Tory peer defends lack of action on historic child abuse

By The Press Association24th February 2015News EnglandChild Abuse, Government / Politics, News England, Non-Recent / Historic Abuse

A senior Tory has defended the party’s failure to more fully investigate past rumours of child sex abuse by politicians, insisting it was “not the Stasi”.

Lord Dobbs, who held a series of posts including Conservative chief of staff and deputy chairman in the 1980s and 1990s, said he was made aware at the time of a number of such claims.

He insisted there was little that could be done beyond “having a word” with the person at the centre of the rumours and suggested it was the police that had failed to do their job effectively.

However the peer – who wrote the House of Cards series about an unscrupulous chief whip that was made into hit TV series – accepted that it was right to examine whether more could have been done.

An inquiry into institutionalised child sex abuse – encompassing a range of public institutions including Westminster – is due to get under way in April after a series of false starts.

Asked by Radio Times magazine if he had heard stories of politicians abusing children, he said: “I was there and yes, I did hear rumours. But one always hears rumours in politics.

“I was right at the heart of the system in those days, and what did you do about it? I would normally have a word with whoever was the subject of these rumours, and very quickly you’d find out if they were true or if they were complete nonsense. And many of these rumours were absolute nonsense.”

Asked what was done, he said: “The Conservative Party is not the Stasi. We don’t have an investigatory branch. If somebody says this is all absolute nonsense, if nobody’s taken any allegations to the police, you’ve got no means of…

“It’s the police’s job. It does worry me. It’s exactly the thing about Jimmy Savile and the BBC. Public service is a very bumpy field.

“Could we have done more? I’m not sure. Should we have done more? I’m not quite sure how. But I think it’s right that we should question ourselves and say, if we ran these times again, what would we do that was any different?”.

He said his own experience of witnessing part of an inquiry into children in care meant he had no illusions that the establishment “can do no wrong”.

Backing the inquiry, he said: “We have to keep knocking away at this. It has to be up to the police. It’s become pretty clear that they haven’t been doing the job as effectively as they might.”