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Special Branch officers seized a paedophile dossier naming Establishment figures drawn up by Labour peer Barbara Castle in the 1980s, it was claimed yesterday.
Officers citing ‘national security’ confiscated the file which listed 16 MPs along with senior policemen, headteachers and clergy, it was said.
The dossier was collated by the late Baroness Castle of Blackburn who handed it to Don Hale, the editor of her local newspaper, the Bury Messenger.
Mr Hale claimed a ‘heavy mob’ of Special Branch officers raided his office in 1984 and took away the file, threatening him with prison if he resisted.
And he said that the day before the raid, Liberal MP Cyril Smith – since exposed as a predatory paedophile – had also visited the office, demanding that he bury the story.
It would be the second paedophile dossier to have ‘disappeared’. A year earlier, a file handed to former Home Secretary Leon Brittan by Tory MP Geoffrey Dickens also went missing.