Sir William Van Straubenzee

Sir William Van Straubenzee

More files have been discovered containing allegations about the involvement of four senior Conservative politicians in child abuse in the 1970s and 1980s.  The files have now been passed on to the child abuse inquiry headed by Justice Lowell Goddard.

According to media reports the four politicians, who are all deceased, were Leon Brittan, a former Home Secretary, Sir Peter Hayman, Sir Peter Morrison and Sir William Van Straubenzee, who was MP for Wokingham from 1959 to 1987.

There is a Northern Ireland connection with one of these politicians in that Sir William Van Straubenzee was a Northern Ireland minister from late 1972 until the formation of the power-sharing executive at Stormont in 1974.

When he died on 2 November 1999 an obituary in The Independent said of him:

Heath, by now a close friend, promoted van Straubenzee to be Minister of State in the new Northern Ireland Office, where he won the respect of the Roman Catholics. His dislike of the Ulster Unionists was increasingly apparent and he was one of those who argued strongly against offering them the whip in the aftermath of the Conservative defeat in February 1974.

In view of the claims that Kincora was linked to a wider circle of abuse, I suspect that his role in Northern Ireland will now come under much closer scrutiny.