No politician pandered to the media’s appetite for personality more than Rochdale’s Liberal MP Sir Cyril Smith during the 1970s and 1980s.
With his remarkable girth and regular appearances on the chat show circuit, blurring the lines between politics and show business, Smith was a larger-than-life character in a landscape of dull, grey men. Yet ‘Big Cyril’ was anything but the gentle giant he sought to portray.
Now a new book out in April, written by Rochdale’s current MP Simon Danczuk and Matthew Baker, Smile for the Camera, tells the story of how Cyril Smith rose from poor beginnings to become a dominating political figure in the Northwest and nationally, and used his extraordinary profile to conceal a spectacular abuse of power: systematically grooming and sexually abusing young boys, often in care homes he helped to establish.
Danczuk, who outed the former MP in the House of Commons back in 2012 writes of how Smith’s story begins as an illegitimate child in the grinding poverty of post-war Rochdale. This background kindled a ruthlessness that drove him on to eventually take over his home town, running it as his own personal fiefdom in which he could do as he pleased.
The Publishers, Backbite says that this is a story deeply rooted in time and place. Smith’s dark side was obscured by his overbearing personality and went unnoticed by the public at large. His victims, often troubled boys from broken homes, had no voice against the famous politician.
And yet there were always rumours. Rochdale parents would threaten misbehaved children with a visit from ‘Uncle Cyril’. However, a charmer and a bully with an iron grip on his town, his misdemeanours were never prosecuted. Those who tried found their operations mysteriously shut down by higher authorities. Consequently, Smith retired from politics in 1992 and died in his sleep in 2010. Many of his victims later committed suicide or drifted into a life of drug abuse or prison.
A Channel Four documentary last year revealed that in the late 1960s Lancashire police carried out several investigations into Smith’s behaviour, compiling an 80-page file.However, veiled threats from local liberals meant the case was dropped and the file locked away in a safe at Special Branch, which has responsibility for national security. Labour MP Jack McCann, Smith’s predecessor as MP for Rochdale, also spoke to the DPP on Smith’s behalf.
It also claimed that in 1977, MI5 also took an interest in Smith’s background and Lord Steel, who as David Steel led the Liberal party between 1976 and 1988, says he asked Smith about the allegations of child abuse and accepted his denial of wrongdoing.
Smile for the Camera is a deeply troubling story of a truly shocking abuse of power, and asks urgent questions of those who allowed Smith to get away with it.
