From Ireland’s Village magazine:
In 2015, [Enoch] Powell was named in a Church of England review into historical child sex abuse concerning the 1980s. One of its spokespersons told the press that: “The name Enoch Powell was passed to Operation Fernbridge on the instruction of Bishop Paul Butler”. The information originally came from a cleric who has counselled child abuse victims in the 1980s. Last April Village gave Powell the benefit of the doubt insofar as these claims were concerned. In light of [Richard] Kerr’s account of his encounters with Powell – revealed here for the first time – that benefit must now be replaced with outright condemnation.
The “revelation” forms part of a longer article that supposedly links sex abuse in children’s homes in Northern Ireland with VIP paedophile conspiracies involving the British secret services. This was the context in which Powell was thus able to commit abuse in Northern Ireland with impunity, despite his status as a political pariah and many journalists, activists and other enemies highly motivated to look for discrediting scandals.
I discussed the allegation against Powell that was raised in 2015 here. Powell was not in fact named during a “Church of England review”; Butler contacted police after the Bishop of Monmouth, Dominic Walker, was asked to expand on an old quote that had appeared in 1991 book, when he was a vicar in Brighton. This old quote in turn related to claims about a VIP Satanic cult that were raised in court during the trial of a fraudster in the 1980s (1).
Meanwhile, I discussed Kerr here, in relation to the Inquiry into Historical Institutional Abuse in Northern Ireland. There is no doubt that Kerr is a damaged and vulnerable adult whose early years were blighted by sex abuse, but the inquiry found that his account contained inconsistencies and that he was actually in custody in Northern Ireland during a period in which he now claims to have been trafficked to London. The Village article, by one Joseph de Búrca, does not address or even acknowledge this problem. (2)
It is also difficult to understand why Powell’s alleged abuse of Kerr (“Powell began to beat him with a leather belt and buckle. The abuse involved a variety of other acts of degradation including oral sex and masturbation…”) is now being “revealed here for the first time”. In 2015, Kerr appeared on the UK’s Channel 4 News and Australia’s 60 Minutes programme on Channel 9. On 60 Minutes, Kerr identified the late Peter Hayman (a known paedophile who was likely the Deputy Director for MI5) as having been one of his abusers; according to Exaro News, he also referred to Lord Mountbatten, the former head of MI6 Sir Maurice Oldfield, Anthony Blunt, and the MPs Knox Cunningham, Nicholas Fairbairn and Cyril Smith. (3)
Kerr made some of these identifications after being shown photographs; it’s not clear to what extent this was a genuine test rather than theatre, but even if he were not shown a photo of Powell, one would still have expected Kerr to have mentioned his name long before now. Powell is probably the most famous person Kerr has now publicly named, looming larger in British collective memory today than even Lord Mountbatten.
In lieu of providing supporting evidence, the Village instead draws attention to Powell’s racism, and to details of a homosexual affair while he was at university. The article also quotes a letter Powell wrote at the age of 25, in which he admits (unconventionally, to his parents) to an “instinctive affection” for 17-year-old boys to whom he was teaching classics in Australia. Readers are also shown photos of Powell apparently appearing on a television chat show with Jimmy Savile and smiling alongside Ted Heath, who is also described as “another paedophile with a taste for young boys” (presumably the author’s odd take on the Operation Conifer fiasco).
Notes
1. At the time, Walker was associated with the Churches Exorcism Study Group, and he had a media profile as an Anglican authority on “occult” matters. I remember seeing him on TV from time to time.
2. Village magazine describes itself as “Ireland’s political and cultural magazine”. It was relaunched following bankruptcy by an Irish journalist named Michael Smith in 2009. It leans left, although a rival left-wing magazine called The Phoenix doesn’t think much of it.
3. This segment was not used by 60 Minutes, and it has been claimed that Exaro published the article against Kerr’s wishes. The Exaro website closed down in 2016; it has recently been revived as an online archive.
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