We read today that police officers brought in Cyril Smith in the early 1980s as part of an inquiry that targeted properties suspected of holding sex parties involving teenage boys. But almost as soon as Smith was brought in, he was released again and officers were told to hand in their notebooks and all video footage. They were also told to keep quiet otherwise they would face prosecution under the Official Secrets act.
Now, in case you are wondering, a ‘notebook’ is what a law enforcement officer carries around with him whilst he is on duty and where possible records details of events and conversations as they happen or as soon as possible afterwards. It forms the basis of any statement that officer makes to a court of law as part of a criminal investigation. And, we are led to believe, that officers were ordered to hand in their notebooks there and then. Officers sign for notebooks and have them signed back in by someone who has the authority to issue them and then take them back or storage. These notebooks are then retained for possible use in future court cases. There must be a record, somewhere, of these books being issued and handed back in, you would think. But I wonder about that. There is an obsession in public service with weeding and destroying older documents, or evidence as criminal investigators would call it. Once a period of time has elapsed, documents can be destroyed. There is only one reason for obsession with destroying old documents: cost. Storage costs money, especially when you, as a government sells of the storage facilities to a private company who then charge the government for storing it and then charges it again when an agency requires site of documents. You could not make it up, except that someone did.
So there must be a possibility that the documents from almost 35 years ago no longer exist. For all we know, damning documents about Smith and others may have been destroyed decades ago. But that is no reason to give up. Staggeringly, it appears that the investigation into events at Dolphin Square, where events are said to have taken place, were dropped because police officers got “too near prominent people”. The implication here, surely, is that these “prominent people” must have been quite high up the establishment food chain since mere minions lower down the scale could not possibly have done anything to stop it. Are we really talking about senior politicians, judges, police officers and figures from the armed forces? The implication, surely, is that we are.
Today, it is simply incredible to comprehend that in those days a group called the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE) operated openly, speaking to the media through spokesmen, as if it were a respectable organisation. The word paedophile, which makes most of us shudder these days, was, unaccountably, not so toxic. I hate to advance wild conspiracy theories, since usually they are from the wild imaginings of the insane and the deluded, but is it possible that an organisation like this could have more sinister links to the establishment? That is what any investigation should seek to establish.
The fact that I never liked Cyril Smith was nothing to do with any of this since it was not known or suspected by ordinary folk at the time. I disliked his egotistical, scattergun rent-a-quote modus operandi, which endeared him to some but had the opposition effect with people like me who saw him as a hanger and a flogger (which he was) who would say anything for a vote (so he was in a perfect place in the Liberal Party).
There isn’t always smoke without fire, but there’s an awful lot of smoke billowing around and someone committed, competent and independent needs to get to the bottom of this pretty damn quick.
