Tom Driberg

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Person.png Tom Driberg  Rdf-entity.pngRdf-icon.png
(politician, UK/VIPaedophile)
BornThomas Edward Neil Driberg
22 May 1905
Died12 August 1976 (Age 71)
NationalityUK
Alma materLancing College, Christ Church (Oxford)
PartyCommunist Party of Great Britain (1920-1941), Labour Party (UK)

Employment.png Member of Parliament for Barking

In office
8 October 1959 - 28 February 1974

Employment.png Chairman of the Labour Party

In office
1957–1958 - Present
Preceded byTony Benn, George Lansbury, Herbert Morrison, Dennis Skinner, Tom Watson"strong class="error">Error: Invalid time." contains an extrinsic dash or other characters that are invalid for a date interpretation.

Employment.png Member of Parliament for Maldon

In office
25 June 1942 - 26 May 1955

Thomas Edward Neil Driberg, Baron Bradwell was a British journalist, politician and MI5 informer and possible Soviet spy, who was a Member of Parliament (MP) from 1942 to 1955, and again from 1959 to 1974.

Driberg, a very promiscuous homosexual, something which was illegal in the UK until 1967, was vulnerable to blackmail, but his MI5 connection secured Driberg a lifelong immunity from prosecution.[1]

Abuse

In 2015, Simon Danczuk, the then Labour PM for Rochdale, was contacted by an ex-policeman called Michael Cookson. Cookson was a CID sergeant in the Met's Central Command. In 1968, he was assigned to a team who surveilled a succession of teenage escapees from what was then Feltham Borstal in West London entering Driberg's home. The police subsequently interviewed several of the boys and in Cookson's words, 'it was clear that Driberg was abusing them'. According to him, a file was prepared and subsequently sent to the Director of Public Prosecutions, Norman Skelhorn, but the application of the charge was rejected on the basis that it was not in the public interest to pursue the investigation.It was a decision that still distressed Cookson almost fifty years after the event.[2]



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References

  1. Pincher, Chapman (1982) [Originally published by Sidgwick & Jackson, London 1981]. Their Trade is Treachery. London: Sidgwick & Jackson. ISBN 978-0-283-98847-9. p. 244
  2. www.icsa.org.uk/key-documents/10433/view/INQ003692.pdf quoted in Daniel Smith The Peer and the Gangster, page 222