- Nicholas Fairbairn has been linked to fellow paedophile MP Cyril Smith
- The former Tory MP who died in 1995 is accused of abusing children
- Susie Henderson claims she was abused by Fairbairn in the 1970s
- Fairbairn even tried to proposition Margaret Thatcher while incredibly drunk
Despite
his reputation as a womaniser and fondness for malt whisky, a daily
habit that brought about his premature death aged just 61, the funeral
of Sir Nicholas Fairbairn in 1995 was marked by an outpouring of respect
and admiration.
As
more than 1,000 luminaries crammed into St John’s Kirk in Perth, the
former Tory MP’s significance as a political figure was underlined by
the presence of Lady Thatcher, who had promoted the brilliant solicitor
to her first Cabinet in 1979.
While
a lone Scottish piper played a lament, Britain’s first woman Prime
Minister strode solemnly to the pulpit to read an excerpt from The
Prophet, a book by the Lebanese poet and philosopher Kahlil Gibran, who
had been one of Fairbairn’s favourite authors.
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Sir Nicholas Fairbairn, pictured with his second wife Samantha, had a terrible secret he brought to his grave
Her tribute was witnessed by a host of leading politicians, judges, and Scottish aristocrats of the day.
They
had come to pay respects to a uniquely colourful individual who, in a
political career spanning two decades, had achieved a mixture of fame
and notoriety as one the most recognisable — but also controversial —
members of the Commons.
A
self-styled eccentric, who lived in the 13th-century Fordell Castle near
Dunfermline, Sir Nicholas was blessed with extraordinary intelligence
and political talent. He had been Scotland’s youngest ever QC before
being elected MP for Perth and Kinross in 1974, at the age of 40.
In
Westminster, where his initial rise was stratospheric, he cut a
dandyish figure, and was often seen in blue baronial tartan adorned with
two miniature (working) silver revolvers, which Sir Nicholas would load
with blanks and fire when drunk.
When
speaking in the Commons, Sir Nicholas sometimes wore an enormous
Highland smock (‘I know I look like an ironmonger, but I don’t want my
suits to glitter like other MPs’ ’), or a kilt teamed with
double-breasted scarlet jacket, gold watch chain and lurid pink shirt.
Following his death in 1995, Fairbairn has been subject to several accusations that he sexually abused a number of children
Other
favourite outfits were buckled shoes, tartan knickerbockers, and a
thick brown jumper over which he placed a huge leather belt with a metal
buckle. When the Queen knighted him in 1988, he turned up in full
Scottish regalia, complete with a sgian dubh — a small dagger — and
sword.
Clothes weren’t the only thing about Sir Nicholas that generated column inches, though.
A
notorious adulterer, who clocked up two wives and scores of mistresses,
he was forced to resign as Lady Thatcher’s Solicitor General for
Scotland in 1982, after a scandal stemming from his decision not to
press charges against a group of men accused of attacking a Glasgow
prostitute with razor blades during a gang rape.
Thereafter,
he descended into chronic alcoholism, consuming at least a bottle of
Scotch each day — though he stressed that he was happy to ‘make do’ with
vodka.
As
his fondness for drink worsened, his tongue loosened. Throughout the
Eighties and early Nineties, he became notorious for giving colourful
interviews in which he expressed deeply offensive, and often highly
misogynistic, sentiments.
On
Desert Island Discs, for example, he declared that female MPs ‘lack
fragrance — they all look as if they’re from the 5th Kiev Stalinist
machine gun parade’.
In
newspaper interviews, he called Labour MP and feminist Clare Short ‘the
big, fat one,’ described rape victims as ‘tauntresses’ and asked, ‘what
is a skirt, but an open gateway?’
In
a late-night Commons debate about the gay age of consent in 1994, Sir
Nicholas was meanwhile called to order by the Speaker for delivering a
drunken diatribe against homosexuality which included an obscene
description of the mechanics of ‘sodomy’.
In
later years he took great pleasure in making unsolicited and often
deeply demeaning advances on women unfortunate enough to catch his eye.
The
Guardian reporter Judy Rumbold interviewed him in 1991. Towards the end
of proceedings, she wrote: ‘He lunges across the table and tries to
engage me in a whiskery snog.’ Shockingly, Fairbairn’s second wife,
Suzanne (known as Sam), was in the next room at the time.
Fairbairn was brought into Margaret Thatcher's first cabinet in 1979 and was a close confident of the PM
Not
even Lady Thatcher could avoid his unwanted attention. In the
mid-Eighties, Sir Nicholas drunkenly propositioned the then Prime
Minister during a dinner at Holyrood Palace, whispering into her ear
that he’d ‘always fancied’ her.
The
Iron Lady is said to have responded: ‘Quite right, Nicholas, you have
very good taste.’ But noting the extent of Fairbairn’s intoxication, she
then added: ‘However, I don’t think that you would make it at the
moment.’
Doubtless Lady Thatcher, like many in those less enlightened times, regarded her former Cabinet ally as an amusing buffoon.
Perhaps
she, and other friends, forgave his wandering hands as a sort of
harmless horseplay. Indeed, following his death from cirrhosis of the
liver, obituaries portrayed him as a bombastic eccentric who’d added
greatly to the gaiety of Westminster.
Susie Henderson, pictured, claimed she was first abused by Fairbairn when she was just aged four
But
that was then. Today, things have changed. And in light of a series of
appalling recent allegations, that light-hearted view of Sir Nicholas
Fairbairn seems nothing less than grotesque.
For
in addition to being a drunk and a womaniser, this famous Scottish
Conservative also stands accused of being a predatory paedophile — one
of two abusers now identified in Lady Thatcher’s inner circle.
Talking
to the Daily Mail last week, 48-year-old Susie Henderson gave a
disturbing account of her childhood encounters with the MP.
Waiving
her anonymity, she claimed that Fairbairn had sexually assaulted and
raped her on several occasions, beginning when she was four years old.
Susie Henderson, pictured here as a child, said she was abused by Fairbairn as her father looked on
Sir
Nicholas was a close friend of Susie’s late father, Robert Henderson, a
fellow leading light of the Scottish legal establishment, who regularly
held decadent private parties at his family’s large and smartly
decorated townhouse in Edinburgh.
It was during one of these sordid events in about 1970 that Susie says her father came into the kitchen with Fairbairn.
‘I
was maybe four years old,’ she told the Mail. ‘I had a skirt on and
Nicholas and my dad had been drinking, and my dad told me to sit on
Nicholas’s knee. I sat on his knee and he put his hand up my skirt and
abused me. My dad just stood there laughing.’
During
another party, Susie says she was raped by Sir Nicholas and another man
in a guest room at the top of her parents’ five-storey home.
‘I
hated that man,’ said Ms Henderson, who says she still recalls the
pungent smell of Fairbairn’s feet. She’s not sure exactly how often Sir
Nicholas abused her over the years, but says it happened many times.
Ms Henderson does not seem to have been his only victim, either.
Last
month, Sir Nicholas was named as one of three MPs on a list of clients
of the notorious Elm Guest House, a gay brothel in Barnes, West London,
where under-age boys from a nearby care home were allegedly plied with
drink and drugs and sexually abused.
The
other MPs were Sir Peter Morrison — another Scottish minister close to
Lady Thatcher, who was a prolific child abuser — and Cyril Smith, the
Liberal MP for Rochdale exposed as a paedophile in 2012.
The
trio feature in documents apparently penned by the owner of the
guesthouse, which state that ‘N Fairburn’ (sic) and ‘C Smith’ (who asked
to be called Tubby by staff and boys), visited on June 7, 1982. The
documents add that ‘Fairburn’ had ‘used boys in sauna’. Given the very
public opposition to homosexuality that Fairbairn expressed in
Parliament, allegations that he abused boys at a gay sauna have shocked
his former colleagues.
Fairbairn has also been linked to a paedophile ring involving former MPs Cyril Smith and Sir Peter Morrison
Take
an extended look at his life, however, and some astonishing secrets
emerge. For in his younger days, this obsessive womaniser turns out to
have been something rather different: a highly promiscuous gay
liberation activist with murky links to the now-notorious Paedophile
Information Exchange.
And
indeed, those who knew him before he entered politics say that
Fairbairn grew up aggressively bisexual, but suppressed his true desires
in order to advance in the Tory Party of the mid-Seventies.
They
believe this left him hopelessly conflicted, leading to his chronic
drink problem and the predatory and often hugely offensive nature of his
advances to women.
The
story begins in a deeply dysfunctional childhood. Fairbairn was born in
1933. His father was a prominent psychoanalyst, his mother an
aristocrat. ‘By the time I was born,’ he recalled, ‘they were totally
estranged.’
Fairbairn, pictured, once tried to drunkenly proposition Margaret Thatcher
After
graduating from the exclusive Loretto School and Edinburgh University,
he trained as a solicitor, and soon became known in legal circles as a
gifted advocate with strong libertarian principles and, outside the
office, a keen interest in the arts.
An
amateur poet and painter, he soon became chairman of Edinburgh’s
Left-wing Traverse Theatre in the Sixties. And it was here that he
became active in the radical gay community.
‘Under
Fairbairn’s stewardship, the Traverse began specialising in gay and
lesbian drama,’ recalls a contemporary. ‘I remember going to one play
called something like ‘Gay Sweatshop,’ and another called ‘Mass In F,’
which was full of nudity and got picketed by the Mary Whitehouse lobby.
The funny thing, given Fairbairn’s views later in life, was that he was
also notorious for propositioning male actors and theatre staff. I
remember a boy in his 20s telling me about an advance Fairbairn had made
on him at a Traverse party.’
Fairbairn
was in fact married from 1962-79, to Elizabeth Mackay, the daughter of
the 13th Baron Reay and mother of his three surviving daughters. But in
the circles in which he moved, this was not uncommon.
‘It
was a time of free love. You must remember that homosexuality was
illegal in Scotland until 1980, and many gay and bisexual men were
supposedly happily married,’ adds the contemporary.
We
have established that, in 1970, Sir Nicholas became honorary vice-
president of the Scottish Minorities Group (SMG), a new, radical gay
liberation organisation founded by a man called Ian Dunn.
The
SMG campaigned, among other things, for homosexuality to be legalised
in Scotland, and for the age of consent to be identical for gay and
straight sex.
But
it also had a more contentious place in history. For in 1974, Dunn and
another SMG activist, Michael Hanson, co-founded the Paedophile
Information Exchange (PIE). The vile organisation, which lobbied for
child sex to be legalised, was for the first year of its existence a
sub- committee of the SMG.
Over
the ensuing years, PIE retained affiliate status with the SMG, and
forged links with other mainstream groups, including the National
Council for Civil Liberties, which at the time was being run by future
Labour heavyweights Patricia Hewitt, Harriet Harman and Jack Dromey.
Ms
Hewitt apologised for her links to PIE earlier this year when they were
highlighted by the Mail, though Harman and Dromey have so far refused
to say sorry.
But
we digress. After being selected as a Conservative MP, Fairbairn
performed a remarkable ethical volte face, quietly resigning his vice
presidency of SMG in 1974, and morphing overnight into a vociferous
opponent of gay rights. His links to PIE were never discovered by the
Press. And details of his progressive youth never filtered through to
Westminster where, though re-married to Suzanne, he ensured that he
became famed as a womaniser by embarking on several high-profile
affairs.
There
were dozens of female lovers. One, a Commons secretary, attempted
suicide outside his London home in 1981. Another, broadcaster Esther
Rantzen, says he plied her with Krug and beluga caviar a few years
later. ‘The rest was inevitable,’ she wrote in her memoirs.
Ian
Pace, a lecturer at City University in London, and a campaigner and
researcher on organised abuse, believes Fairbairn’s behaviour during
this era was part of a concerted effort to ‘cover the tracks’ of his
bisexual past.
Despite publicly opposing homosexuality in the most offensive terms, it is understood Fairbairn was bisexual
If
so, then it wasn’t entirely successful. In the early Nineties, a
Scottish newspaper discovered Fairbairn’s name in an old piece of SMG
literature. He responded by claiming that he’d had no idea of the nature
of the ‘perverted’ minority the SMG lobbied for when he’d agreed to be
their figurehead.
That
explanation always seemed unlikely, however. A former SMG activist who
emailed the Mail this week described it as ‘clearly a lie’.
‘I
have never had access to early SMG membership records (they probably no
longer exist), but I am told that Fairbairn was a fully paid up
individual member before he was appointed as Honorary VP,’ said the
activist.
‘Even
if he hadn’t been, SMG was very high profile. And of course Fairbairn
received all the Group’s mailings, for four years, so he must have known
what the organisation did.
‘He
moved in a lot of artistic circles in his youth and I know several
(straight) people who can recall being propositioned by him. I wonder to
what extent the denial of his sexuality led to the drinking which so
clearly wrecked his life.’
Little wonder, perhaps, that even in his final years, Fairbairn still manoeuvred to keep his past under wraps.
Fairbairn, was buried at Fordell Castle, pictured, where he was described as 'a great womaniser'
A
few years before his death, he called for Leveson-style curbs on Press
freedom amid newspaper claims (dismissed by an inquiry) that a so-called
‘magic circle’ of Scottish judges, sheriffs and advocates in his former
professional set were conspiring to ensure that homosexual criminals
were given soft-touch treatment by the courts.
After
Sir Nicholas was buried at Fordell Castle, the obituaries talked of him
as one of Parliament’s great womanisers. All of them, that is, except
one in the little-read underground magazine ScotsGay.
Obtained by the Mail this week, it lamented that Fairbairn had died ‘firmly in the closet’.
One
straight man who remembers being propositioned by Fairbairn in the
Sixties told ScotsGay: ‘It was really a shame — if he’d just accepted
and been open about his bisexuality it would have taken a lot of
pressure off him and he might not have taken to the drink.’
Given
what we now know, of course, Fairbairn had plenty of other reasons to
conceal the real nature of his sexuality. Did he, perhaps, drink himself
to death because he was haunted by his paedophile past?
That
seems unlikely. Shortly before his death, he expressed no regrets.
‘I’ve had a hell of good time on Earth,’ he told Martin Robb, a fellow
Tory. ‘It has been Heaven.’
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