Secrets, Pt.2

As reports about the late MP Cyril Smith are back in the media today I am struggling to remember the conversation I know I had about him at some point in the dim and distant past. I think it was probably when I was in the Oxford University Liberal Democrats and more specifically soon after the merger of the Liberals and the SDP, therefore probably about 1988 or early 1989. At that time Smith’s public image was that of a very popular, hardworking constituency MP – which indeed he was, and had he not been he would not have held onto the unlikely Liberal seat of Rochdale for as long as he did. I think the substance of the conversation was about the party’s MPs and the kind of qualities the party needed in its leadership; in response to my praise of the sort of community politics Cyril Smith represented I was met with a ‘dubious’ look and a sotto voce account of him ‘going into hostels and caning small boys’. It made it sound as though he was a sort of external consultant in corporal punishment in a way that shouldn’t have happened. Allegations of this sort had apparently been circulating in Rochdale for ten years by that time, and more widely via a report in Private Eye, but as my interlocutor would only have been a couple of years older than me at the most it’s more likely that they would have picked the stories up from others in the wider Liberal world. If a student in a university political society knew the allegations, they were, therefore, pretty common knowledge.

Was this just gossip, speculative rumour, or an ‘allegation’ one should have done something about? Nowadays one’s first thought on hearing something like this would be to ask, if only mentally, whether any action had been taken about it. My struggles to remember exactly what was said and who said it also raise questions about the reliability of memory. I know, in so far as I know anything at the distance of 25 years or so, that this conversation happened, but can’t actually recall who I was talking to: I can imagine the words coming from any of two or three different people. In terms of my own reactions, too, I can’t remember what sort of ideological context I put the incident in: I know I felt very uncomfortable, but I probably didn’t take it seriously enough even to file in a mental box labelled ‘Horrible and Wrong Things’. I very deliberately shoved Cyril Smith to the back of my mind, and I expect that’s what many people tried to do.