Labour’s deputy leader, Tom Watson, is facing mounting political pressure over his pursuit of allegations of sexual abuse against the former Conservative home secretary Leon Brittan.

Bob Neill, the Conservative chairman of the justice committee, has demanded the publication of a letter Watson wrote to the director of public prosecutions, Alison Saunders, in which the Labour MP called for the accusation to be reinvestigated.

Neill has also called for Saunders’ subsequent correspondence with the police to be made public to gauge how much influence Watson’s interventions had in Scotland Yard’s decision to reopen the historical rape allegation. Watson claims Lord Brittan would have been interviewed by police even without his intervention.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Leon Brittan. Photograph: John Stillwell/PA

Brittan died in January this year without he or his family knowing that he had been cleared of suspicion of rape. The Metropolitan police wrote to Brittan’s widow, Diana, in the last fortnight to say that no further action would have been taken.

Neill told the Telegraph that his committee would be raising the matter with Saunders when she next appeared to give evidence.



“Both Watson’s letter to the DPP and the DPP’s letter to the police need to be made public because we need to know precisely what pressure was put on,” he said. “And – unless there is some satisfactory answer – we need to know what was it that caused the DPP to ask the police to review it.

“Was it just the fact there was pressure from a prominent politician? If so, that would be questionable given the DPP is independent.”

Meanwhile, members of the home affairs select committee will meet on Tuesday to decide whether Watson should give evidence over the Brittan case.

Keith Vaz, the chairman of the committee, has written to the Met to ask why it did not inform Brittan of its decision not to pursue the case against him. He said he hoped it would reply before his committee discussed whether to call on Watson to give evidence.

“I don’t know enough about what he [Watson] did in order to make a judgment,” Vaz said.

Last Friday Watson issued a partial retraction over his allegations against Brittan, saying he should not have described Brittan as being “as close to evil as any human being can get”. There have been separate but unsubstantiated allegations that Brittan had been involved with a VIP paedophile ring that operated in Westminster and west London in the 1970s and 1980s, the subject of a controverisal ongoing investigation by the Met police.



Watson has said he was sorry for the distress caused to Brittan’s family. “But I wanted the claims made against him properly investigated,” he said in an article for the Huffington Post. “I think most people would assume that when an individual is facing multiple allegations of sexual crimes from people who are independent of each other, the police would want to interview them.”

The intervention of the justice committee chairman increases the pressure on Watson to issue a full apology. The Conservative MP Sir Nicholas Soames used Twitter to call on Watson to make a statement in the Commons.

Nicholas Soames (@nsoamesmp) Disgraceful were Tom Watson not to make personal statement to the House to apologise for the dreadful false accusations he made

On Sunday it emerged that Watson had allowed the police to use his Commons office to interview a man about abuse allegations involving Brittan.

Mike Broad, who has claims of abuse against several MPs and peers, said “half the Cabinet” had been to a gay brothel linked to allegations of child sex abuse. He told the Daily Mail that Watson “sat there and listened” while he was interviewed by police in the MP’s office.