May to address Commons over sex abuse claims

There are growing calls for a full public inquiry after the Home Office admitted that more than 100 files related to historic organised child abuse over a period of 20 years had gone missing.

Over the weekend, the former Conservative cabinet minister Lord Tebbit, who served a series of ministerial posts under Margaret Thatcher, said the instinct in the 1980s was to protect “the system”.

Theresa May will make a statement to MPs on Monday in response to the growing concerns and demand for an over-arching inquiry into the many strands of investigation into allegations of child abuse from the 1980s, including allegations of abuse at parties attended by politicians and other prominent figures.

He stopped me outside the chamber and had a word in my ear in terms of what I would and wouldn’t say at the select committee Simon Danczuk MP

It was also reported that police have traced an alleged victim who has “implicated a senior political figure”.

The man, who is now in his 40s, has given a detailed account of how he was assaulted by the politician, the Telegraph said, but has so far refused to make a formal statement to detectives.

The permanent secretary at the Home Office, Mark Sedwill, has said he will be appointing a senior legal figure to conduct a fresh review into what happened to a dossier relating to alleged paedophile activity at Westminster which was passed to the then home secretary, Leon (now Lord) Brittan, by the Tory MP Geoffrey Dickens in 1983.

Over the weekend, he disclosed that a previous review – carried out only last year – had identified 114 potentially relevant files from the period 1979 to 1999, which could not be located and were “presumed destroyed, missing or not found”. He said the investigation had also identified 13 “items of information” about alleged child abuse, nine of which were known or reported to the police at the time – including four involving Home Office staff.

Police had since been informed of the other four cases.

Simon Danczuk, the Labour MP for Rochdale at the forefront of the campaign to investigate the alleged paedophile ring in Westminster told Channel 4 News there was an attempt to lean on him by a Conservative MP not to name any names just before giving evidence to the Home Affairs committee last week.

He said: “He stopped me outside the chamber and had a word in my ear in terms of what I would and wouldn’t say at the select committee.

“I was quite riled by his approach, I said I’d listen to what he’d say, I’d consider what he’d said and leave it at that.”

Labour’s shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper accused the Home Office of failing to respond to legitimate public concerns.

“The government must take these concerns extremely seriously – to make sure justice is done for victims of abuse no matter how long ago, to make sure that any institutional failure is uncovered, and to make sure that lessons are learnt and the child protection is as effective as possible for the future,” she said.

“We need a wide ranging review that can look at how all the allegations put to the Home Office in the 80s and 90s were handled. Any stones left unturned will leave concerns of institutional malaise, or worse a cover-up, unaddressed.”