Cyril Smith Cover-up: Who Pulled the Strings?

 Eileen Kershaw's Recollections

EILEEN KERSHAW, a former Lancashire county councillor from up Whitworth, has recovered her memory and talked to Katie Fitzpatrick for tomorrow's Rochdale Observer.   The dots are starting to come together in the mystery of the how Cyril Smith may have escaped justice in the1960s.  Was he really a paederast and a child molester who got his political cronies to intervene to get him off, when the police had him by the short and curlies?

There are still plenty of questions as to what really happened and who did what to help Mr Smith in his time of need.  But it seems clear that the network of friends that existed within the political classes allegedly helped Mr. Smith at that time.  What part did Jack McCann, the former Rochdale Labour MP, play to get the then Director of Public Prosecutions to drop the case against Smith?  It is now clear, from what Eileen Kershaw says, that Smith called upon his old friend in the Labour Party to get his assistance and that 'the late Labour MP declared that he would call on the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) for them to drop the case'.

Eileen Kershaw told the Rochdale Observer that Smith would 'maintain his innocence to us (Eileen and her late husband, Jack Kershaw) and we would put up with it night after night from 8.30pm to 3am.'  She now says that:  'After the case was dropped he went back to being his normal jolly self'. 

At that time Jack McCann was a Labour Whip in the House of Commons, and that may have given him a chance to have a word with Jim Callaghan who was Home Secretary in the Labour Government between 1967 and 1970 .  Talk about wheels within wheels in the corridors of power.  Did Jack McCann in trying to help his old mate Cyril, who had been in the Labour Party, get 'Sunny Jim' Callaghan to get the DPP to ditch the case?  What a thought!  Our readers must judge for themselves what may have gone on, but networking is not a new phenomena.