIP pedophile scandal. Just as rapidly and fully as mainstream media had rushed into the story, it also rushed back out again, and with a vengeance. From that point onwards, editors no longer wanted to hear allegations of abuse. I was frequently told that these people are fantasists and can't be trusted. They were revealed in Panorama. But I and others had many problems with Panorama's investigation.

In a 45-minute film, the BBC set out a clear course of discrediting both the rumours of paedophiles and those who carried them. Panorama's top line on the story was clear. There was no credible links to paedophiles in Parliament. As one example of the BBC's economy with the truth, the reporter described this man like this:

‘Another paedophile, a well-connected prep school teacher, was jailed for 13 years after Tom Watson's call for action.’

“It was only when Tom Watson started making a noise about it and putting pressure on the police, they then opened an inquiry and they tracked down everyone who had been at school with me and found that about a third of them had been sexually abused by this master. And so, with dozens of witnesses, they finally prosecuted him.”

But who was this unnamed prep schoolmaster? He was Charles Napier, a former treasurer of the Paedophile Information Exchange and half-brother of John Whittingdale, a powerful man in Parliament who previously held the role of overseeing media and culture, and that included the BBC. But more importantly, perhaps, Whittingdale began his parliamentary career working for both Leon Britton and Margaret Thatcher, two people who have been heavily implicated in the paedophiles in Parliament scandal. Why didn't the BBC see fit to inform viewers of this seeing as Napier had previously boasted that he could import child abuse images into Parliament via his connections?

Could it be that Napier having parliamentary connections did not fit in with the narrative that the BBC wished to pursue? For many, Panorama's best bit was the unravelling of former social worker Chris Fay, who was largely, but not exclusively, behind the Elm guesthouse accusations.

The programme played heavily on Fay's previous fraud conviction. However, Fay's questionable stance had already lost credibility online, but Panorama framed him as one of the most significant voices to emerge regarding the scandal, This was a deliberate ploy to discredit the story. However, what was interesting was that they missed out a significant character and one who was ever present with Chris Fay regarding the rumours of paedophiles in Parliament, Bill Maloney.

It was Bill Maloney, a survivor of an abusive care system. Maloney had become the outspoken voice for victims and survivors and had plenty of online footage detailing him accusing MPs of child abuse. In fact, one of his viral videos featured me. I had a small experience of working with Bill, but I found that his allegations, like much of those that existed within alternative media, was high on bluster, but not on any supporting evidence.

Former E17 singer Brian Harvey has recently made a tabloid splash with his video in which he talks extensively about Bill Maloney, and which features another character that Panorama used to discredit the notion of paedophiles in Parliament.

‘David started making claims about VIP paedophile abuse in 1990. He'd met Chris Fay at a support group, and he says he was encouraged to name names.’

In fact, it was Bill Maloney who suggested I speak with Andrew Ash, and he told me that Andrew could name many abusers. I refused. It didn't sound like a good basis for a journalistic scoop. Andrew later spoke with two other national newspapers.

“Simon Cowell. Yes. Max Bygraves. Yes. David Frost. No. Alan Wicker. Yes. Richard Malick. Yes. Ted Heath. Yes. Confirmed. Okay. Yes means Andrew had sex with them.”

I later discovered that Andrew Ash, by his own words on Panorama, was a man in need of psychiatric treatment, not a media hell-bent on wringing alleged paedophile names out of him. Nonetheless, the BBC used Andrew Ash, just as he'd been used before, to shut down allegations, and it worked brilliantly.

The media climate changed, and that certainly led to not only the discrediting of alleged survivors, but the pursuing in law of them too. The BBC's power should not be underestimated. Many people still believe something is not happening unless the BBC report on it. And as people are now realising, the BBC has been far from an impartial and untainted source for news for many decades.

British security services have been routinely involved in vetting people who are either employed by the BBC or regularly appear on the broadcaster. And so, what about current political leaders? Well, Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the Labour Party, has been subject to a great deal of accusations of covering up abuse. A number of people have come forward, including a social worker, to claim that Corbyn ignored what was told about abuse in Islington. In fact, as we recall, it was Corbyn who clashed with Geoffrey Dickens in Parliament in the 80s when Dickens refused to ignore what was being said about abuse in Corbyn's constituency.

John Mann MP, who also came out asking for justice for survivors but has used many sticks with which to beat Corbyn, who he clearly loathes, issued an open letter to Jeremy Corbyn.

Corbyn's people responded robustly, denying allegations and reassuring people that all would be tackled by the child abuse inquiry. Nonetheless, a shadow hangs over Jeremy Corbyn regarding what he did and didn't know about child abuse in his own community.

There is no doubt that vulnerable young people were being abused in Islington's care homes, part of Corbyn's territory, and their plight came into sharp focus during the next stage of my research concerning a police investigation centred around Piccadilly Circus in the 1980s.

Given that Parliament is attended by the biggest police force in the UK, the Metropolitan Police, how is it that the Met has routinely failed to apprehend parliamentary paedophiles?

Could it be that the Met was infiltrated by people who were not only part of the sex abuse of children, but were also able to tip off those under investigation?

The Independent Police Complaints Commission, the body that examines police conduct, has been unable to give me a current figure of how many allegations of impropriety concern their own officers and the issue of child sex abuse. In 2015, they were managing 29 separate investigations concerning the period 1970 - 2005.

In May 1986, an Islington social worker was jailed for four years for helping to organise a prostitution ring involving young boys and youths. Abraham Jacob, a former schoolmaster and a trainee priest, was arrested as part of Operation Circus, a police operation centred around Piccadilly Circus in London, which lasted five months and had over 100 officers working the case.

Operation Circus interviewed hundreds of young people, many from care homes. It was coordinated from this station and overseen by this man, Commander Trevor Lloyd-Hughes. However, Commander Lloyd-Hughes had not been able to see this investigation through to completion, for he had died of a heart attack just over a week before Jacob Abraham was sentenced.

On the Sunday following Lloyd Hughes' death, a newspaper claimed that he was under investigation for potential links to what was called a rent boy ring.

Could it be possible that this exemplary cop, who the commander of the Metropolitan Police had paid tribute to, was part of the problem for young boys in Piccadilly Circus and not the solution?

“Right, on the night in question, I was on duty at Barnet Police Station. There was a telephone call that came into the station office as opposed to the command and control room which was also at Barnet Police Station. As a consequence of that call the station officer went to the control room, spoke to the sergeant in there and a message was put out for the area car crew to attend the local station and call the control room.

They were obviously assigned to something, we didn't know what they were assigned to and off they went. Well, there then was a call for a section sergeant to attend an address and consequently also a serving chief inspector who was called out from home to also attend this address at this point none of us knew what was going on. Later on in the evening or the early hours of the morning as it was we got together as a team for you know morning tea and biscuits at sort of four or five o'clock in the morning and the area car crew relayed to us what had happened at the address. Now, they told us that they'd been to an address in Blanche Lane, South Mems, which was the home address of Commander Trevor Lloyd Hughes.

The crew detailed to us what they'd found at the scene, and what they told us was that they found Trevor Lloyd Hughes in a chair, fully dressed, in a suit, with a tie, very tightly tied around his neck, there was a note there and he was surrounded by multiple vials of amyl nitrite. As a consequence of which, the Chief Inspector and the Sergeant attended the scene, that the officers were told to leave the scene, that the amyl nitrite, which they'd started to evidence, and the officer's notebook were both taken off and they were relieved of possession of those things, and they were told to leave the scene and not to discuss it any further.

Now, throughout the rest of the night, there was absolutely zero radio communication whatsoever about this incident that was going on. Left 7 or 6, 7 o'clock in the morning, I can't remember exactly, went home, came back the following evening.

Now, when we got back the following evening, we were known as parade, we went on parade. And then we were taken to another room. where there was two gentlemen both wearing suits, one of them didn't speak at all and then one of them did speak to us. Don't know who he was, I can't even remember whether he was formally identified or not.

Now what we were specifically told was that the events of the evening before were likely to generate considerable media interest and that under absolutely no circumstances whatsoever were we to speak to the media, we weren't even to speak to our wives and partners and preferably not to discuss the incident between ourselves. If there were any approaches made by the media then we were immediately to inform our inspector or the chief inspector and they would handle it but we were to make no comment on anything. We were sort of pre-warned that there could be something coming out at the weekend in the press concerning Commander Trevor Lloyd Hughes, which I found quite unusual but hey ho, that's the way the police works.

During the course of the night I went into the station office and back in the day technology wasn't so advanced and we had a teleprinter system. Now every day we would get messages of consequence, come over the teleprinter system, events that were going on, any major incidents, things of particular interest. And that was stored in a binder on the station officer's desk along with something called an occurrence book, which is a handwritten book where certain things are put into it. Sudden deaths been one of them.

So I looked at these telecommunications from the commissioner, which was, I think it was about 10am it was actually timed at, in which the commissioner announced, or he regretted to announce, the death of the highest ranking officer to die in service, that being of Commander Trevor Lloyd Hughes, who died peacefully at home from natural causes, which again was completely contradictory to what we believed may have happened the night before, certainly on the evidence of the officers that attended the scene.

Well, during the course of that night duty, I went to Potters Bar Police Station. Potters Bar Police Station was closed at night, only worked from 7 in the morning, I think, to about 10 at night. But we had access to it. So I went to Potters Bar Police Station and I read the occurrence book. Interestingly, the report of the sudden death of Commander Lloyd Hughes was in the occurrence book at Potters Bar Police Station. And it was reported by an officer stationed, I believe, on the community team, or the Homebeats as they were called then, from there, that attended the venue in the morning to report the sudden death.

Now, of course, there was no CAD reference of this incident whatsoever prior to that officer being dispatched to the job. So the CAD reference was created as if it had come in after 6am in the morning.

I read the report and I noted that the officer had said that Commander Lloyd Hughes, he'd been visited, apparently lifeless body, so on and so forth, and that he was in his bed. Now that is completely contradictory to what the officers had said the night before. The fact that he was sitting in a chair, that he was fully clothed, that he'd got tied, tied very tightly around his neck, there was a note and the vials. Completely contradictory to that.

There was some time after that, in fact it was that following weekend, I read the article in the newspaper and saw that there was an expose of Commander Lloyd Hughes and his alleged association with rent boys and young people.”

Machen is in no doubt that there was a cover-up in place.

“I believe it was suicide. And I mean, so did everybody else.”

Since Lloyd Hugh's death, Howard Groves, a detective on Operation Circus, has spoken out. He believes that the investigation was fine when arresting people like Jacob Abraham, but not when parliamentarians, who were said to be picking up boys in Piccadilly Circus, were mentioned.

Machen's story is backed up to a degree by a man I encountered. He has asked me to hide his identity.

“When I was a teenager, I was introduced to a guy, a rather kind of creepy guy, when I was working in a TV studio in North London. And that guy had an interest in two-way radios. And at the time, so did I. And he invited me after, I don't know, some time period had passed. He invited me to go and look at some radios that he wanted to sell. So I reluctantly went round his place because he didn't live too far away from where I lived. And he had these Pye radios out on the table, and I walked in and sat down. I was looking at them. We were chatting and everything, having a cup of tea. And after a little while, another guy appeared at the kitchen door, which kind of startled me, and he had a young boy with him. And I kind of, I didn't say anything at first, and I looked at this guy, this Mike Lewis guy, and... I said, oh, hello, wondering who the hell this guy was and where he'd come from, because we'd been in this guy's apartment for, I don't know, probably 10, 15 minutes or something like that at some time. And I wondered what he'd been doing and who this kid was. So he said, oh, this is a friend of mine. And I said, do you have a name? And he said, Trevor. And I said, do you have a last name? And he said, Lloyd Hughes. And I said, you know, Hi, sort of thing. And then I was looking at the boy and I said, who's this? And Trevor Lloyd Hughes said, this is Martin. And I remembered his name because I have the same middle name. And then after maybe a few more words, which I can't remember, he said that he has to leave. But he was standing there and he was holding the boy by the arm, not by the hand, which I thought was a bit strange. It was almost like he was kind of reprimanding him or fearful that he might escape somewhere. And he said, well, we have to leave. And he disappeared out. And I heard the front door go. And that was it. But the interesting thing was, I have a photographic memory for faces, and I have fairly recently discovered, to my horror, that the boy who was with Trevor Lloyd Hughes that day was Martin Allen, a boy who, well, he was probably a year or two younger than me, I should think, has disappeared and has never been found. And I am 100% certain that that was him. And it made the blood in my veins go cold when I saw that because that suddenly, now that I know more about Trevor and the sort of things that he was into and up to, it really chilled me. And I think I missed the bullet on that occasion.”

Martin Allen, a 15-year-old schoolboy, disappeared on bonfire night, November 5th, 1979. He travelled from his London school on the Tube with the intention of visiting his older brother in Holloway Road, Islington. After saying goodbye to friends, he headed off for the Piccadilly line at King's Cross. This was the last confirmed sighting of him. He has not been seen since.

Over a period of three years, Lloyd Hughes, a senior commander at the Met, began grooming Tony and they spent many hours together. Tony was flattered that a man of Lloyd Hughes' status took such an interest in him.

“Yeah, we used to drive around in his car, which was a police vehicle, an unmarked police vehicle. And I don't know how long it was between me first meeting him, but I suppose it couldn't have been... It couldn't have been that long because the vehicle that he used was supplied by C-11, the intelligence branch, and it was the same car that he had. Um, and I used to sit outside. We started to drive down to the Pimlico area, and I didn't know what this place was. It just looked like an enormous, ugly, you know, block of apartments and stuff. And I used to sit outside in the car and read police reviews. He'd disappear for, you know, about an hour and stuff like that. And he always told me that he was going, he had to go and visit an old friend of his, which may have been the case, I don't know. But knowing now what I know about Trevor and the sort of stuff that he was involved in, and the association with Dolphin Court, it's very difficult not to put two and two together and come up with four. Knowing what happened there, why was Trevor there, what was, you know, there were too many connections as far as I'm concerned. Trevor was into that kind of thing. That was what was going on at that location.

It's not really something that I particularly want to go into the exact details, but needless to say, we went round to, I think it was the second or third flat that Lewis owned or had moved into. The place was empty, but he had a key, and we went in. And at that point, he got very violent with me. He grabbed hold of me, pushed me into this room, and... yeah, basically ripped open my shirt. I won't tell you what happened after that, but it was enough for me to, I just started screaming at him that I would speak to my friend who worked for MI5, and I would tell him, and I'd have him thrown out the police. And at that point, he stopped, and I just ran out the place and I can’t even remember how I got home because we arrived there in his car.”

In 1986, I worked at the Empire Ballroom in Leicester Square, just two minutes' walk away from Piccadilly and during the time of Operation Circus, and we knew the meat rack well. The boys would hang out in these windows, ready to be selected. It was seedy, and there was a general sense that these kids were lost.

“We weren't much older than some of the kids on the meat rack but our lives couldn't have been more different really. Me and my friends in Leicester Square in 1986.”

All this information on Trevor Lloyd-Hughes has been given to police, politicians and even the Prime Minister Theresa May. No one has done anything.

I have worked with other journalists on this and other police who were there on the night of Lloyd-Hughes' death has been traced. They have refused to speak. The culture of silence persists.

In 1993, the popular miniseries Prime Suspect aired. Written by Linda LaPlante, (this stuff practically writes itself sometimes), Prime Suspect was about a tough female detective for the Metropolitan Police. She was played by Helen Mirren. The storyline was that of a bent senior cop linked to a rentboy ring in Soho, the district of the Meat Rack. Just as the cop was about to be exposed, he committed suicide. It was based on the Lloyd Hughes story, with research supplied by a senior Metropolitan Police cop.

During my six-year-long investigations, I have been repeatedly warned of the dangers of investigating paedophiles. Certainly within months of my articles appearing in the national press, I had my own band of online trolls.

After two years, there were thousands of tweets and blogs written about me threatening to harm me and accusing me of the murders of survivors of child abuse.

“So the Metropolitan Police have decided that I need this. And this... is a panic alarm. Now, the problem about a panic alarm is it makes you panic. And literally, if I have any reason to worry, I have to press a remote control I have, and this will automatically send a message that the police need to be dispatched ASAP.”

“They really convict themselves by going after you. I mean, what am I trying to do? I'm trying to help children, trying to stop children being sexually abused. I mean, anyone who doesn't like that really, well, they have a problem.”

The fact is, just because there hasn't been charges and convictions does not mean there are no paedophiles. The establishment, media, legal, political pulls together when one part of it is attacked. Paedophiles, by their very nature, are cunning and secretive. They test out people before revealing anything about their true natures because anything else does not fit in with their survival mode.

If we looked at the correlation of people who have been sexually abused as children and long-term depression and unemployment, it may educate us enough to start to make a change.

For all the campaigns of survivors and victims, what truly has changed? The dirty secrets of the British establishment remain hidden from general view. Some never made it even to the archives. The names that have leaked out have been done so strategically, sometimes after death, sometimes because the person is no longer of use to the handlers, sometimes because the person rebels. Either way, there are paedophiles in Parliament and higher up the food chain.

‘Parliament, place of British democracy or so we are told, but the fact remains since 2012 when Tom Watson stood up in the Houses of Parliament and addressed then Prime Minister David Cameron and said that there was clear intelligence of a powerful paedophile ring linked to Parliament. Not one politician has been charged or convicted with crimes against children.

Could this be that this was just purely works of fantasists and those with political agendas? Or is it the truth that the British establishment will never allow its crimes to be uncovered and what we are seeing is just one cover-up after another and children who were abused by people in this house will never receive justice?’