Most everyone remembers Cyril Smith. The member of Parliament had a personal touch. He sang. He went on pal Jimmy Savile's BBC show. He also, according to hundreds of allegations since his 2010 death, was a pedophile of historic proportions. That fact was one of many in a dossier prepared 30 years ago by a crusading member of Parliament who warned of a powerful pedophile ring of "big, big names." The man told his family the allegations were "explosive." It would, he told his son, "blow the lid off" of the pedophile ring and perhaps take down powerful, famous sex abusers who had infiltrated the highest reaches of British life. The allegations ... weren't aggressively pursued and no arrests or prosecutions followed. "My father [Geoffrey Dickens] thought that the dossier at the time was the most powerful thing that had ever been produced," son Barry told the BBC ... after it emerged that the document has since gone missing. As its disappearance ballooned into a national scandal, the Guardian reported [that] an additional 114 documents relevant to allegations involving the ring are also missing - a revelation sparking suspicion that Margaret Thatcher's government orchestrated a cover-up. Norman Tebbit, a former cabinet minister who served under Thatcher, [said] the inclination at the time may have been to protect "the system" rather than delving "too far" into the claims. Asked if there had been a "big political cover-up," Tebbit conceded "there may well have been."
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