Fake News or What?

By Les May

‘EX-MP set up deal to keep sex abuse secret’ screams the half page headline on the front page of today’s Rochdale Observer. Look inside and it’s just a claim made by Martin Digan to the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse.   A claim for which by his own admission he has absolutely no evidence.

Digan claims that a deal was struck between Cyril Smith, the late Jim Dobbin and Colin Lambert, in which Smith would ‘keep quiet’ about ‘a serious offence against a child in a public toilet’ supposedly perpetrated by an un-named Rochdale Council leader, in return for Dobbin and Lambert keeping quiet about sexual abuse at Knowl View.  He also claims to have given a ‘dossier’ about the abuse to Dobbin.  As is all too frequent when claims are made about Smith and Knowl View we are kept in the dark about when these events are supposed to have taken place.  And ‘when’ is critical in evaluating the likelihood that any of this might be true.

We’ll return to the ‘dossier’ later, but just to clarify, Jim Dobbin was Labour MP for Heywood and Middleton from 1997 to his untimely death in 2014.  He had previously been a Rochdale councillor from 1984, Labour leader from 1994 and Leader of the Council from 1996.  Colin Lambert was a Labour councillor and worked in Jim Dobbin’s constituency office.  He later became leader of the Labour group and delivered a stunning electoral result in 2014 before finding himself displaced by the present incumbent.

Now we’ve met Mr Digan before. In the section of Simon Danczuk’s 2014 book where he claims that Smith was sexually abusing the pupils at Knowl View Special School, Digan is the prime witness. I say ‘witness’, but in fact Danczuk writes that although he had been at the school since the late 1970’s he ‘was oblivious to what was happening at the school’.  ‘Oblivious’ or not, it didn’t stop him claiming in Danczuk’s book that ‘boys were sold to paedophile gangs’.  Nor can we consider him to be the most reliable of witnesses.   The story about an event at Knowl View he told in a Radio 4 programme was subtly different from the same story which appears in Danczuk’s book.

As for the ‘dossier’, it’s a favourite term in the Cyril Smith/Knowl View saga, which seems to cover everything from a handwritten note of a short telephone conversation twenty years earlier, upwards. It consisted of copies of two reports one made by Aids worker Philip Shepherd and the other by psychologist Valerie Mellor, which Digan found in the Headmaster’s office and which had previously been submitted to Rochdale Council in 1991 and 1992.

So how likely is it that Digan’s claim about a ‘deal’ has any merit?   In cases like this it helps to ask who stood to gain? Certainly not Labour. From 1986 to 1992 Labour was running the council.  Any revelations about sexual abuse at Knowl View would have have had to be answered by them.  So why would they need any deal as an inducement to keep quiet?  I have seen the Shepherd report and can state categorically that it makes no reference to Smith.  Though I know the contents of the Mellor report I have not seen it in full, but I have been assured by someone who sees themselves as fighting for ‘justice’ for the ex-pupils of Knowl View that it makes no reference to Smith.

Digan likes to be seen as a ‘whistleblower’. Had he confined himself to trying to get the Shepherd and Mellor reports published and in the public domain so that we could see for ourselves what had been happening at Knowl View I would have felt that such a label was justified as that is what I want to see myself because these reports contain information about some very unsavoury goings on between some of the pupils at Knowl View. But, as his present claims show, he hasn’t.

In Danczuk’s book he lets himself be used as a tool for Danczuk to fashion his claims about Cyril Smith and Knowl View school. Now he’s gone freelance.   But apart from the story of ‘a deal’, the best he can come up with at the inquiry is that he had often seen Smith bouncing young boys on his knee during parties held on the premises to coincide with governors meetings.  So no ‘smoking gun‘ then?

No doubt he told the police all this when he was interviewed as part of the ‘Operation Clifton’ investigation.   The fact that the police concluded there was no evidence of a ‘cover up’ at Knowl View suggests in the absence of evidence of ‘a deal’ they did not take take the claim seriously. Claims like this just make the inquiry look like an amateurish shambles.