Rotten Boroughs given a tip by the Voices

TODAY's Private Eye runs an item in a story entitled 'FAROOQ, MAN' in its Rotten Boroughs column, which was purloin from something our arts and culture correspondent Chris Draper dug-up about Rochdale's Knowl View school and the 'Statanic Panic' in the 1990s.  'Purloined' is probably too strong a word because it was knowingly handed to the Eye by one of own corresponmndents knowing that the Eye would use it.

The point of the story is that the new leader of Rochdale Council, Richard Farnell, is still claiming that he knew nowt about what was going on at Knowl View in the 1980s and 1990s when he last led the council.   Yet some of the lads wrongly taken away from their working-class parents on Langley in Middleton, when it was claimed by wild-eyed social workers that they were subject to Satanic rituals, were it seems moved to Knowl View where, it now seems, they would have been more vulnerable to the attentions of middle-class perverts.  The now dead former Rochdale Tory councillor Harry Wild appears to have been accused of being up to no good at the residential school in a recent book about Knowl View and Cyril Smith.

The story in the Eye goes on about the 'fraticidal but entertaining war within Rochdale council's Labour group... has worsened following the replacement of council leader Colin Lambert with rival Richard Farnell', and ends up on  a lighter note saying at least Councillor Karen Danczuk, the MP's wife, 'remains above the fray... (giving) an interview to the Daily Mail about her habit of posting "eye-popping" tout le monde sur le balcon selfies on Twitter'.