Leon Brittan

Leon Brittan was the Secretary of the Home Office under Margaret Thatcher who received a dossier from MP Geoffrey Dickens in 1983 containing allegations about members of parliament and the Queen's royal staff being part of a VIP pedophile ring with ties to the Pedophile Information Exchange (PIE). Several public figures were named in a Scotland Yard dossier on child sex offences, with Dickens stating he had compiled a list of names and planned to disclose them in Parliament. The Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions confirmed it was studying a report on a police inquiry into PIE, and Interior Minister Leon Brittan ordered a copy of the report by Friday¹.

VIP Pedophile Ring Allegations

The alleged cabinet minister in question turned out to be Leon Brittan, the Secretary of the Home Office who Geoffrey Dickens handed his VIP pedophile dossier to in 1983. A social worker named Fay, now 69, claimed on oath that Brittan had been involved in abuse and that in March 1990 he had seen a photograph of the former Tory politician in a French maid's uniform, with a young boy. Another parliamentary minister named during the inquiry was Cyril Smith, who would be posthumously exposed as a serial violent sexual abuser of boys in 2013, said to have been a frequent visitor to the Elm Guest House¹.

Notes on records from an Elm Guest House sign-in book were included among photos leaked online of files seized by police. Among those named, under alleged monikers, were MP Ronald Brown, MP Harvey Proctor, Royal staffer Anthony Blunt, a barrister named Colin Peters, as well as Cyril Smith and Leon Brittan. Many of these figures, particularly those last two, became targets of an investigation launched by Metropolitan police in February 2013 called Operation Fernbridge¹.

Customs Incident and Cover-up

A customs official named Maganlal Solanki told Operation Fernbridge detectives in 2014 he'd stopped Leon Brittan at the port of Dover in the late 1980s, travelling into the UK from Amsterdam with child pornography in his car. The films confiscated from Tricker featured child abuse of an undisclosed nature, and one had been entitled 'LB'. This had led journalists to speculate that "LB" stood for Leon Brittan, and that the tape in question featured a boy being abused in Brittan's presence. While Solanki refused to comment on the Russell Tricker incident, stating he was bound by the Official Secrets Act, he did mention another incident involving Leon Brittan later in the 1980s¹.

Missing Dossier and MI5 Connection

The Operation Orchid files weren't the only ones to go missing. It was also learnt the dossier Geoffrey Dickens handed over to Leon Brittan in 1983 had since been either lost or destroyed by the Home Office. And because Leon Brittan had been the minister in charge of overseeing domestic intelligence agencies at that time, it was soon suspected past investigations into an alleged VIP pedophile ring had been covered-up by MI5. Brittan was later identified as a regular visitor to the Australian High Commissioner's residence at Stoke Lodge, Kensington, where Martin Allen lived with his family. Allen disappeared in 1979 at age 15, and Australian intelligence officers launched an investigation into stand-in drivers hired by visitors to the residence, which often hosted civic functions attended by those close to Margaret Thatcher's circle, including her Home Secretary Leon Brittan¹.

Operation Midland and the Inquiry Findings

Brittan was among the figures named by Carl Beech ("Nick"), whose false allegations of a VIP abuse and murder ring led to the Metropolitan Police investigation Operation Midland of 2014 to 2016. Properties of the accused were raided; the operation made no arrests, and the review by Sir Richard Henriques found 43 serious errors. The Met apologized and paid compensation to Brittan's family, and Beech was sentenced in 2019 to 18 years for perverting the course of justice and fraud.² The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse recorded that a social worker, Andrew Keir, had alleged that on the night of the 1982 raid on the Elm Guest House a 10-year-old boy named an abuser as "Uncle Leon," who might have been a politician, and that the detail had been left out of the interview notes; the Independent Office for Police Conduct found "no substance … at all" to the allegation.³