The Mail reports that MI5 were responsible for spreading rumours about Leon Brittan in 1984 because of his failure to prevent the Libyan embassy siege. Right-wing elements in the security services allegedly disliked his Jewish background. The smears surrounding him became so well known, Downing Street had to issue a warning that they were untrue. And in June 1984, Private Eye was of the opinion that "The “Cabinet Minister Scandal” that surfaced after a lobby briefing by Mr Bernard Ingham, Mrs Thatcher’s press secretary, relates to Home Secretary Brittan."
The article does not say whether the rumours about Brittan applied to the late 1960s about which one very recent allegation has been made or to the early 1980s. However, Tebbit, Hurd and others have not referred to Ingham's lobby briefing in recent interviews and they have not given any impression that one occurred. The alleged anti-semitism in parts of MI5 is just about possible but that may need to be considered in the context of the significant role of Victor Rothschild alongside Government. While Labour leaning, he was throughout his life a valued adviser on intelligence and science to both Labour and Conservative Governments including those of Margaret Thatcher.
In fact, so close was Rothschild to Edward Heath that he was a crucial figure in his support team after 1970 and he briefed him directly on MI5 matters when Heath was Prime Minister. Hurd, whose connections - or not - with MI5 and MI6 have been speculated on by journalists, and whose son stepped down from Government this week, was another member of that team. That is, Hurd was Heath's Private Secretary from 1968 until the early 1970s long before he himself was elected to Parliament. His remit was wide ranging but was often about crisis management.
In 1986, Rothschild wrote to the papers to deny that he was the fifth man in the Cambridge spy ring's penetration of British intelligence. Fourth man Anthony Blunt had been secretly granted immunity in 1964 for confessing to his role and, being related to the Queen Mother, remained modestly in employment within the Royal Household. Most Home Secretaries were briefed but it did not become public knowledge until Thatcher was Prime Minister in 1979.
While Harold Wilson in the mid 1970s arguably suffered mental decline because of concerns about MI5's alleged mistrust of Labour, the same could not be said of his Home Secretary Roy Jenkins. As early as 1966, he was dining at the invitation of homosexual law reformer Lord Annan with Blunt, Rothschild and James Bond author Ian Fleming. If we are to accept Rothschild at his word and he was not a mole, MI5 therefore had a close relationship with Jenkins as presumably it also did with Heath, Hurd, Thatcher, the Queen Mother and, in an odder way, Anthony Blunt. While Hurd went on to be Home Secretary and Foreign Secretary in the Thatcher and Major years, he is also a successful author who since the late 1960s has written fiction not dissimilar to that of Ian Fleming.
Am I the only person getting a whiff of ocean swimming creatures with Cameron's reshuffle.
It seems to me that he has used it to clear out any of the old guard that could be in any way (even if only to the point of ignoring what they knew of others) get embroiled in an inquiry. There are some names that were mentioned online back when the Lord McAlpine issue was under discussion that could emerge again.
It strikes me as rather a coincidence that they've all gone today.......
Two men have been charged by police investigating allegations of historical child sex abuse.
Charles Napier, 66, of Sherborne, Dorset, is accused of inciting a child to commit an act of gross indecency.
Richard Alston, 69, of Suffolk, faces five counts of indecent assault and three of gross indecency with a child.
The offences were allegedly carried out in the late-1970s against an 11-year-old. Mr Napier is the half-brother of Conservative MP John Whittingdale.
Mr Napier and Mr Alston have been bailed to appear at Westminster Magistrates' Court on 29 July.
The men were arrested in June last year by officers from Operation Fairbank, which was established in 2012 to investigate historical allegations of child sex abuse.
The men were held under a strand of Fairbank called Operation Cayacos.
Mr Whittingdale is chairman of the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee.
Whittingdale was Special Adviser to three successive Secretaries of State for Trade and Industry - Norman Tebbit, 1984-5; Leon Brittan, 1985-6, and Paul Channon, 1986-7. He worked on international privatisation at NM Rothschild in 1987 and then from 1988 was Political Secretary to Thatcher. Upon her resignation, he received the OBE. He continued as her Political Secretary when Major became leader until his election to Parliament in 1992.
On some points raised in recent posts, I don't wholly disagree. However, there is a strong argument that individuals may wish to step down from Government not because of anything they have done themselves but to enable clarity and limit party political damage. If they remain in posts and family members or old political colleagues are brought before the courts, that could be awkward for the current Government or indeed in other circumstances for the Opposition. Realistically their actions may well be neither sinister or unwise if ultimately democracy benefits too.
I'm not sure why Whittingdale's name features in any of this. Smear by association, perhaps?
Both parties are full of nonces, not to speak of Cyril Smith and the LibDems.. The labour party is just as full of nonces as the conservative party. Conveniently, they don't out one another, just the odd smear here and there by their cronies using the press or social media like DS.
Am I the only person getting a whiff of ocean swimming creatures with Cameron's reshuffle.
It seems to me that he has used it to clear out any of the old guard that could be in any way (even if only to the point of ignoring what they knew of others) get embroiled in an inquiry. There are some names that were mentioned online back when the Lord McAlpine issue was under discussion that could emerge again.
It strikes me as rather a coincidence that they've all gone today.......
Glad its not just me - exactly what I noticed, too.
Glad its not just me - exactly what I noticed, too.
Thanks. I was starting to think that I must be nuts and belonged on a David Icke forum as no one else has been commenting about the way that the cabinet has been effectively cleansed of all the Thatcher posse.
Last week when the whole dossier thing blew up I mentioned to friends that I expected a few people to suddenly retire from government....
I don't think any appointment is going to make some people 100% happy
l hope that the eventual appointment satisfies a number of the child protection charities and that will be a sign that the government has, at last, made the right choice.
Those are the last people you'd want for an investigation of this kind and half of them are chancers and fakers anyway. Professional victimhood is fast becoming an occupation of choice for some. There'll be courses on it soon, offered by loony left 'educational' establishments.
Thanks for the idiotic comments. I hope adult abuse survivors charities are represented as they are the people that often deal with the fallout from abuse years down the line rather than children's charities.
There was a piece on Newsnight tonight about Clive Driscoll
He was the detective who finally secured convictions in the Stephen Lawrence and has just retired. Most of the piece was about the Lawrence case
However he also said that in the 1990s he had investigated child abuse at Lambeth children's homes and had passed a list of names of suspects, including politicians from the 1980s, up the chain of command at the Met and was promptly taken off the case......
Small point but there is a mistake in that article. Ian Fleming died in 1964 before Roy Jenkins became Home secretary.
Thank you for that point. You are quite right - the social occasion organised by Lord Annan which took place in 1966 two years after Blunt confessed and during a year when Jenkins was Home Secretary included Annan, Jenkins, Blunt, Rothschild and the widow of Ian Fleming. My apologies for suggesting it was Fleming himself.
Annan had been in the Cambridge Apostles with Guy Burgess, Rothschild had been a friend of Blunt since their education at Trinity College, Cambridge where indeed Hurd and Brittan were also educated at different times, Jenkins had worked at Bletchley Park and Mrs Fleming had previously been married to Viscount Rothermere.
I think when it comes to the range of allegations, some contexts are more surprising than others. Political history will begin to seem different if and when the full facts emerge. That may indeed be why there is such political resistance. It is not just that abuses will be very unpopular with voters but that their understanding of the way Britain itself works will be challenged. Much the same was true when it became clear in the last decade just how much influence the multinational corporations wield. For example - and it is a niche one - the reform of the legislation on sexual matters in 1967 has for many decades appeared to have been enlightened benevolence on the part of heterosexuals. How kind they were to oppressed minorities etc. But oh no. Clearly that was not the case. It was introduced by individuals at the upper echelons of society who had at one time or another bisexual traits.
More broadly, it isn't hugely surprising to me that what might be termed the alternative liberal Labour of the 1970s - the Hewitts and Harmans and NCCL - or the early 1980s era of mainstream Conservativism have both been mentioned as environments in which abuses may have occurred. In the case of the former, the tone of what was being advocated politically was provocative and in terms of public opinion extreme. As for the latter, those who did not take to the yuppie sort of ribaldry that was fashionable will consider anything that is proven to have been dire then as a vindication of their critical opinion. It will be seen as symptomatic of the economic policy of those times.
Mainstream Labour in the 1970s - that of Wilson - may acquire more sympathy. The country was a mess, far left trade unions were creating havoc, the main political personalities were not exactly charm itself particularly in the opinion of southern voters and when Ministers thought they were being questioned about friendliness towards the Soviets it was merely a further sign to many that they had lost any ability to manage. I think we felt that with some luck the party would move forward into some sort of modern Attlee vehicle. Unfortunately, social liberals took it in an NCCL direction in the 1980s and then from the mid 1990s we all had to put up with Blair's economic liberalism too.
The Liberal Party of that decade now seems more liberal than it did at the time and not necessarily in a great way. It was actually possible to interpret the Liberal Party as a Social Democratic Party before the advent of the SDP in 1981 and then to regard the alliance between those two parties as a 1940s version of Labour in a new European age. Now the earlier roles of Jenkins make the SDP seem liberal too rather than social democratic almost to the extent that it was more liberal than the Liberal Party was in the 1980s. More significantly, rather than merely being a flounce of four towering figures from the Labour Party, albeit based on seriously held principles, was it more strategic? That is, systemically devised, with a pre-determined outcome of a neo-conservative direction. All levers of the state working towards it including MI5, probably American led, and to hell with the voters.
As for Heath, and the conservatism under his leadership, that in many ways is the most difficult at the current time. I no longer believe that it was quite as it appeared but I am not wholly convinced yet that it was radically or awfully different. Again one remembers the tone at that time and, while the period was bleak and no doubt there was the need for news management, nothing seemed to be seriously awry. Given his character, it is almost too easy to draw negative conclusions - and I just don't think that it is sensible to do so at this stage.
Evidence now being examined by Metropolitan Police detectives links Napier to Peter Righton, one of Britain's most high-profile paedophiles.
Both men were linked to a shadowy organisation called the Paedophile Information Exchange which campaigned in the 70s and 80s for what they called the age of "child love" to be reduced to four.
Righton was a founder of PIE, Napier its one-time treasurer. Righton, incredibly, was also one of Britain's leading child protection specialists.
The probe led police to the kitchen of a flat in South London where they found a letter from 'Napier - who had a child assault conviction 20 years before - boasting of his life in Cairo as a British Council teacher.
He bragged of easy access to young boys and how he could send obscene images back to Britain in diplomatic bags.
The scandal erupted again when Labour MP Tom Watson raised the matter with David Cameron in the House of Commons last month suggesting a network of paedophiles working in the UK had links to high levels of Government.
He believes there was an Establishment cover-up of the Righton files and his claims are now being investigated by a Scotland Yard team.
Even Michael Hames, then head of Scotland Yard's Obscene Publications Squad, who handled the Righton files expressed disappointment more was not done. Writing in 2000 of the Righton inquiry, he called for a national team to be set up to investigate paedophiles, adding: "I remain convinced that we have only touched the tip of a huge national and international problem."
The story of Charles Napier is an extraordinary one that shows how a paedophile was able to operate with impunity while holding down a thoroughly respectable lifestyle.
In 1972, Napier was found to have indecently assaulted pupils at a Surrey school where he was working. After being banned from teaching, he left the country.
Napier was jailed for nine months in 1995 for sexually abusing a 14-year-old boy he'd lured to his home in the 80s.
Two men have been charged by police investigating allegations of historical child sex abuse.
Charles Napier, 66, of Sherborne, Dorset, is accused of inciting a child to commit an act of gross indecency.
Richard Alston, 69, of Suffolk, faces five counts of indecent assault and three of gross indecency with a child.
The offences were allegedly carried out in the late-1970s against an 11-year-old. Mr Napier is the half-brother of Conservative MP John Whittingdale.
Mr Napier and Mr Alston have been bailed to appear at Westminster Magistrates' Court on 29 July.
The men were arrested in June last year by officers from Operation Fairbank, which was established in 2012 to investigate historical allegations of child sex abuse.
The men were held under a strand of Fairbank called Operation Cayacos.
Mr Whittingdale is chairman of the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee.
There's a historic claim of abuse dating back to the late 70's. One of the accused is a half brother to someone who was at uni at the time, went into politics as a Spad in the early 80's and didn't become an MP himself until 92.
Are you suggesting that the establishment covered up the actions of a fresh faced Spads step-brother? Are you suggesting that any tenuous link that can be traced back to the conservative party of the day is proof of something sinister going on inside Westminster?
Sorry but I'm a bit confused. Either I'm missing something here or this is starting to resemble a witch-hunt of Monty Python proportions
I think it's hard to disbelieve someone like that. I think something similar happened with regards to the investigation into the Jersey care home scandal.
The dickens dossier goes missing, the Castle dossier goes missing, Clive Driscoll's list of suspects is put into the long grass
But surely quite a lot of people must have read these dossiers........and you think they'd remember the names of 'prominent politicians' even if the dossiers have gone missing
Presumably Driscoll and the people at the local newspaper in Bury can supply these names from memory
OK........any 'evidence' attached to the names might be missing but surely they can remember it ?.............these would probably be the most shocking things they'd seen in their lives if the politicians were high level.
The dickens dossier goes missing, the Castle dossier goes missing, Clive Driscoll's list of suspects is put into the long grass
But surely quite a lot of people must have read these dossiers........and you think they'd remember the names of 'prominent politicians' even if the dossiers have gone missing
Presumably Driscoll and the people at the local newspaper in Bury can supply these names from memory
OK........any 'evidence' attached to the names might be missing but surely they can remember it ?.............these would probably be the most shocking things they'd seen in their lives if the politicians were high level.
Of course, they'll remember names. They just can't name them without any proof attached. Unless anonymously on the Internet. There's also the issue of the Official Secrets Act, too. Although, I don't know much about that.
... But surely quite a lot of people must have read these dossiers........and you think they'd remember the names of 'prominent politicians' even if the dossiers have gone missing ...
It's a long list of secretarial staff, civil servants, reporters, police clerks and copy-room staff.
Everybody who signed for the papers, everybody who typed up summaries, everybody who made copies, everybody who got it all dumped on their desk, and all the reporters who handed in a large folder and never bothered to try and follow up on it.
And anybody in the secretive sector who participated in the cover-up (threats, bribes, accidental shredding) should be fitted with concrete boots, especially if they were involved in either encouraging people's vices or entrapment for the purpose of leverage.
As regards the Official Secrets Act, is there any mitigation if a breach is evidence of a crime? It's not like there's never been leaks or folders/envelopes accidentally left in car boots or on train seats...
I don't think there's any doubt that the Dickens dossier, in particular, existed.
I'm just wondering really why it's such a big deal that they've gone missing when so many people must have read them and remember them
Surely these people like the detective Clive Driscoll and the people at the newspaper in Bury can come forward and tell the police who's names were in the dossiers, what localities, any specific childrens homes etc
The missing files might be an inconvenience but they shouldn't prevent a full investigation.........there must be plenty of people around who know what was in those dossiers even if they can't be located now
Comments
With a black indelible marker.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2690141/MI5-spies-blamed-spreading-lurid-sex-scandal-rumours-Leon-Brittan.html#ixzz37YlUChFV
The article does not say whether the rumours about Brittan applied to the late 1960s about which one very recent allegation has been made or to the early 1980s. However, Tebbit, Hurd and others have not referred to Ingham's lobby briefing in recent interviews and they have not given any impression that one occurred. The alleged anti-semitism in parts of MI5 is just about possible but that may need to be considered in the context of the significant role of Victor Rothschild alongside Government. While Labour leaning, he was throughout his life a valued adviser on intelligence and science to both Labour and Conservative Governments including those of Margaret Thatcher.
In fact, so close was Rothschild to Edward Heath that he was a crucial figure in his support team after 1970 and he briefed him directly on MI5 matters when Heath was Prime Minister. Hurd, whose connections - or not - with MI5 and MI6 have been speculated on by journalists, and whose son stepped down from Government this week, was another member of that team. That is, Hurd was Heath's Private Secretary from 1968 until the early 1970s long before he himself was elected to Parliament. His remit was wide ranging but was often about crisis management.
In 1986, Rothschild wrote to the papers to deny that he was the fifth man in the Cambridge spy ring's penetration of British intelligence. Fourth man Anthony Blunt had been secretly granted immunity in 1964 for confessing to his role and, being related to the Queen Mother, remained modestly in employment within the Royal Household. Most Home Secretaries were briefed but it did not become public knowledge until Thatcher was Prime Minister in 1979.
While Harold Wilson in the mid 1970s arguably suffered mental decline because of concerns about MI5's alleged mistrust of Labour, the same could not be said of his Home Secretary Roy Jenkins. As early as 1966, he was dining at the invitation of homosexual law reformer Lord Annan with Blunt, Rothschild and James Bond author Ian Fleming. If we are to accept Rothschild at his word and he was not a mole, MI5 therefore had a close relationship with Jenkins as presumably it also did with Heath, Hurd, Thatcher, the Queen Mother and, in an odder way, Anthony Blunt. While Hurd went on to be Home Secretary and Foreign Secretary in the Thatcher and Major years, he is also a successful author who since the late 1960s has written fiction not dissimilar to that of Ian Fleming.
It seems to me that he has used it to clear out any of the old guard that could be in any way (even if only to the point of ignoring what they knew of others) get embroiled in an inquiry. There are some names that were mentioned online back when the Lord McAlpine issue was under discussion that could emerge again.
It strikes me as rather a coincidence that they've all gone today.......
Charles Napier, 66, of Sherborne, Dorset, is accused of inciting a child to commit an act of gross indecency.
Richard Alston, 69, of Suffolk, faces five counts of indecent assault and three of gross indecency with a child.
The offences were allegedly carried out in the late-1970s against an 11-year-old. Mr Napier is the half-brother of Conservative MP John Whittingdale.
Mr Napier and Mr Alston have been bailed to appear at Westminster Magistrates' Court on 29 July.
The men were arrested in June last year by officers from Operation Fairbank, which was established in 2012 to investigate historical allegations of child sex abuse.
The men were held under a strand of Fairbank called Operation Cayacos.
Mr Whittingdale is chairman of the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-28314991
On some points raised in recent posts, I don't wholly disagree. However, there is a strong argument that individuals may wish to step down from Government not because of anything they have done themselves but to enable clarity and limit party political damage. If they remain in posts and family members or old political colleagues are brought before the courts, that could be awkward for the current Government or indeed in other circumstances for the Opposition. Realistically their actions may well be neither sinister or unwise if ultimately democracy benefits too.
Both parties are full of nonces, not to speak of Cyril Smith and the LibDems.. The labour party is just as full of nonces as the conservative party. Conveniently, they don't out one another, just the odd smear here and there by their cronies using the press or social media like DS.
Glad its not just me - exactly what I noticed, too.
Thanks. I was starting to think that I must be nuts and belonged on a David Icke forum as no one else has been commenting about the way that the cabinet has been effectively cleansed of all the Thatcher posse.
Last week when the whole dossier thing blew up I mentioned to friends that I expected a few people to suddenly retire from government....
l hope that the eventual appointment satisfies a number of the child protection charities and that will be a sign that the government has, at last, made the right choice.
He was the detective who finally secured convictions in the Stephen Lawrence and has just retired. Most of the piece was about the Lawrence case
However he also said that in the 1990s he had investigated child abuse at Lambeth children's homes and had passed a list of names of suspects, including politicians from the 1980s, up the chain of command at the Met and was promptly taken off the case......
Clive Driscoll says his inquiry into 1980s.... was "all too uncomfortable to a lot of people".
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-28316874
Thank you for that point. You are quite right - the social occasion organised by Lord Annan which took place in 1966 two years after Blunt confessed and during a year when Jenkins was Home Secretary included Annan, Jenkins, Blunt, Rothschild and the widow of Ian Fleming. My apologies for suggesting it was Fleming himself.
Annan had been in the Cambridge Apostles with Guy Burgess, Rothschild had been a friend of Blunt since their education at Trinity College, Cambridge where indeed Hurd and Brittan were also educated at different times, Jenkins had worked at Bletchley Park and Mrs Fleming had previously been married to Viscount Rothermere.
I think when it comes to the range of allegations, some contexts are more surprising than others. Political history will begin to seem different if and when the full facts emerge. That may indeed be why there is such political resistance. It is not just that abuses will be very unpopular with voters but that their understanding of the way Britain itself works will be challenged. Much the same was true when it became clear in the last decade just how much influence the multinational corporations wield. For example - and it is a niche one - the reform of the legislation on sexual matters in 1967 has for many decades appeared to have been enlightened benevolence on the part of heterosexuals. How kind they were to oppressed minorities etc. But oh no. Clearly that was not the case. It was introduced by individuals at the upper echelons of society who had at one time or another bisexual traits.
More broadly, it isn't hugely surprising to me that what might be termed the alternative liberal Labour of the 1970s - the Hewitts and Harmans and NCCL - or the early 1980s era of mainstream Conservativism have both been mentioned as environments in which abuses may have occurred. In the case of the former, the tone of what was being advocated politically was provocative and in terms of public opinion extreme. As for the latter, those who did not take to the yuppie sort of ribaldry that was fashionable will consider anything that is proven to have been dire then as a vindication of their critical opinion. It will be seen as symptomatic of the economic policy of those times.
Mainstream Labour in the 1970s - that of Wilson - may acquire more sympathy. The country was a mess, far left trade unions were creating havoc, the main political personalities were not exactly charm itself particularly in the opinion of southern voters and when Ministers thought they were being questioned about friendliness towards the Soviets it was merely a further sign to many that they had lost any ability to manage. I think we felt that with some luck the party would move forward into some sort of modern Attlee vehicle. Unfortunately, social liberals took it in an NCCL direction in the 1980s and then from the mid 1990s we all had to put up with Blair's economic liberalism too.
The Liberal Party of that decade now seems more liberal than it did at the time and not necessarily in a great way. It was actually possible to interpret the Liberal Party as a Social Democratic Party before the advent of the SDP in 1981 and then to regard the alliance between those two parties as a 1940s version of Labour in a new European age. Now the earlier roles of Jenkins make the SDP seem liberal too rather than social democratic almost to the extent that it was more liberal than the Liberal Party was in the 1980s. More significantly, rather than merely being a flounce of four towering figures from the Labour Party, albeit based on seriously held principles, was it more strategic? That is, systemically devised, with a pre-determined outcome of a neo-conservative direction. All levers of the state working towards it including MI5, probably American led, and to hell with the voters.
As for Heath, and the conservatism under his leadership, that in many ways is the most difficult at the current time. I no longer believe that it was quite as it appeared but I am not wholly convinced yet that it was radically or awfully different. Again one remembers the tone at that time and, while the period was bleak and no doubt there was the need for news management, nothing seemed to be seriously awry. Given his character, it is almost too easy to draw negative conclusions - and I just don't think that it is sensible to do so at this stage.
Note that it was reported in Nov 2012 that Napier was a former treasurer of PIE and had previously served a jail sentence.
Abuse scandals probe widens: The man who may hold key to UK's biggest paedophile network ever
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/paedophile-scandal-charles-napier-could-1430365
Where are you going with this?
There's a historic claim of abuse dating back to the late 70's. One of the accused is a half brother to someone who was at uni at the time, went into politics as a Spad in the early 80's and didn't become an MP himself until 92.
Are you suggesting that the establishment covered up the actions of a fresh faced Spads step-brother? Are you suggesting that any tenuous link that can be traced back to the conservative party of the day is proof of something sinister going on inside Westminster?
Sorry but I'm a bit confused. Either I'm missing something here or this is starting to resemble a witch-hunt of Monty Python proportions
I think it's hard to disbelieve someone like that. I think something similar happened with regards to the investigation into the Jersey care home scandal.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2693635/Now-revealed-Barbara-Castle-drew-dossier-VIP-paedophiles-File-seized-Special-Branch-heavy-mob.html
One thing though.......
The dickens dossier goes missing, the Castle dossier goes missing, Clive Driscoll's list of suspects is put into the long grass
But surely quite a lot of people must have read these dossiers........and you think they'd remember the names of 'prominent politicians' even if the dossiers have gone missing
Presumably Driscoll and the people at the local newspaper in Bury can supply these names from memory
OK........any 'evidence' attached to the names might be missing but surely they can remember it ?.............these would probably be the most shocking things they'd seen in their lives if the politicians were high level.
Everybody who signed for the papers, everybody who typed up summaries, everybody who made copies, everybody who got it all dumped on their desk, and all the reporters who handed in a large folder and never bothered to try and follow up on it.
And anybody in the secretive sector who participated in the cover-up (threats, bribes, accidental shredding) should be fitted with concrete boots, especially if they were involved in either encouraging people's vices or entrapment for the purpose of leverage.
As regards the Official Secrets Act, is there any mitigation if a breach is evidence of a crime? It's not like there's never been leaks or folders/envelopes accidentally left in car boots or on train seats...
I'm just wondering really why it's such a big deal that they've gone missing when so many people must have read them and remember them
Surely these people like the detective Clive Driscoll and the people at the newspaper in Bury can come forward and tell the police who's names were in the dossiers, what localities, any specific childrens homes etc
The missing files might be an inconvenience but they shouldn't prevent a full investigation.........there must be plenty of people around who know what was in those dossiers even if they can't be located now