52 years on: The Forgotten Fly in the Reshuffle

I cannot recommend strongly enough this new blog article by Charlotte Russell, on the strikingly little-known case of Tory MP Sir Ian Horobin, who received a four year sentence in 1962 for indecent assaults on boys (he had attempted it with the fourteen-year old Terence Stamp, as recounted in Stamp’s autobiography). Then Prime Minister Harold Macmillan’s ‘Night of the Long Knives’ reshuffle in 1962 may bear some resemblance to David Cameron’s reshuffle this week. This post also brings in Lauren van der Post and Lord Reith, against both of whom wider and highly plausible allegations of child sexual abuse exist.

Bits of Books, Mostly Biographies

1962: An MP on trial, the Solicitor-General his Defence Counsel and Macmillan’s timely Night of the Long Knives (13th July)

Horobin in 1934, National Portrait Gallery, http://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portrait/mw120053/Sir-Ian-Macdonald-HorobinA fly in the reshuffle

Sir Ian Horobin MP, Laurens Van Der Post

Will Black’s recent article for his Huffington Post blog here asks whether Cameron’s cabinet reshuffle wasn’t more window dressing designed to distract from the ongoing pressure on the Palace of Westminster to take itself seriously as just another institution under investigation for child abuse allegations?

52 years earlier on the same date, 13th July, Harold Macmillan, Conservative Prime Minister, culled one third of his Cabinet. Remarkably, at the time of the reshuffle, a resolutely unremorseful Sir Ian Horobin MP (Con. Oldham East) was due to stand trial five days later  for a number of indecent assaults on teenage boys during 1958-1961 as reported in The Times on 16 May 1962.

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