20 'powerful elite' abused children for decades – whistleblower

​At least 20 former MPs, government ministers, judges and other prominent figures abused children for decades, claims a former child protection manager.

At least 20 former MPs, government ministers, judges and other prominent figures abused children for decades, claims a former child protection manager.

Whistleblower Peter McKelvie, whose allegations led initially to a 2012 police inquiry, told BBC Newsnight a “powerful elite” of pedophiles carried out “the worst form” of abuse.

He told the programme there was evidence that victims of abuse were treated like “lumps of meat,” taken from place to place to be molested.

McKelvie, formerly a child protection manager in Hereford and Worcester, took his concerns to Labour MP Tom Watson in 2012, who then raised the matter in parliament, prompting a preliminary police inquiry that became a formal inquiry in 2013.

“For the last 30 years and longer than that, there have been a number of allegations made by survivors that people at the very top of powerful institutions in this country ... have been involved in the abuse of children," McKelvie told Newsnight.

Asked if claims had been made against people still in positions of power today, he said, "Very much so ... what are allegations may or may not be true, but the allegations are there and they are against very specific named individuals.”

Announcing two reviews into the claims in the House of Commons on Monday, Home Secretary Theresa May said the first would be led by an independent panel of experts headed by Lady Butler Slosson law and child protection, while the second would cover how police and prosecutors handled information given to them.

She said further inquiries would focus on the Home Office’s alleged failure to act on allegations of child sex abuse contained in a dossier handed to them by Home Secretary Leon Britton in the 1980s by former Tory MP Geoffrey Dickens.

May claimed that files in the missing dossier were not deleted or destroyed intentionally, but pledged the inquiries would determine whether state bodies and “other non-state institutions”fulfilled their“duty of care to protect children from sexual abuse”.

“It will, like the inquiries into Hillsborough and the murder of Daniel Morgan, be a non-statutory panel inquiry. This means that it can begin its work sooner," she told MPs.