UNITED KINGDOM
International Business Times
By Ewan Palmer
October 16, 2015
Peter McKelvie, a former child protection officer who acted as a “whistle-blower” to Labour MP Tom Watson when he first put forward allegations of a paedophile ring linked to Westminster, has resigned from the troubled inquiry into child abuse over after “conflict of interest” concerns.
Labour’s deputy leader Watson made the explosive allegations in the House of Commons in 2012 which claimed evidence had been seized in the 1990s containing “clear intelligence of a widespread paedophile ring” whose members had “links to a senior aide of a former prime minister”.
However, it recently emerged following an investigation by BBC’s Panorama the Met Police dropped the case just two months after Watson made the claims as there was “no evidence of offending linked to [the minister] held within the files”.
Watson’s allegations were based on information fed to him by McKelvie who had a “long experience of working in social work and child protection”. Despite being told the minister in question was cleared of the claims in 2012, McKelvie wrote to the prime minister to give his reasons for contacting Watson in 2012, and also to Lord Goddard, head of the abuse inquiry, to describe his appointment to government as “utter contempt for the survivors of child sexual abuse”.
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