Claims of historical child sex abuse by VIPs and politicians at the Dolphin Square apartment complex in Westminster and at other locations are as wide-ranging as they are shocking.



The most serious allegations, involving a multiple child murder, emerged last year from an abuse victim now in his 40s, who uses the pseudonym “Nick”. He told of a decade of abuse at the hands of people including senior politicians and members of Britain’s establishment.

Scotland Yard detectives said in December they believe his allegations that politicians and establishment figures abused and terrorised children as young as seven more than 30 years ago and went on to kill three young boys. The claims also included allegations a child had been run over.

“Nick” came forward, first to Exaro News, an independent investigative news website, and then told detectives the names of “VIPs” allegedly involved in the abuse.

Following three days of police interviews, he said last November: “They were very powerful people and they controlled my life for the next nine years. They created fear that penetrated every part of me, day in, day out. You didn’t question what they wanted, you did as they asked without question and the punishments were very severe.”

He told the BBC the alleged abusers were very organised and arranged chauffeur-driven cars to collect boys from locations such as schools, and drive them to the places they would be attacked, such as hotels or flats in London and other cities. “Some of them were quite open about who they were,” he said. “They had no fear at all of being caught.”

But important evidence remains lacking for the detectives of Operation Midland who are investigating the case. They, as yet, have no bodies. Neither do they have full names of those abused or killed, or exact locations where the alleged killings took place.



Officers from the inquiry team have been hunting hard. Earlier this month they searched the Grantham home of former Conservative MP Harvey Proctor. He denied ever having “attended sex parties at Dolphin Square or anywhere else” and has not been arrested.

He told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “I have not been part of any rent boy ring with cabinet ministers, other members of parliament or generals or the military.” He described being bought into the inquiries as Kafkaesque.

Also this month, officers from the same team searched the Surrey home of the former chief of defence staff, Lord Bramall, which he said left him mystified. He has not been arrested and said any suggestion he was involved in child abuse was “absolutely a load of rubbish”.

But the alleged murders and abuse at Dolphin Square are just one part of the jigsaw of proliferating child sex abuse inquiries. A wider investigation into a VIP child abuse ring is being conducted under the umbrella of Operation Fairbank, launched after the Labour MP Tom Watson made claims in parliament in 2012 about a child sex abuse gang with establishment connections.

Meanwhile, Operation Fernbridge is examining claims of a network of abusers, including prominent politicians, using the former Elm guesthouse in Barnes, south-west London in the late 1970s and 1980s. Among the alleged visitors was the former Liberal MP Cyril Smith who is also alleged to have abused boys at Knowl View school, in his Rochdale constituency. And Operation Cayacos is looking at claims of a paedophile ring linked to Peter Righton, a founder of the Paedophile Information Exchange, a campaign group that lobbied for sex between adults and children to be legalised in the 1970s and 1980s.

Last year, Simon Danczuk, the Labour MP for Rochdale who investigated claims against Smith, pressed Leon Brittan, who died in February this year, to reveal what he knew about paedophilia allegations, passed to him when he was home secretary in the 1980s. It was claimed a dossier was given to the Tory cabinet minister by the late Conservative MP, Geoffrey Dickens. The current home secretary, Theresa May, said in November there was no evidence documents were deliberately destroyed and said claims of a cover up were “not proven”.

Separately, Peter McKelvie, a former child protection manager, has claimed that at least 20 prominent figures – including former MPs and government ministers – abused children “for decades”. He said he discovered possible links between paedophiles and the government while assisting police in investigating convicted Righton. Among evidence seized from Righton’s home in 1992 were documents that pointed to a “very well organised paedophile network”, going back to the 1950s and 1960s.

The question of why police and prosecutors failed to tackle the claims, many of which surfaced years ago, is now being asked. Last July, Clive Driscoll, a former senior Metropolitan police officer said he was moved from his post when he revealed plans in 1998 to investigate politicians over claims of child abuse, that allegedly took place in children’s homes in the 80s. When he revealed – in an internal meeting – the names of suspects he wanted to investigate, which included politicians, he was taken off the case. He told the BBC his inquiry was “all too uncomfortable to a lot of people”.

Now the Independent Police Complaints Commission has launched an inquiry into 14 different claims of police and establishment coverups. One is about criminal allegations against a politician being dropped during a child abuse investigation in south London, another is the claim that an investigation into the suspected Dolphin Square ring was dropped “because officers were too near prominent people”.

Another is that no action was taken after a document that originated from the Houses of Parliament was found at an address of a known paedophile – it listed a number of MPs and senior police officers as being involved in a child sex abuse ring. Further investigations have been launched into the removal of a senior politician’s name from an account of abuse given by a victim, claims a politician had asked a top police officer to not take any action on a Westminster paedophile ring in the 1970s, and allegations that surveillance of a child sex abuse ring was shut down due to high-profile people being involved.