Lord Janner scandal day 52: Scotland digs for evidence

Lord Greville Janner: a look at news on the Labour peer embroiled in allegations that he abused children. He maintains his innocence. It’s been 52 days since the Crown Prosecution Sevice decided not to prosecute Lord Janner on gounds of his failing health.

Today’s news.

BBC: “Lord Janner claim investigated by police in Scotland”

Police in Scotland are understood to be investigating claims Labour peer Lord Janner abused a boy there in the 1970s. Det Ch Supt Lesley Boal said Police Scotland officers were investigating a historical complaint – but did not confirm a name.

As ever, facts are thinner than Theresa May’s smile.

BBC home affairs correspondent Tom Symonds said the allegation had first been made in 1991 by a Leicester man who told police that Greville Janner sexually abused him during the 1970s – including in Scotland.

We’re told that Leicestershire police investigated and found Janner had no case to answer. And now a mere 14 years later the allegations resueface. The accused man is now old. He and his victims are denied a court trial. And all we get is a stink.

Now Scottish police are investigating.

“Because Scotland has a separate and independent prosecutor, it would be able to make its own decision about whether to charge Lord Janner,” he added.

Is there new evidence to warrant a charge that wasn’t available to police in 1991? Did the Scottish police investigate Janner? Questions and more questions. And with no court date, there is no chance to having them answered with satisfaction.

So that’s two police forces investigating Janner, the Crown Prosecution Service reviewing the Director of Public Prosecutions’ decision that m’lord would to be unable to take part in his defence due to his poor health, and Justice Lowell Goddard looking at the Labour peer as part od her independent inquiry into child sex abuse.

Yeah, that’s all.

Lord Janner is 86. He says he’s innocent.

But the Mail picks up a scent.

Daily Mail: “With a school party on a Commons visit in 1976, two Labour grandees Greville Janner and George Thomas who ‘abused children'”

Smiling broadly, two Labour grandees welcome a party of young schoolboys to the Commons. Since this photograph was taken in 1976, Greville Janner and George Thomas have been exposed as alleged paedophiles.

Exposed. Alleged. Can you be exposed as an alleged anything? What happened to those barriers to guilt?

The pair, later ennobled as Lord Janner and Viscount Tonypandy, have been accused of preying on children and yesterday campaigners said there was growing evidence a Labour paedophile ring operated at Westminster.

Is the Mail serious in labelling Labour the Paedos Party? If it is, were Liberal Sir Cyril Smith and Sir Tory Peter Hayman wannabe Labour members?

Thomas, Commons Speaker before becoming a peer, is said to have propositioned young men in his official grace and favour apartment in Parliament. He died aged 88 in 1997, but is now the subject of investigations by British Transport Police over an incident on a train in 1959, and by South Wales Police into a claim he raped a nine-year-old boy.

How can that be proven?

The alleged rape victim came forward to say he was abused at home in the late 1960s and early 1970s by the MP, who had befriended his foster parents.
A third former Labour MP, the late Leo Abse, has also been named as an alleged abuser.

Abse is dead. Smith is dead. Hayman is dead. Thomas is dead.

Yesterday campaigning Labour MP Simon Danczuk, who exposed the Cyril Smith scandal, said: ‘If George Thomas abused a nine-year-old boy, then you can be certain it was not a one-off. He would have abused others. The links between these people are coming together like a jigsaw puzzle, and one does get the impression there was a Labour network of paedophiles.’

If. Certain. We’re digging up the bodies to beat them with sticks. It’s only when the depraved grandees die that their guilt becomes a certainty. The pieces from Danczuk’s jigsaw puzzle crumble like dead skin when touched.

1984

The close bond between Janner and Thomas is clear from the black-and-white photograph unearthed by the Mail, which was taken on June 22, 1976. Janner had arranged for 70 pupils from his Leicester West constituency to visit the Commons. There is no suggestion any of the children in the photo were abused…

The claims about Thomas, a one-time headmaster and Methodist lay preacher, surfaced last year. His victim, now aged 56 and living in Australia, said: ‘I was raped by George Thomas in Cardiff. I was about nine. He spent a lot of time at my house.’

He alleged the abuse also happened at another address in the city. A second victim says he was sexually abused on a train from Paddington to Aberystwyth when he was 22 and Thomas was 50.

Thomas, an MP from 1945 to 1983, was a secretary of state for Wales in Harold Wilson’s government and presided over the 1969 investiture of the Prince of Wales. He also read the lesson at Prince Charles’s wedding to Lady Diana Spencer in 1981.

Wasn’t is Sir Jimmy Savile who took Diana’s secrets to his grave?

In 2001, Leo Abse MP spoke to the Sunday Times about helping with George Thomas MP’s young blackmailer:

“Over the years, given his exposed position, it was inevitable that he would fall victim to blackmail. On one occasion, after a distraught recounting to me of the pressure upon him, I insisted I would meet and deal with the young criminal in his constituency into whose hands he had fallen.

“My reputation in Cardiff’s criminal underworld stood me in good stead in dealing with the wretch. As a lawyer, I had often acted in the courts on behalf of the local prosecution department, and even more frequently, I had defended the city’s gangsters. As one-time chairman of the watch committee, I had the duty of supervising the local police.

“The blackmailing cur, therefore, had no doubt that, unless he desisted, I would carry out my threat to ensure he was put behind bars for 10 years; shortly after our encounter he found it was politic to quit the city.”

The Mail forgets to say that Thomas was chairman of National Children’s Home (NCH) in 1983.

times 1983