 |
| Former police inspector Clive Driscoll |
One November day in 1998, a group of officials from Lambeth Council found themselves in an upstairs meeting room at Mary Seacole House, a concrete office block in South London.
It was the end of a lengthy business meeting. And they were sitting in stunned silence.
The reason? A few moments earlier, a local police inspector had just delivered several pieces of earth-shattering news.
First, he revealed that detectives working on Operation Trawler, an investigation into a paedophile ring suspected of operating in the London borough’s children’s homes, were focusing their inquiries on 12 potential abusers.
Second, he was prepared to name these people. Third, it contained the names of several high-profile members of the Establishment.
On condition of confidentiality, the policeman read out a list of the people his team was pursuing.
One was a Lambeth councillor. Another was a household-name celebrity. A third, perhaps most explosively, was a minister in Tony Blair’s government.
‘These are all only suspects at this stage,’ the policeman said, bullishly. ‘But I have reason to believe that further investigation will produce evidence that I can use to pursue court cases.’
In the room in Clapham High Street there was a sharp intake of breath. Labour-run Lambeth was no stranger to ugly headlines. For almost two decades, its name had been a byword for corruption, incompetence, and loony-Left political dysfunction.
Since the Eighties — when, under the Trotskyite leadership of ‘Red’ Ted Knight, it was dubbed Britain’s worst-run local authority — the Town Hall had spawned a series of criminal investigations and public inquiries, involving everything from fraud and blackmail to Mafia-style racketeering.
More recent years had seen Lambeth’s social services department rocked by a string of appalling sex scandals, some of which remained ongoing.
Yet even by those standards, the allegation that its premises were home to an Establishment paedophile ring, which included a member of the government, must have seemed so extraordinary, and so utterly unprecedented, as to be in a class of its own.
That, presumably, will have been the verdict at Mary Seacole House that day, where the gobsmacked council officials included several of Lambeth’s most senior social workers and executives, along with two of the borough’s solicitors.
But in the weeks that followed, something very strange occurred. Far from leading to arrests and court cases, the policeman’s comments triggered events that saw him moved out of Lambeth and Operation Trawler brought to a halt. (
more...)
