Former senior cabinet minister facing rape allegations

The Independent/London

A former senior cabinet minister is now the subject of a rape allegation currently being considered by the Crown Prosecution Service.

Police investigating possible child abuse at the Elm Guest House in West London have submitted a file on the former minister, and the CPS is expected to come to a decision over the matter during the summer.

The claims are not understood to relate to the abuse of minors at the guest house and the alleged victim was over the age of consent.

The allegation follows evidence given to the Metropolitan Police’s Operation Fernbridge, which is investigating claims that a well-connected paedophile ring was operating from a guest house in Rocks Lane, Barnes, south-west London in the early 1980s.

Operation Fernbridge, as the inquiry is called, has been examining more than 300 leads submitted after a politician claimed that a historic paedophile ring with connections to Downing Street had been in operation there.

The extent, breadth and wide timeframe of the claims led police to look beyond the Elm Guest House’s allegedly dark epoch and beyond the abuse of children.

Police have been looking into claims that young boys from the Grafton Close care home run by Richmond Council were sexually assaulted at the guest house – now a block of respectable flats. It is alleged that the boys were taken to organised parties at the house attended by prominent people, where they were made to dress up.

The parties were often “Kings and Queens” themed, a practice begun around the time of the Silver Jubilee in 1977. The lack of charges relating to the guest house has given rise to counter-claims of “conspiracy theories” and cover-ups.

But in January, The Independent on Sunday revealed that the disgraced Liberal Democrat politician Sir Cyril Smith, who for decades abused children without ever facing justice, was a regular visitor.

The revelation came after police raided the house of one worker and seized documents said to contain the names of some of those who stayed at the guest house. Those on the list also included prominent politicians, judges and celebrities.

The Fernbridge investigation came in the wake of the allegations surrounding the TV presenter and DJ Jimmy Savile. In October last year, Tom Watson MP told Parliament that an evidence file on Peter Righton, a former child care worker convicted of importing illegal pornography in 1992, contained “clear intelligence of a widespread paedophile ring”.

At Prime Minister’s Questions, he said: “One of its members boasts of a link to a senior aide of a former prime minister, who says he could smuggle indecent images of children from abroad.” Scotland Yard is investigating those claims along with claims that its officers failed to carry out a proper examination of child abuse allegations in Richmond in 2003, when, it is claimed, the Independent Police Complaints Commission received allegations from a concerned worker.