How did Cyril Smith outfox the law?
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Version 0 of 1. While reading Daily Mail extracts from Labour MP Simon Danczuk's chilling exposé of the paedophile career of his Rochdale predecessor, the late Cyril Smith, I have been racking my brains: did I ever speak to Smith as a young Westminster reporter in the 70s when rumours of sexual misconduct first surfaced? I certainly don't remember doing so. Why should I? Whichever way you looked at Smith, he seemed an unsavoury character, a loud-mouthed, unreliable and manipulative bully and a political populist of no discernibly fixed convictions – not an MP to have a drink with and discuss the future of social democracy or post-industrial blight in Lancashire cotton towns. Smith led the Cyril Smith party. That was it really. Typing that evaluation 30 or so years later smacks of metropolitan condescension, but it is true. Politics is full of odd characters, saints as well as sinners, mostly unremarkable but decent people, some of whom lose their way, as we all do. There are MPs and peers, officials and advisers one likes, others one approves of, alas not always the same people. Rochdale has had its share of good MPs, including the forthright Simon Danczuk, so wise colleagues of his assure me. This week's grim serialisation contains one especially poignant story of abuse and cover-up. The Rochdale Alternative Press, reinforced by Private Eye's redoubtable Francis Wheen, put allegations against Rochdale's Liberal MP (1972-92) into the public domain. So there was no excuse for politicians, active then and now, to claim they knew nothing – nor for anyone else, especially in public life in Lancashire. Yet, read Smith's obituaries in 2010, and neither Indy nor Telegraph mention the "rumours". The Guardian's piece, written by ex-Liberal MP Michael Meadowcroft, notes only that claims of "scandalous activities with boys … never stuck". Nick Clegg may have been a child in 1979, but that was no excuse in 1988 (when Smith was knighted) or 2014 to pretend the Lib Dem machine did not know about the allegations. But that goes for everyone else, too – most conspicuously the police, who failed to prosecute Smith and his network despite powerful evidence, and for those in higher authority, including No 10 and Buck House. And, of course, the press and TV, notably the BBC, so conspicuous in the parallel Jimmy Savile affair. Not for the first time, voters and readers are also entitled to ask: where was the mighty News of the World when we needed it to expose corruption in high places? Where was the Guardian – no, we don't do sex scandals, but that's not a watertight excuse, and Nick Davies did try. Where was the Daily Mail itself, so pious this week against the failures of others? Busy smearing the then Labour government was one thing it was doing, as usual, though it was also nursing its own slightly comic sex scandal too. As with most of the recent predatory sex cases, whether child or adult, straight or gay, some aspects of the evidence heard in courts and elsewhere has a time-warp quality: the past was a different country. Some well-meaning, innocent Rochdale parents with unruly kids actually handed them over to Smith – he was mayor at the time – for "punishment". He was conscientious with his chastisements, found jobs for the pliant, and got resistors sacked, according to the book, Smile for the Camera: the Double Life of Cyril Smith, which Danczuk has co-authored with Matthew Baker. Shocking stuff, but it was not confined to politics or homes for vulnerable children. Among other corrupted institutions, it now transpires, were some pretty famous public/private schools. Kids at these schools are not always believed when they speak up about abuse. When the brother of a friend of mine finally plucked up the courage to report abuse by a teacher at one such expensive school, his father flogged him – the boy, not the abuser. Of course, it's not over, as sexual abuse cases of young girls continue to show. The police and Crown Prosecution Service, aware how they failed in the past and under-resourced, over-compensate in their efforts to restore public confidence, and sometimes come unstuck for want of enough good evidence. More puzzling than the phone hacking affair or Jimmy Savile, the scale of Smith's activities seems to have provided plenty of evidence with which to make a better case than the CPS mounted against Nigel Evans this month. Yet they were stopped, according to Danczuk and others, by interference from on high – from within the police, and unnamed political hands working to protect the unsavoury old fraud from prosecution. During the same decade Smith's far better connected party leader, the suave, Eton-and-Trinity lawyer Jeremy Thorpe, was prosecuted for conspiracy to murder a discarded lover, Norman Scott. He was acquitted, but ruined, rightly so too; it was a sordid case. So how did Smith outfox the law? Cunning, bombast and – like Savile – a cultivation of friends in high places. Was that enough? Political friends of mine, more savvy than me but no more inclined to conspiracy theory, say they suspect that even the intelligence services contained powerful figures protecting fellow paedophiles in those days. There is more to tumble from the closet. Could it happen again? Not so easy in an age committed to transparency and social media. But never say never. |