Naming names: Geoffrey Dickens vs the Establishment

In 1981 The Times printed a typically sharp cartoon by Mel Calman. 'Hurry,' a woman calls to her husband, as the TV news starts; 'they're naming names.'

The reference was to the Conservative MP Geoffrey Dickens, a man who has made such a spectacular return to the news media over the last week, nearly twenty years after his death. Dickens, we learn, compiled a dossier of information and allegations about paedophilia amongst those in public life. This was handed to the then home secretary, Leon Brittan, in 1984. The fate of that dossier, together with any description of its contents, is unknown. An enquiry is promised.

Whilst we wait for that (no rush), let's look instead at what is on the record, and specifically at that 1981 case that prompted Calman's cartoon.

The story goes back to 1978, when a package was found on a London bus, containing 'obscene literature and written material'. No further details were officially given, but it was understood that the material related to paedophilia. The owner of the package was traced, along with several others who had shared 'correspondence of an obscene nature', until eventually a circle of nine people - seven men and two women - had been identified.

Under section 11 of the 1953 Post Office Act, all were liable for prosecution for the offence of sending obscene matter through the post. No charges, however, were brought in this instance.

But one of the men involved was discovered to be also carrying out a separate correspondence with another man (outside the original circle of nine). Their communications were more extreme and concerned 'the systematic killing by sexual torture of young people and children'. These two men were prosecuted and given a conditional discharge.

Meanwhile another trial was making its way to court, this time of Tom O'Carroll, a member of the Paedophile Information Exchange and the most vocal advocate for a reduction in the age of consent. He was charged with conspiracy to corrupt public morals, found guilty and jailed.

Both these court cases involved members of the original circle of nine correspondents, whether as witnesses or as names that were mentioned in evidence. And amongst those named was Peter Henderson, the owner of the package that had been left on the bus.

And so, finally, to Geoffrey Dickens.

In March 1981, Dickens used parliamentary privilege - the legal convention that the laws of libel do not apply in the Houses of Parliament - to reveal that 'Peter Henderson' was actually a pseudonym, concealing the identity of Sir Peter Hayman, a sixty-six-year-old former diplomat, who had been High Commissioner in Canada. Dickens wanted to know whether Sir Michael Havers, the attorney general, would initiate proceedings against Hayman under the Post Office Act. The answer to that question was 'no'; Havers agreed with the decision made by the office of Sir Tony Hetherington, the director of public prosecutions, not to bring charges relating to the correspondence within the original circle of nine.

There were many who felt that this didn't really deal with all the issues involved. In particular, there was a strong suspicion that the reason there was no prosecution was simply that the establishment was protecting one of its own, a senior retired diplomat who was also - it was rumoured - high up in the security services at MI6 (as well as being a member of the Paedophile Information Exchange). Furthermore, some believed, this was the reason that Hayman was not called as a witness in either of the two trials and why his name - uniquely - was kept out of the court record: he was simply referred to as Peter Henderson.

In short, the whole thing stank of the suggestion that Sir Michael and Sir Tony were looking after Sir Peter.

But there were others who felt that this wasn't the real issue here at all, that the main area of concern was the action of Geoffrey Dickens, which might bring Parliament into disrepute.

'I do not believe Sir Peter Hayman should have been named,' wrote Alan Watkins in the Guardian, 'and I hope MPs will now curb the absolute privilege they possess.' David Steel, then the leader of the Liberal Party, suggested that Dickens might have been abusing parliamentary privilege. Sir Michael Havers had attempted to persuade him not to name Hayman in the first place. And the Metropolitan Police called Dickens in for questioning over the source of his information, which he refused to reveal.

Much of this response was shaped by the nature of the man himself. Geoffrey 'Bunter' Dickens was a figure of great ridicule on the liberal left. A rotund man (he was a former heavyweight boxer) who spoke with a London accent, he called on a regular basis for the reintroduction of capital and corporal punishment, and was noted for his 'monomania' (to use the Sunday Times's word) on the subject of paedophilia. He was clearly obsessed, and few took him seriously when he argued, for example, that there was a connection between paedophile rings and Satanists: 'Children are sacrificed sexually to the lust and gratification of the coven,' he told the press in 1988. (To be fair, he went on to suggest that skeletons were also being sexually abused.)

By that stage in the late 1980s, of course, the question of paedophile rights was not on anyone's agenda. But a decade earlier, it had existed on the fringes of liberal thought, and PIE had found that, in some quarters at least - including the National Council for Civil Liberties, Mind, Release and the Campaign for Homosexual Equality - its arguments were not rejected entirely out of hand.

The fact that it was the likes of Dickens and of Mary Whitehouse who spoke out so strongly against paedophilia, and that their cause was taken up by the tabloids, made some feel that the paedophile scare was being blown up out of proportion. Here, for example, is an extract from a somewhat jokey leader column in the Guardian in 1981 concerning Dickens's naming of Hayman, complete with mockery of the tabloids:

'Straight sex, kinky sex and gay sex are all now looking a bit passé for the purpose of raising a scandal, and it may be thought that paedophilia (an even smaller minority interest than most) has surfaced only just in time. As the Daily Mirror remarked in a thoughtful leader, "The Daily Mirror is a tolerant newspaper. But tolerance has its limit. AND THIS IS IT."'

But times have changed, and here is an extract from the Guardian's leader today about the fallout from the Dickens dossier:

'It is now obvious that the scale of child sex abuse has been greater and has gone on for longer than many people might have imagined. So the question that most urgently needs answering is who knew, and why didn't they act.'

Maybe we're getting to the stage where that Calman cartoon could be dug out for a reprint.