Cyril Smith admitted to intimate contact with lads

CYRIL Smith confessed 30 years ago to spanking boys and conducting intimate 'medical examinations' on them but was allowed to remain as a Liberal MP.

This admission in today's Daily Telegraph comes from Lord Steel, the former Liberal leader who has defended the party’s refusal to hold an inquiry into sex abuse allegations, said on Tuesday that he had confronted Smith about his 'unusual' behaviour with teenage boys at a hostel in Rochdale.  He said that he was running a political party not a detective agency.

An article in the Rochdale Alternative Paper (RAP) and Private Eye in 1979 alleged that Smith, who was secretary of the Cambridge House boys hostel in Rochdale, put teenagers across his knee, pulled down their trousers and spanked them as a 'punishment' in the 1960s.

Lord Steel said:  'I asked Cyril Smith about it. I was half expecting him to say it was all wrong, and I would have been urging him to sue to save his reputation. To my surprise he said the report was correct.  He had some kind of supervisory role, I don’t know what it was, in these institutions in Rochdale which he reckoned entitled him to be involved in corporal punishment.'


Using a strange kind of historical relativism Lord Steel told the Telegraph that the 1960s were a 'different era' when corporal punishment was permitted and added that he had been 'perfectly happy' to recommend Smith for a knighthood.