Baron van Boothby

1900 – 1986

Links: samen met gangster Ronnie Kray in 1963. Hun relatie werd beschermd door de ‘Prime Minister’

Hij werd een ‘Union member of the Parlement’ in 1924 en werd de privé secretaris van Churchill van 1926 – 1929. Hij verzorgde de Britse toetreding tot de Europese Unie en was een krachtige spreker.

Lord Boothby was one of Britain's best loved politicians. He was also an importuner of boys whose secrets helped keep the Krays out of prison. Until now, all this has been hushed up. This week, a C4 documentary finds out why.

The Profumo affair, which erupted in 1963, was so notorious that a film has been b made about it. Yet the same year another scandal began to surface, one that was soon buried under a brick pile of cover-up, and which involved the top dogs of British society right up to the prime minister, Harold Wilson.

What's more, without this disgraceful affair, the criminal reign of the Kray brothers might have ended years earlier, sparing untold grief and the lives of at least two (albeit unsavoury) characters, rival gangster George Cornelland thief and drunkard JackMcVitie.

The affair is now examined for the first time in s 'Lords of the Underworld', a documentary in CA's 'Secret History' series. Among the artefacts it reveals is a collection of photographs taken in 1963, the full set of which has never before been seen by the general public. A couple of them show four men sharing drinks at the flat of Lord Boothby, former private secretary to Winston

Churchill. innocuous-looking enough, unless you realise the men with Boothby are gangster (Ronald Kray; Leslie Holt, a former East End slum kid and cat-burglar; and 'Mad' Teddy Smith, a bizarre gangster associate of the Krays.

Boothby was an early media darling whose blunt, articulate manner and appearance on numerous TV discussion programmes had led to him being christened 'the nation's uncle'. But there was another side to him, and other, less cosy: nicknarnes. While at Oxford in the early 1920s, Boothby was known as 'the Palladium' because ('he was twice nightly'. His cousin, TV presenter  Ludovic Kennedy, thought him 'a bit of a shit'. Boothby was a rampant bisexual at a time when homosexual acts were not just bad for careers, but  illegal. Indeed, Boothby was later to indulge all most exclusively in homosexual acts, with the exception of the love of his life, his mistress Dorothy, wife of Tory PM Harold Macmillan.

Of the people in the photos, the strangest was 'Mad' Teddy Smith. He could speak foreign languages, engage people in deep, literary conversations and then for no reason start beating them around the head. Smith was a Kray lieutenant, a regular at the twins' Bethnal Green conferences. He was also, like Boothby, Kray and Holt, homosexual. Smith was having an affair with Labour MP Tory Driberg: Driberg and Tory Boothby were seen one night importuning young boys at a dog track, their lusts for life and sex crossing party lines. Driberg was rampant at a time when such behaviour would have been curtains without the protection of successive Labour leaders. 

John Pearson, consultant on the programme and author of the biography of the Krays, 'The Profession of Violence', first revealed the Boothby - Kray affair in a series of articles for the Sunday Times in August 1993. The photographs couldn't have been more damaging for Baron Robert John Graham Boothby, KBE, of Buchan and Rattray Head, a peer of the realm, the subject of an adoring 1964 'This is Your Life' edition, and a man who, confessed to the BBC's 'Tonight' two years earlier: 'If the true story of my life ever came out I would be paid  ₤ 500,000, but I' d have to spend the rest of my life in Tahiti.' Ironically, in 1964 he received ₤ 40,000 as an out-of-court settlement from the Sunday Mirror, along with a grovelling apology, even though they had been sent the photos by a member of Scotland Yard's intelligence squad, C11, the day after their main story appeared.

The newspaper had been hot to trot, notably its chairman Cecil King, a Labour supporter who wanted to give his political ally, Wilson, another present almost as good as the Profumo scandal. Acting on information from Scot1and Yard officers tailing the Krays, the newspaper printed a front-page story on July 12 1964, under the banner headline 'Peer and a gangster: Yard inquiry'. Boothby's response was devastating: demonstrating mysterious Labour support, he composed an outrage letter to the Times drafted by Wilson's own lawyer, Amold Goodman. Sir Joseph Simpson, the Metropolitan police commissioner, furiously denied there was any such investigation and, despite the photos, evidence and the support of the staff which, says the paper's then picture editor, Derek Jameson, was almost unanimous, the Mirror caved in. The reason for Cecil King's climb down was that Harold Wilson had leaned on him, realising that Driberg was also implicated. Boothby, the man once touted as a future prime minister, was laughing all the way to the bank

The result was devastating. Jameson remembers that, afterwards, no one would touch the Krays with a well greased bargepole: 'Dodgy trouble, ₤ 40,000, not very nice,' says the former tabloid king. Pearson is blunt: 'During four crucial years from 1965 until their arrest in the summer of 1968 the Krays did exactly as they pleased: swindling, organising London-wide protection rackets, allying with other gangsters and the American mafia, making and spending fortunes, and, of course, killing people.'

Leonard 'Nipper' Read, the cop who final1y nailed the twins, says that his investigation ceased to have much support, and that he was particularly 'not helped' by Boothby's words in the House of Lords supporting the Krays after they had been acquitted on a 'desperate' charge of protection racketeering in 1965.

Boothby's relationship with Ronnie Kray was sinister: the gangster provided the peer with members of his stable, tough young heterosexuals, many of them boxers, whom he would terrorise into compliance. A former associate tells how one evening, Boothby called Kray outside to remonstrate with an unwilling pick-up. 'Ronnie said to the boy: "You will go home with Lord Boothby. You will do exactly what Lord Boothby wants. Or I will hurt you"

'Lords of the Underworld', tells a lot of new things about this buried scandal: How Leslie Holt died in 1979 after being operated on by a doctor who was both his lover and partner in crime. How Driberg had a boyfriend who would rob the homes of wealthy victims who Driberg set up, with the MP pocketing some of the proceeds. How Teddy Smith just disappeared, like that other Kray henchman, Frank' Axe Man' Mitchell. How Boothby and Kray swapped young boys during orgies at a swish club. How Boothby got out of the gay scene, married his second wife, a gorgeous Sardinian, in 1967 and died, mourned in the Times for his 'jaunty combativeness' and ‘unfulfilled promise'. Funny old world. .