1. RESIGNATION.
Sir Jeffrey Donaldson MP, leader of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), 2021-24, has been charged with historical sexual offences.
He resigned as leader of the DUP on Friday, 29 March 2024.
His wife has also been charged with aiding and abetting in connection with the alleged offences.
The pair were arrested on Thursday morning, 28 March, by PSNI detectives and questioned before being charged that same night.
Donaldson’s social media accounts were deleted overnight. This led to immediate speculation on Thursday night on social media that Donaldson was about to be charged with unspecified charges.
The PSNI issued a statement on Friday morning that a 61-year-old unnamed man had been charged with ‘non-recent sexual offences’, adding that a 57-year-old woman had been arrested at the same time and charged with ‘aiding and abetting additional offences’.
Donaldson’s date of birth – 7 December 1962 – is readily available, e.g., on Wikipedia. This enabled thousands of people on social media to link the DUP leader to the intense rumours which were circulating in political circles. Donaldson’s name and that of his wife, who is a 57-year-old woman, spilled over onto X/Twitter, and other social media platforms, within an hour or so.
Senior DUP officers, who met on Friday morning, issued a statement to the public revealing that:
‘The Party Chairman has received a letter from Sir Jeffrey Donaldson MP confirming that he has been charged with allegations of an historical nature and indicating that he is stepping down as Leader of the Democratic Unionist Party with immediate effect.
‘In accordance with the Party Rules, the Party Officers have suspended Mr Donaldson from membership, pending the outcome of a judicial process.
‘The Party Officers have this morning unanimously appointed Mr Gavin Robinson MP as the Interim Party Leader.‘
The Donaldsons will appear before Newry Magistrates’ Court on 24 April. It is believed both will contest the charges. They are fully entitled to a presumption of innocence.
The charges relate to female, not male complainants.
Donaldson took an early morning flight to London on Friday morning, 29 March. His bail address is in Greenwich, London.
The mainstream media did not report that Donaldson’s wife had been charged until Sunday 31 March, 2024.
2. FAMILY VALUES
Donaldson portrayed himself as a champion of old fashioned family values, as the recording from a radio interview, contained in the tweet below, indicates.
He became leader of the DUP in 2021.
He resigned as leader of the DUP on 29 March 2024.
He has not resigned from his Lagan Valley seat. He will now sit as an independent MP at Westminster.
3. A COMMENDABLE NEW DEPARTURE FOR THE PSNI UNDER JON BOUTCHER.
The approach taken by the PSNI marks a significant break with the past when charges such as these would have been suppressed by MI5 and the RUC for control and blackmail purposes.
This may indicate a new approach to the manner in which senior politicians are treated by the PSNI under its new Chief Constable, Jon Boutcher.
It follows logically that MI5 and the Northern Ireland Office (NIO) have not interfered with the PSNI either. If so, the political, intelligence and security tectonic plates in Northern Ireland may have shifted in a positive direction.
4. THE COVER-UP OF VIP SEX ABUSE
In the past, the long arm of the law rarely extended to senior politicians and VIPs in Britain and Northern Ireland.
Some people still remain above the law. The Metropolitan Police failed to investigate Prince Andrew’s abuse of Virginia Roberts, in London when she was seventeen. Roberts was a victim of trafficking. Some of the abuse of Robert’s took place at the London residence of Ghislaine Maxwell. Maxwell is now in prison in the US serving a twenty year sentence.
Sir Peter Morrison MP was Margaret Thatcher’s private secretary. He was a prolific child abuser.
Morrison died from a heart attack on 13 July 1995, aged 51. Three years later, Nick Davies, an investigative journalist with The Guardian, reported that Morrison had received a caution for cottaging with underage boys in public lavatories. He was never charged for any of his crimes.
One of his more serious offences was the rape of a 14-year-old in 1982. The child was taken to Elm Guest House in London and escaped shortly after the assault. The crime was reported to Scotland Yard by the boy and his family within hours of his ordeal. He gave a statement and was examined by a doctor. A few months later Scotland Yard contacted the boy’s father and told him that the man had been sent to prison for the assault and that the matter was closed. Nothing of the sort had happened.
The boy and his family did not realise precisely how important Morrison was at the time. When they did, they made enquiries about him and discovered they had been duped by Scotland Yard. Morrison had not been charged, let alone sent to prison.
In October 2012, Rod Richards, a former MP and ex-leader of the Welsh Conservatives, implicated Morrison in the abuse in Wales. He maintained that between 1974 and 1990, approximately 650 children from forty children’s homes had been sexually, physically and emotionally abused. Morrison and another high-profile Conservative politician were implicated as regular visitors to the child care homes. One of the institutions he exploited was Bryn Estate care home in Wrexham, North Wales.
In July 2014, Thatcher’s former bodyguard, Barry Strevens, revealed he had told Thatcher that Morrison hosted sex parties at which under-age boys were abused. Strevens said that despite passing on the allegations to Thatcher, she later promoted Morrison to the position of deputy chairman of the Conservative party. Thatcher’s private secretary, Archie Hamilton, reportedly took notes of what was said at the encounter.
Norman Tebbit, a former Chairman of the Tory Party, has revealed that ‘rumours had got to my ears’ that Morrison was a paedophile more than a decade before the truth was exposed.
In 2002, Edwina Currie, the former Tory minister, published an account in her diary reciting that Morrison had been a ‘noted pederast’. She understood he regularly had sex with 16-year-old boys – whilst the legal age of consent at the time was 21.
Morrison might have become a cabinet minister had Thatcher not fallen from office in 1992.
The most senior officials in Whitehall knew about Morrison too. On 4 November, 1986, Antony Duff, Director-General of MI5, 1985-88, wrote to Robert Armstrong, Cabinet Secretary, after allegations of child abuse had been made by separate sources against Morrison. At this juncture, Morrison was serving as Conservative MP for Chester and Deputy Chairman of the Conservative Party. Duff opined that Morrison was only a minor ‘security danger’. The spymaster felt the MP did not have access to valuable government secrets. By this time, he had served Minister of State for Trade and Industry, Minister of State for Employment, and Lord Commissioner of HM Treasury. One would be forgiven for thinking that with a resume like that, he would have had access to plenty of economic secrets. Nonetheless, Duff concluded: ‘At present stage … the risk of political embarrassment to the Government is rather greater than the security danger’. There was no consideration of the ongoing risk posed by Morrison to children.
The reference to the ‘risk of political embarrassment’ implies an assumption that Morrison was not going to be reported to the police. If two senior officials were aware of child abuse, the word ‘risk’ should not have entered the equation. It should have been taken for granted that a report would be furnished to the police automatically.
After the Morrison memo came to light in July of 2015, Armstrong (notorious for his use of the phrase ‘being economical with the truth’), defended his inaction thus:
‘Clearly, I was aware of it … but I was not concerned with the personal aspect of it, whether he should or should not be pursued. That was something for the police to consider. My concern was implications of national security and international relations.’
Morrison was never reported to the police by Duff or anyone in MI5 either. Clearly, MI5 did not believe his denial of wrongdoing because they rated him as a risk. Had they believed he was innocent, he would not have been susceptible to blackmail and hence could not have been perceived as a ‘security danger’, of any significance. Morrison went on to become Thatcher’s private secretary and would receive a knighthood. He had been one of one of the first backbench MPs to support her bid for the leadership of the Tories in 1975.
Morrison’s successful upward career trajectory could not have been sustained without the sanction of MI5 who vet all high-level political appointments.
Other politicians and VIPs were protected by MI5 and the British special Branch. Some, such as Cyril Smith, were awarded knighthoods rather than being arrested. So too was Sir Jimmy Saville, a favourite of the Royal Family and Margaret Thatcher.
5. SIR JEFFREY DONALDSON’S POLITICAL MENTOR.
Enoch Powell was another politicians who should have been charged with sex abuse.
Sir Jeffrey Donaldson acted as Powell’s election agent, 1982-84.
Powell ran against Ted Heath for the leadership of the Conservative Party in 1966. He left the Tories in 1974 and became the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) MP for South Down. He remained in Westminster as a Unionist MP until 1987.
In the intervening years, the truth about Powell’s involvement in the Anglo-Irish Vice Ring and his abuse of Williamson House and Kincora resident Richard Kerr has become public knowledge.
On his website Donaldson has said that:
‘My involvement with the Ulster Unionist Party grew as I worked alongside two of the greatest names in Unionism in the 20th century [i.e. Powell and Molyneaux]. Between 1982 and 1984 I worked as Enoch Powell’s constituency agent, successfully spearheading Mr Powell’s election campaigns of 1983 and 1986 when the South Down seat was retained by the fact the constituency contained a natural ‘nationalist’ majority.‘
Donaldson, who became a political activist at 18, got to know Powell very well. Powell came over to the North most weekends. He usually returned on Monday mornings. One of Donaldson’s tasks was to drive Powell to the airport. The discussions in the car were ‘politically orientated’, he has said.
‘He would talk about Parliament, about the 1974 period leading up to his resignation [from the Conservative Party], about British politics, about American politics. Sometimes, it would be completely different. He was a Greek classical scholar – you would get a lecture on the Elgin marbles. He wanted to help me get a foothold. It was real political apprenticeship.’
Powell once tried to make up for Donaldson’s education deficit by gaining him access to a course in Queen’s University.
Powell had deranged views about women which are described later in this article.
Donaldson left the UUP and joined the DUP in January 2004 at the invitation of Peter Robinson.
6. ENOCH POWELL AND THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND REVIEW INTO HISTORICAL CHILD SEX ABUSE.
In 2015, Powell was named in a Church of England review into historical child sex abuse concerning the 1980s. One of its spokespersons told the press that: ‘The name Enoch Powell was passed to Operation Fernbridge on the instruction of Bishop Paul Butler’. The information originally came from a cleric who has counselled child abuse victims in the 1980s.
Powell’s sexual interest in younger men was a long-standing trait. In 1937, having graduated with a double first from Cambridge, Powell had become a classics professor at the University of Sydney. He was only 25 and held the post for two years during which he wrote to his parents describing his infatuation with his male students. He told them how he was repelled by his female students, while feeling ‘an instant and instinctive affection’ for Australian males between the ages of 17 and 23. This, he added, might be ‘deplored, but it cannot be altered’, and therefore had to be ‘endured – and (alas!) camouflaged’. Somewhere along the line Powell developed an interest in much younger boys.
After serving as an intelligence officer during WW2, Powell went into politics and in 1950 became a Tory MP and later served in Cabinet. In 1966 he ran unsuccessfully for the leadership of the Conservative Party against Ted Heath, another paedophile with a taste for young boys. Powell’s career went into decline after his infamous 1968 ‘rivers of blood’ anti-immigration speech. Eventually, Powell relocated to Northern Ireland where he became a UUP MP in 1974.
By 1982, Jeffrey Donaldson had become one of his key political supporters.
After Powell died in 1998, his friend Canon Eric James, a former chaplain at Trinity College, Cambridge, and Extra Preacher to the Queen, revealed that Powell had confided in him ten years earlier that he had engaged in a homosexual relationship as a young man. Powell gave him a copy of a collection of his poems called ‘First Poems’ (1937). He highlighted some verses where he had ‘tried to put into words what a homosexual relationship had meant to him’. It had been assumed by many that they had described Powell’s feelings for Barbara Kennedy, whom he had taken on his first date with a woman, to a music hall, in 1948, when he was 35 or 36 years old. Canon James explained that Powell did not identify his male lover but said the relationship was ‘the most painful thing in my early life’. The individual in question was probably Edward Curtis, a fellow male undergraduate at Cambridge. The Canon revealed he had promised Powell he:
‘Would not disclose what he had said to me about the homosexual basis of certain of his poems until after his death. Then it would be a matter of literary history.‘
One of the lines read as follows:
‘I love the fire/ In youthful limbs that wakes desire…‘
Another of his poems leaves little to the imagination: It described how he, as an “unknowing boy” was “led to sin”.
‘I did not speak, but when I saw you turn
And cross your right leg on your left, and fold
Your hands around your knee, I felt a flow
Of white-hot lava seething up the old
Volcano shaft. That self-same attitude,
Though not of yours, it was which long ago
Fired me, an innocent, unknowing boy,
And led me on to sin and on to learn
and onwards to the very font of woe’.
7. BELT AND BUCKLE, ENOCH POWELL’S APPETITE FOR SADOMASOCHISM
By 1968 Powell was making visits to NI where he was active in the support of the Unionist cause. His interest was intense, so much so that by 1972 – if not long before – he was giving speeches at meetings of the British Army in England. Fred Holroyd, the military intelligence officer and whistleblower who worked for MI6 in NI, recalls being at one in England where Powell advocated taking a ‘robust’ approach to defeating the ‘enemies’ of the British Empire. Holroyd came across Powell again at the Seagoa Hotel in Portadown where he found him personally amiable but his wife to be openly racist. He claims she referred to black people as ‘n***ers’. Powell was elected as the Westminster MP for South Down in October 1974.
Richard Kerr was a resident at Williamson House, a State run institution. He recalls that a trafficker called ‘David’ and an accomplice came to take him away to be abused by Powell on a summer’s day in either 1973 or 1974 when Powell was 61 or 62. By this stage of his life, sexual abuse by adult males had become ‘normal’ for him.
Kerr was taken to Barry’s Amusements in the seaside resort of Portrush, Co Antrim. It was opened in 1926 and became – and remains – the largest theme park in NI. Located in the centre of Portrush, it is a 50-mile drive from Belfast. Kerr was either 12 or 13 at the time of the trip. The group went unnoticed as they mingled with the crowds of children who were laughing and shouting all around them. He vividly recalls being taken on bumper cars. ‘Maybe I am just having a fun day today’, he allowed himself to think for a spell. However, the visit to the arcade was a cynical ploy. The children at Barry’s provided the perfect cover for what was about to happen: the handover to Powell. If the kidnappers had waited at a cross-roads or outside a hotel for such a high-profile politician, it might have attracted unwanted attention.
When Powell made his rendezvous with the group, he was in the company of another two men. Powell spirited Kerr away on his own to a guest house near Portrush where he had booked a bedroom. Inside it, he sat him on a chair and then lifted him onto the bed and placed his head on the pillow. Next, he undid his shorts. After this he threw him on top of his chest and started to abuse him. Kerr wasn’t shocked at what was happening since he had been violated by countless men by this stage; nor was he unduly surprised when Powell began to beat him with a leather belt and buckle. The abuse involved a variety of other acts of degradation including oral sex and masturbation but no penetration. Powell smiled a lot during the encounter, he recalls.
8. ENOCH POWELL AT THE WHIP AND SADDLE BAR
Long before the Kincora scandal erupted, the Whip and Saddle Bar at the Europa Hotel had become notorious as a meeting place for older men who were sexually interested in younger men. The bar was the object of ribald jokes among the international array of journalists who stayed there, including some from the Republic. Joseph Mains, the Warden of Kincora, supplied Kerr to abusers at the hotel and, in 1977, asked his friend Harper Brown, the then manager of it, to arrange a job for Kerr as a bellhop. As it transpired, Kerr’s real function would be to provide sexual services to men who drank at the Whip and Saddle. Enoch Powell was one of them.
One night at around 10:45 pm, a man approached Kerr while he was behind the concierge’s desk. Powell was with a group of men inside the bar. The man who approached him was a friend of Powell. He ‘definitely did not have a Northern Ireland accident’, Kerr recalls. He told him that he had a ‘gentleman’ he wanted him to meet upstairs. ‘Can you go up to see him’, the man asked, but it was more an order than a request. He gave him the room number and told him to go up half an hour after the bar had closed. Meanwhile, Powell remained in the bar with his associates.
At the designated time, Kerr went upstairs to the room and found Powell waiting for him in it. He recognised him as the individual who had abused him in Portrush. He says he had the same distinctive accent and smiled a lot. On this occasion he wanted masturbation and oral sex.
Kerr recalls that after Powell had finished with him, he went into the bathroom to wash the towels that had been soiled ‘to hide evidence’. Powell stayed behind while Kerr returned to the bellhops’ station downstairs. Powell’s friend came up to him not long afterwards saying, ‘Here’s a tip for you’, and gave him a half crown.
Powell was playing a dangerous game. Homosexuality was outlawed in NI and many of his constituents would have condemned him for any hint of it. Only heterosexual sex between consenting adults was legal. Powell was acutely aware of these facts. In May 1965 he had co-sponsored an unsuccessful bill on homosexual law reform at Westminster. In 1967 he had voted for the Sexual Offences Act which had succeeded in decriminalising homosexuality but only in England and Wales. On 13 March 1982 he would give a speech in Ilford calling for the law to be reformed in NI (and allowing parents the right to forbid school-teachers to administer corporal punishment to their children, a mercy he had not afforded Kerr in Portrush when he had beaten him).
Kerr went to live in London in the early 1980s. One night while he was watching television he recognised on the screen Powell who was at a political rally with Ian Paisley.
9. THE KINCORA THREAT AND THE HILLSBOROUGH AGREEMENT
The Anglo-Irish Agreement at Hillsborough was signed on 15 November, 1985.
In early November 1985, Lobby Correspondents in London received an unattributable briefing from Margaret Thatcher’s press office claiming she had ordered the Ministry of Defence to open a fresh inquiry into Kincora. This can only have had a chilling effect on the then Unionist leadership in NI.
First, James Molyneaux, the Leader of the then dominant Ulster Unionist Party (UUP), had an interest in concealing his friendship with William McGrath, the ‘Beast’ of Kincora.
Second, Ian Paisley of the DUP faced a drubbing if he was ever to be hauled before any sort of a tribunal. He would have had to explain under oath why he had done nothing about Kincora after his secretary, Valerie Shaw, had informed him about it. Moreover, Paisley had once been very close to McGrath and had officiated at the marriage of one of McGrath’s children. Equally, Powell was vulnerable to severe embarrassment over Kincora. Suffice it to say, the threatened Ministry of Defence inquiry never took place.
10. ENOCH POWELL VISITS COLIN WALLACE’S SOLICITOR
Colin Wallace, a psychological operations (PSYOPS) officer, working for the British Army at Lisburn tried to expose the Kincora scandal in the 1970s. In return for his efforts, Ian Cameron of MI5 sabotaged his career – something for which Wallace was later compensated. Later still, Wallace was framed for manslaughter, and spent years in prison only to be acquitted on appeal. By the early 1980s, Wallace was beginning to reveal some of what he knew about Kincora. As the decade proceeded, more information began to emerge including the fact MI5 had compiled information on the sex lives of MPs such as Cyril Smith, Ted Heath and William van Straubenzee.
On 29 October 1986 Powell wrote to Wallace’s solicitor, James Morgan-Harris, on headed House of Commons notepaper, with a request to see him. Wallace was still in prison at this time. Powell could have spoken to the solicitor on the phone if he had wanted to. Instead, he journeyed all the way to West Sussex a while later for a face-to-face meeting. At it, Powell sought general information about Wallace and his case. He appeared most interested in learning about Operation Clockwork Orange which had been run in various phases during the early and mid-1970s by both MI5 and MI6. Part of Clockwork Orange had concerned the gathering of information about the private sexual activities of MPs. Wallace was not released until 5 December 1986 after the meeting between Powell and Morgan-Harris.
Was Powell trying to find out what Wallace might have learnt about him and might yet pass to the press? As it transpired, Wallace knew nothing about his private life.
Powell was defeated in the June 1987 British general election. He died in 1998.
11. ENOCH POWELL’S DERANGED VIEWS ABOUT WOMEN
Powell had bizarre views about women. When asked by broadcaster Michael Cockerell about his time as an undergraduate at Cambridge for a documentary about his life entitled Odd Man Out, he stated, ‘I had no social life as an undergraduate’. When asked about women, he responded, ‘They didn’t exist’. While he was aware of their presence:
‘I wondered what they were doing there because I didn’t think they would approach advanced learning in the same mood or manner as a man would.‘
And the reason for this?
‘Because the analytical faculty is underdeveloped in women.‘
Powell’s wife Pamela told Cockerell how hopeless he was at remembering women’s faces, even her own. He married her at the age of 39 and the couple went on to have two daughters. ‘We married. We had a three-week honeymoon’ and then, within four weeks, she found herself going to meet him in the Central Lobby of the House of Commons where a number of women had gathered and ‘watched him go all the way around wondering which one he had married and been on a honeymoon with’.
Powell had a number of female admirers including Margaret Thatcher who said of him, ‘Enoch was the best parliamentarian I ever knew’.
David Burke is the author of three books published by Mercier Press: –
‘Deception & Lies, the Hidden History of the Arms Crisis 1970’, and;
‘Kitson’s Irish War, Mastermind of the Dirty War in Ireland’ which examines the role of counter-insurgency dirty tricks in Northern Ireland in the early 1970s, and;
‘An Enemy of the Crown, the British Secret Service Campaign against Charles Haughey’, which was published on 30 September 2022.
These books can be purchased here:
https://www.mercierpress.ie/irish-books/kitson-s-irish-war/
https://www.mercierpress.ie/irish-books/an-enemy-of-the-crown/
https://www.mercierpress.ie/irish-books/deception-and-lies
David Burke’s next book, ‘The Puppet Masters’, will be published in June 2024.
See also: The Mountbatten dossier, an ebook by David Burke.
See also Kincora’s Darkest Secret.
See also: Prince Philip’s illicit sex life was monitored by Soviet spies.
See also Operation Clockwork Orange Vol 1 of Covert History Ireland’s new ebook.
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