By John Ward
The revelations concern the Kincora Care Home in Northern Ireland. I first heard about this one some five years ago, after an Irish alleged victim wrote to me naming several names, absolutely none of whom (apart from Liam Brittan) I could identify, for fear of being an expat forever – whether I wanted to be or not. My original correspondent’s line was that senior members of the mainland and Ulster administrations had been availing themselves of Kincora boys for the usual recreational buggery over several years, with the connivance of MI5. I must be honest and say it all sounded a tad too like deep waters or high fantasy for me, and so I replied politely saying I’d look into it. The address he’d used was a bounce-back letterbox.
As it happens, I did look into it. I asked the only person I knew at the time to be an ex-spook , and he said he thought it “entirely possible”…but wouldn’t say why. When I soon afterwards asked a hack at the Mirror the same question, this latter person snorted and said, “Blimey, you’re a bit behind the music on this one chum”. Over time I have picked up snippets here and there – and one or two agendas about which I was less than convinced – but nothing worth writing about. Somehow, Needle dug up what I’d missed, and more power to his elbow. Also hat-tip to the Slogger who pointed me at the piece.
One extract in particular is of great interest to all of us dismayed by the lack of progress in Rocks Lane. It’s about convicted spy Anthony Blunt (an alleged regular at Elm House) and his interrogator, the spy-catcher Peter Wright:
What’s intriguing here is that Blunt wanted his immunity to be multivariate…to include paedophile offences of which he knew he was guilty. And further, that Peter Wright didn’t want the spying immunity to be known by the media. This gives us a very clear motive for the shall we say somewhat light touch being applied by Plod at the moment in relation to the Richmond Care Homes case. For while it’s been known for years that the Royal Art curator was pardoned in return for something or other, what is as yet beyond the public domain is the breadth of highly blackmailable depravity that may have helped Blunt get his pardon in the first place.
That the Establishment was worried about this should not be doubted. Even Ken himself adds some further colour to the urgent need for much under-carpet sweeping:
A further interesting thing for me is that this last part concerning ‘out of Court settlements’ chimes precisely with what my correspondent said long ago about his own experience. It could of course all be a load of old cobblers, but the existence of cunning attempts (by those with a preference for children) to get the practice more widely accepted is way beyond any reasonable doubt.
Several US perverts during the 1980s worked hard to justify the supply of children for care homes by the invention of various ‘syndromes’. One such was ‘parental disassociation syndrome’, a scheme to interpret almost everything said by kids to social workers and psychiatrists as a sign of their desire to get away from a dysfunctional family. I came across one such scam in Staffordshire during 2008, where the motive for shrinks ‘finding’ this system was perpetual fees (“Find this or you’ll never work for the Council again”) and for some of the social workers involved, the supply of yet more vulnerable children to be groomed by their fellow child-admirers. In at least one case, there was a in turn a strong suspicion of judicial involvement as well, although the motive here was hard to discern.
During the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, organisations like the Paedophile Information Exchange (‘PIE’) first of all got themselves affiliated to human rights organisations, and then latched onto influential researchers in an attempt to present themselves as an oppressed sexual minority. During this period, the either naive or somewhat odd Harriet Harman wrote her infamous paper promoting PIE, in which she referred to paedophilia as ‘merely part of the rainbow of sexual experience’. She has never satisfactorily explained why she did this, nor has she ever recanted from the view. Later, she became Minister for Families – promising several times to reform the heinous Secret Family Courts, but somehow never finding the time.
As long ago as 1931, Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World, a novel during which (as an aside) there were references to children engaging in pre-pubertal sex games. My impression when I read the book in the late 1960s was that Huxley was merely describing this as part of the nightmare future of instant and eclectic gratification he envisaged, but a University colleague worked hard with several of us to argue the case that Huxley was putting this forward as a natural (ie, ‘normal’) state for children. In the three years I was there, I never saw this bloke with a girlfriend. He became a teacher.
I’m indebted to Slogger Sabine for pointing me in turn at the circumstances surrounding Alfred Kinsey’s famous ‘Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male’ (1948) – a learned volume based on massive field-research in the US, which has been widely credited with (and blamed for) kick’starting the sexual revolution of the 1960s. What Kinsey didn’t know, however, was that Chapter 5 of his book, which dealt with child sexuality, was compiled from the diaries of a predatory paedophile. Rex King used his work in Arizona and New Mexico as a cover to abuse children. Kinsey’s mentor, Dr. Robert Dickinson, had taught King basic scientific methods to record the sexual abuse of children. King “molested at least 800 boys and girls, recording the abuse in explicit hand written diaries.” The key Chapter in Kinsey’s seminal work contains records of King’s abuse of 317 infants and children from 2 months to 15 years old. At one point, Rex King interpreted a little girl’s floods of tears, as a result of sexual abuse, as evidence of orgasm.
That too reflects my own limited experience of talking to paedophiles: that is, their unshakeable belief that the children enjoy it, and what they (the perpetrators) are doing is perfectly normal. The evidence relating trauma and eventual suicide with the aftermath of sustained sexual abuse in childhood is blanked out by them. Whether this is a form of psychopathy or a narrow delusional condition I am not qualified to say; what I can say is that the more intelligent end of the paedophile spectrum often displays manipulative cunning in a manner I have always associated with psychopaths. They hide behind homosexuality, they join anti-paedo societies, they plump for social care and disabled home work, they teach in primary schools, they join the police or get elected to local government, they penetrate the judiciary here and there, and they work hard behind the scenes to both justify and normalise their behaviour. Inevitably, the most talented of all become legislators and administrators at national level.
The features any investigator of this seamy demi-monde cannot help but notice over time are as follows:
i. The involvement of the judiciary. (Cases I investigated in Plymouth and Bristol are still subject to long gagging orders, in both cases for reasons that simply do not make sense other than as an attempt to cover up judicial involvement)
ii. The nature of the personalities at the centre of the case: ‘autocratic’ and so forth…aka, bullies.
iii. The money motive. Speaking to John Hemmings MP earlier this year, he told me his long-held view is that financial gain is at the top of the motivations for being involved in such scams. Willy-nilly privatisation is clearly an issue here….as an American case recently illustrated.
iv. The connection between privileged power over a State’s citizens, and the desire to have power over innocent children.
As to this final point, I am increasingly drawn to the hypothesis that there is a real and strong link between the desire to rule – to have power over people – and the desire to bully the vulnerable. While many dismiss the focus on political paedophile rings as standard-issue conspiracy theory, I am not convinced: the psychography involved here strikes me as entirely logical: but beyond that, the growing evidence pointing to a strong legislator connection – and deliberate distraction from it – is too obvious to miss. The opportunity to be autocratic as a judge conjures up similar connections – as of course does the desire to secretly control the population as a security agent.
But the opportunity to become Home Secretary, of course, is the ultimate paedophile wet-dream. It will, I am convinced, go a long way to eventually explaining the farce of endless ‘reopening’ of the Rocks Lane/Elm House saga…..followed by closure of the file again once Establishment influence has been brought to bear. It may well also explain at least one cover-up of a disgraceful episode inside Lambeth Council homes some thirty years ago.
In the light of this huge black cloud of doubt, the police and spin doctors serve up circuses for the appreciation of a population they know to be celebrity-fixated. It does strike me as oddly ironic that, on the one hand the élite seems determined to dismiss the idea of the power-paedo connection as crackpot conspiracy invention, but on the other to suggest an almost 100% showbizz-paedo connection. What else could explain the Jimmy Savile, Stuart Hall, Bill Roache, Jim Davidson and Max Clifford parade to which we’ve been treated since the Elm House case was re-opened last year?
Powerless old hasbeen showbizz farts are being wheeled out for our delectation, none of whose crimes seem to belong to this century. Some are just gropers, some are opportunist kiddie-fiddlers, and some have been framed. But few if any of them are typical of the depravity in our midst. I’d still like to know why Plod confiscated evidence held by child-protectors, but has yet to feel the collar of a perpetrator. And perhaps most of all, I find myself unable to avoid the conclusion that while the nakedly guilty escape, the dead don’t: Cyril Smith, Anthony Blunt, and Peter Morrison being the highest-profile examples.
Dead men tell no tales, as American pulp detective novels used to say. Perhaps that explains why so many of those involved in the Kincora scandal wound up dead. It may even explain why Stuart Hall was happy to ‘confess’ and toddle off quietly to jail. Let’s hope we shall see. One day.
