Breaking the Code (88 page)

You get the idea. At the start of the story Lolita is twelve and the narrator, Humbert Humbert, is in his late thirties and obsessed with the child, with whom he begins a sexual relationship after he becomes her stepfather. Stanley Kubrick’s film version was released in 1962, which is what prompted my interest. James Mason, aged fifty-two, played Humbert Humbert. Sue Lyon, aged fourteen, played Lolita. The film was X-rated so I could not see it at the time; nor, I suppose, could Sue Lyon. You needed to be over eighteen.

We do not approve of child abuse, but depictions of child abuse we seem to tolerate – if they are well enough done. Not long ago
Time
magazine included
Lolita
in its list of the best 100 novels written in English between 1923 and 2005. Nabokov, in an afterword to the book, said, ‘There is no moral to the story’, echoing Oscar Wilde’s line when he was cross-examined about
The Picture of Dorian Gray
: ‘There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.’

We are certainly ‘conflicted’ when it comes to Oscar Wilde – whose eldest son, incidentally, was a pupil at Bedales in the 1890s. I am writing this on Sunday morning, having just driven my friend Merlin Holland to St Pancras station to catch the Eurostar. Merlin, Oscar Wilde’s only grandson, lives in France, but he was over for a couple of days giving a remarkable talk at the St James’s Theatre about the notorious trials of 1895 and his grandfather’s tragic downfall. I chaired the Q&A afterwards and I asked Merlin – considering the current press interest in paedophilia in high places and given the age of some of the witnesses produced by the prosecution at the Old Bailey in 1895 – if Oscar Wilde was being tried today might he not end up in prison now, just as he did then? ‘Yes,’ said Merlin, ‘quite possibly, though the boys were sixteen – over the age of consent.’

Could they have been fifteen at the time the offences took place? Did Oscar ask them how old they were? I don’t think the detail of their dates of birth was troubling him. By his own admission it was their youth that drew him to them. He was a gentleman, twenty to twenty-five years their senior, hugely famous and successful. They were working-class lads who could barely read nor write. Was Wilde using his position, authority and comparative wealth to exploit their youth, beauty and comparative poverty? Yes. They gave him companionship, an audience and occasional sexual favours. He gave them champagne, cash and an occasional engraved cigarette case. Do we approve? Not really, but that does not stop us from finding his flawed and complex character utterly fascinating and for admiring the charm of his personality and the genius of his works. Next week I am going to yet another production of
The Importance of Being Earnest.
Next month I start writing the seventh in my series of murder mysteries featuring Oscar as my detective. When he was imprisoned, Wilde’s very name became taboo and his plays were taken off the stage. Now he is an icon and his plays are box office gold. I wonder: will
the day ever come when Rolf Harris singing ‘Two Little Boys’ is heard again on Radio 2 and his portrait of the Queen is brought up from the basement and put on show once more? (I doubt it, but I suppose Rolf’s recordings and paintings don’t really rival Oscar’s poetry and plays.)

Extraordinary. I have just been down to the kitchen to get a coffee, I was flicking through the
Mail on Sunday
and I have come across a two-page spread by Chris Bryant (Labour MP for Rhondda) featuring Oscar and his boyfriend, Lord Alfred Douglas, and Douglas’s brother, Viscount Drumlanrig and
his
rumoured relationship with the Earl of Rosebery, Foreign Secretary and Prime Minister. ‘The Cabinet minister who made passes at Etonians, the MP who paid fourteen-year-olds for floggings – the astonishing story of how paedophiles and MPs with bizarre peccadilloes are hardly anything new in the corridors of power…’ It’s a timely reheating of what the paper likes to call ‘the Scandals of Sexminster’. But in the case of young Drumlanrig, sometime secretary to Lord Rosebery, what do we actually know? Rumour was rife, but there is no hard evidence of an unnatural relationship between the two. Drumlanrig was discovered slumped in a ditch at the edge of a turnip field in Somerset on a cold, crisp Thursday in October 1894, his twelve-bore shotgun at his side. Was it murder or suicide or, as the inquest concluded five days later, simply a tragic accident? We will never know.

And will we ever know the truth about Sir Peter Morrison, my predecessor as Member of Parliament for the City of Chester?

When I first met Peter Morrison in 1991 I sensed that he was gay and I could see that he was a heavy drinker. He was stepping down as an MP, aged forty-seven, after eighteen years in Parliament. He was a Privy Counsellor, he was a knight, he had been a minister of state and Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Prime Minister. He told me he knew he wouldn’t make it to the Cabinet, so he was giving up politics for business. ‘I’m going now while I’ve got time to start another career,’ he told me. ‘I want to make some money.’ I believed him. But Michèle, whose instinct is always good, said she thought he was jumping before he was pushed.

Was he?

When we arrived in Chester in 1991, the word on the street was that Peter was ‘a disgusting pervert’. Out canvassing, knocking on doors in one or other of the large council estates, we were told, in no uncertain terms, that Morrison was a monster who interfered with children. At the time, I don’t think I believed it. People do say terrible things without justification. Beyond the fact that his drinking made Morrison appear unprepossessing – Central Casting’s idea of what a toff paedophile might look like – no one was offering anything to substantiate their slurs. At the time I never heard anything untoward about Peter from the police or from the local journalists – and I gossiped a good deal with them.

In 2012, Graham Nicholls, a trade union official and former member of the Chester Trades Council, sent an intriguing letter to
The Guardian
. ‘After the 1987 general election,’ he wrote, ‘around 1990, I attended a meeting of Chester Labour Party where we were informed by the agent, Christine Russell, that Peter Morrison would not be standing in 1992. He had been caught in the toilets at Crewe station with a fifteen-year-old boy. A deal was struck between Labour, the local Tories, the local press and the police that if he stood down at the next election the matter would go no further.’ I have no reason to disbelieve Mr Nicholls, but I am surprised I heard nothing at all of this at the time.

The first, and only, official acknowledgement of my predecessor’s possible involvement in child abuse came my way in 1996 when William Hague, then Secretary of State for Wales, came up to me in the House of Commons to let me know that he had ordered an inquiry into allegations of child abuse in care homes in North Wales between 1974 and 1990 – and that Peter’s name might feature in connection with the Bryn Estyn home in Wrexham, twelve miles from Chester. Sir Ronald Waterhouse QC, a retired High Court judge, was appointed to head the inquiry. It took three years, cost £12 million and was reckoned ‘the biggest investigation ever held in Britain into allegations of physical, sexual and emotional abuse of children who passed through the care system’.

When the Waterhouse Report appeared, it made grim reading. It named and criticised almost 200 people, for either abusing children or failing to offer them sufficient protection. It found credible evidence of ‘widespread sexual abuse, including buggery’ and recognised the existence of a paedophile ring in the Wrexham/Chester area, but found no evidence ‘to establish that there was a wide-ranging conspiracy involving prominent persons and others with the objective of sexual activity with children in care’. Sir Peter Morrison’s name did not feature.

The Waterhouse Report came in for a lot of stick. Some felt its remit had been too narrow and it had let too many people off the hook. Others felt quite differently. In 2005, Richard Webster, a writer of some standing, published
The Secret of Bryn Estyn: The Making of a Modern Witch Hunt.
Webster was highly critical of the Waterhouse Inquiry, arguing that abuse scandals can be ‘phenomena created by public hysteria’ and detailing cases of apparently innocent care workers imprisoned as a consequence of false or unreliable accusations elicited by police trawling operations.

The accusations against Peter Morrison surfaced again in 2012. Rod Richards (junior minister at the Welsh Office when the Waterhouse Inquiry was being set up) said publicly that Morrison had been named as a regular and unexplained visitor to Bryn Estyn. Channel 4 reported that Morrison had been ‘seen’ driving away from Bryn Estyn ‘with a boy in his car’. And the BBC’s
Newsnight
– along with others – wrongly suggested that Lord McAlpine was somehow involved in child abuse, because someone somewhere along the line had confused McAlpine with Morrison.

To calm the furore (or to prolong the hysteria, if you take the Richard Webster view), the Prime Minister and the Home Secretary announced further inquiries into both the original inquiry and any further allegations. Meanwhile, the police were still trawling. In November 2013, they announced that in the past year 235 people had contacted them with information about alleged abuse in care homes in north Wales and they were ‘pursuing a large number of active lines of enquiry’. This month the BBC reported that 275 people had made allegations and forty-nine possible suspects were being investigated.

Maybe, eventually, Peter Morrison will be nailed beyond reasonable doubt. But, for now, what do we actually know? Not much.

We do know that in the late 1980s, a
Sunday Mirror
reporter, Chris House, received a tip-off from police officers who said that Peter Morrison had twice been caught ‘cottaging’ in public lavatories with underaged boys and had been released with a caution. When House confronted Morrison, Morrison threatened legal action. Ten years later, another investigative journalist, Nick Davies, followed up the story and confirmed with the police that Morrison had indeed ‘been picked up twice’, but added that ‘there appeared to be no trace of either incident in any of the official records’.

Was there a cover-up? The story would certainly have been embarrassing. At the beginning of Margaret Thatcher’s premiership, Peter Morrison was in the Whips’ Office, as a Lord Commissioner of the Treasury and pairing whip. He went on to become a junior minister and then a minister of state. In 1990 he became Mrs Thatcher’s PPS. For three years, from 1986 to 1989, he was deputy chairman of the Conservative Party. He was a force to be reckoned with: he was at the heart of the establishment, he was close to the Prime Minister – and, throughout this period, his sister was a friend and lady-in-waiting to the Queen. (Happily, she still is. Indeed, in 2013 Her Majesty made Mary Morrison a Dame Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order, the highest rank of the highest order of chivalry in the Queen’s personal gift.) This association with the palace adds an undeniable extra frisson to the story. That said, I doubt that Dame Mary knew anything about her younger brother’s private life. It’s not the sort of thing a chap discusses with his sister.

At Buckingham Palace it would certainly not have worried anybody that Peter Morrison was homosexual – so many who work there are – but child abuse is quite a different matter. Lord Charteris, a devoted courtier and the Queen’s former private secretary, came to Chester at Peter’s invitation to talk to members of the Conservative Association. I doubt that he would have come if he believed Peter to be a paedophile.

What did Mrs Thatcher know of Peter Morrison’s alleged dark side? When I talked to her about him, I felt she had the measure of the man. She knew he was homosexual. She knew he was a drinker. She was fond of him, clearly, but told me that he had ruined himself through ‘self-indulgence’ – much as Reginald Maudling had done a generation earlier. When it came to the love lives of colleagues, Mrs T. was not judgemental (she
was quite ready to forgive Cecil Parkinson for his affair with Sara Keays), but I am sure she would not have countenanced a child abuser as her Parliamentary Private Secretary – let alone have authorised a ‘cover-up’ on his behalf.

So, if there was a cover-up, who managed it? Peter was a whip and whips do look after their own, so was it the Whips’ Office? That has been the suggestion of the week – prompted by a clip from an old TV interview.

In 1995, in a BBC documentary,
Westminster’s Secret Service
, a former whip, Tim Fortescue,
707
said this:

‘A scandal involving small boys’ – what did he mean? He can’t have been thinking about Peter Morrison because Tim Fortescue was a whip more than forty years ago, at the beginning of the 1970s, before Peter was even an MP. Did Fortescue have another case in mind? Is child abuse endemic at Westminster? According to a former victim of abuse, now aged sixty, quoted in yesterday’s
Daily Mail,
back in the day, young men ‘were picked up at King’s Cross penniless and handed out like pieces of meat to MPs, celebrities, judges and others in the wealthy elite of London. Many of these guys were under sixteen and had run away from children’s homes. They were promised a roof and work, but soon discovered they were being groomed for sex with paedophiles.’

Is it all true? Was there really a paedophile ring at Westminster involving ministers and MPs? And was there a cover-up? Norman Tebbit, among others, now thinks perhaps there was. As I write, the government has promised yet another inquiry, so in the fullness of time we may find out. Who knows?