Nick Davies

The American actor Robin Williams once denounced cricket as “baseball on valium”, a game of tedium and cucumber sandwiches. Robin Williams knows nothing.

In November last year, every newspaper in Britain carried the story of how Scotland Yard had worked with police forces around the country to raid the rooms of teachers at private schools in search of evidence of their involvement in a paedophile ring. The more interesting story, however, was the raid which never happened.

Daniel Handley was unlucky. He was riding his bike near his home in the East End of London one dark Sunday afternoon in October 1994 when he was spotted by two men who had gone out in their car that day with the specific intention of finding a boy whom they could abduct and rape and kill. Daniel died that evening. He was nine.

When Coventry police investigated the Rev’d Phil Aspinall’s behaviour with young boys, they cleared him of breaking the law. He had committed no offence. But for the Bishop of Coventry, the priest’s behaviour raised a different problem. Three adolescent boys separately had complained that Aspinall had made sexual overtures to them. Child protection experts had warned that he was guilty of inappropriate behaviour. In any other job, they said, he would have been suspended. The Church of England, however, tried to turn the other cheek…..

This is a story we are not supposed to tell. It is about a man named Colin Smart, a mild-mannered, rather bookish character who spent his working life in local government looking after children, and who rose in the early 1990s to become the Director of Social Services for the city of Sunderland.

What has happened to criminal skill? How is it that the pavements of Victorian London seethed with pickpockets and conmen, variously feigning fits and forging wills, whereas now we have only beggars and muggers to contend with?