Ministers including Nick Clegg and Theresa May have been rejecting calls for a full-scale public inquiry into historical child abuse, insisting a police investigation will be sufficient to get to the bottom of the claims.
Yesterday, however, the Prime Minister ordered the Home Office’s most senior official to launch an investigation amid claims that the department’s response to the affair so far had been ‘outrageous’.
Probe: David Cameron, left, has ordered the most
senior Home Office official to investigate a missing dossier handed to
Lord Brittan, the former home secretary, by Conservative MP Geoffrey
Dickens about an alleged paedophile ring in Westminster in the 1980s
Mr Cameron said he understood mounting concerns about what happened to the dossier handed over to then Home Secretary Leon Brittan by Tory MP Geoffrey Dickens in 1983.
He said: ‘That’s why I’ve asked the permanent secretary at the Home Office [Mark Sedwill] to do everything he can to find answers to all of these questions and to make sure we can reassure people about these events.’
He added: ‘If anyone has information about criminal wrong-doing they should, of course, give it to the police.’ But the Daily Mail can reveal that only seven detectives have been deployed by Scotland Yard chiefs to investigate the allegations.
