Matthew d'Ancona: The days are gone when power could mean immunity

Yesterday, the Home Office Permanent Secretary, Mark Sedwill, admitted to the Commons Home Affairs Select Committee that the missing documents, handed by Dickens to Leon Brittan, the then Home Secretary, had probably been destroyed. Like the infamous missing 18½ minutes from Nixon’s Oval Office tapes, these 114 documents will become symbolic of an alleged cover-up.

Indeed, they already are. For decades there have been rumours about the Elm Guest House in Barnes, the supposed clubhouse of this blue-chip sex-abuse conspiracy. Yet there is a moment in the life-cycle of every scandal when, for whatever reason, assertions, mutterings and urban myth achieve an unignorable solidity and have to be taken seriously as a series of allegations.

In this particular case, that moment came on Sunday in the form of a remarkable observation on The Andrew Marr Show by Lord Tebbit — scarcely a politician given to wild conjecture or on-screen theatricality. “At that time,” he said. “I think most people would have thought that the Establishment, the system, was to be protected and if a few things had gone wrong here and there that it was more important to protect the system than to delve too far into it.”

Pressed on whether there might have been a “big political cover-up”, Tebbit persisted: “I think there may well have been. But it was almost unconscious. It was the thing that people did at that time.” On Sunday, he spoke not as though he knew something specific but as an old foe of the oligarchic status quo and a friend of the ordinary voter who knows a cover-up when its stench reaches his nostrils.

One suspects that this is only the beginning of a long and ghastly trail in which many voices will be heard and many crimes uncovered. Already, Lord Warner, the former Labour health minister, has testified to the existence of a “powerful elite” that made systematic and disgusting use of children’s homes to groom potential victims.

If I were Ed Miliband, I would not have made this a party political issue, as he did by criticising the Government’s “slow and piecemeal” response to the outcry. There are many stones to be turned over, and no guarantee that every horror beneath will bear a blue rosette. The present Labour leader, a student of his party’s history, should recall that Harold Wilson dispatched his great ally, Arnold Goodman, to help the Tory grandee, Bob Boothby, see off press allegations in 1964 that he was pursuing under-age rent boys (not to mention consorting with Ron Kray) because he was so worried that the trail would lead to Labour’s own Tom Driberg.

Tebbit’s intervention also reminded me grimly of a cover story I commissioned in 2008 as editor of The Spectator, entitled “The Establishment paedophile: how a monster hid in high society”, about an unimaginably evil child molester, Roger Took, who was also a highly respected art historian and curator. What the two journalists on the story — Charlotte Metcalf and Sarah Standing — learned about his little-reported case was insupportably horrible, abominations real or imagined in chat-rooms by Took and his fellow perverts that had profoundly affected the police officers scrutinising the evidence. “He married me for my money,” said Pat, Took’s brave and gentle wife. “And for my children.”

But what was most striking about this case — aside from its infernal horrors — was the closing of Establishment ranks around the guilty man. The judge received no fewer than 23 letters of support for the unspeakable Took, and suggested himself that the convicted man could “exact some pity” from the person sentencing him, even as he was sent down for nine years. How, one wonders? Was the feeling Took evoked in some of his contemporaries really “pity” at all, or rather the twinge of masonic sympathy the powerful feel when one of their number is denied the right to act differently, to act with impunity?

Unbelievably, Took’s wife (now widow — he killed himself while on probation in 2011) found herself criticised by his friends for failing to stand by him. As Metcalf wrote, it was as if one colleague was “ticking [Pat] off for exaggerating while Took’s impeccable social credentials and high-flying academic career served to cushion him from condemnation”.

This is the heart of the matter: the delusion that afflicts all too many in power that they are different, that their temporary authority implies lifelong immunity. One of the best aspects of modern life is that this delusion is being systematically and publicly dashed wherever it is uprooted. This particular hour of reckoning is long overdue. Let justice be done, though the heavens fall; let the children — or the adults they have become — be heard.