Veteran journalist Chris Moore has a new book out on Kincora – Kincora: Britain’s Shame, Mountbatten, MI5, the Belfast Boys’ Home Sex Abuse Scandal and the British Cover-Up.
From Suzanne Breen in the BeltTel:
A man who claims Lord Mountbatten raped him as a child says he learned the identity of his attacker from watching news reports of his murder by the IRA. Arthur Smyth was 11 years old when he says the senior royal twice sexually abused him in the infamous Kincora Boys’ Home in east Belfast. Details of the allegations are outlined in a new book by journalist Chris Moore, who travelled to Australia, where Smyth now lives, to interview him. Moore also spoke to two other boys who claim they were raped by Lord Mountbatten. A father figure and mentor to King Charles, he was the late Queen’s second cousin.
Moore claims MI5 and the British political establishment have for decades tried to cover up his involvement in a paedophile ring. The journalist also reveals how a detective, contacted by concerned social workers, secretly photographed VIPs visiting Kincora and logged their car registrations. The visitors included NIO officials who worked for MI5, lay magistrates, police officers and businessmen.
“What of a Kincora-based paedophile ring, which operated on both sides of the Irish border to supply boys for sex with a client list of rich and powerful individuals? “Such intelligence might have given MI5 leverage over rich and powerful individuals anxious to avoid their paedophilic habits becoming public knowledge. The organisation was known to exploit such human weaknesses,” he says.
The book also tells how boys were trafficked to Mountbatten’s Castle in Mullaghmore, Sligo.
The Irish News also has coverage of the book here.
It is utterly sickening that spooks would use children in this way, but let’s face it, are we that surprised?
Let’s talk about a question that may be on your mind. All these head spooks and establishment figures went to private schools. Are people who went to UK private schools more likely to be paedophiles?
The evidence seems to suggest no, but it certainly feels like it sometimes, doesn’t it? When story after story emerges about elite boarding schools, cloistered church institutions, and decades-old abuse scandals dragged out from behind chapel doors, it creates a picture. A dark, tailored, Latin-quoting picture. But what we’re really seeing isn’t a higher rate of abuse among the posh. What we’re seeing is a uniquely British cocktail of class, secrecy, and institutional protection that distorts how abuse is discovered, reported, punished, and remembered.
There’s no real data — no credible academic study — showing that people educated in private schools are more likely to become paedophiles. Abuse happens across every social class, religion, postcode and school system. Statistically, most abuse occurs within families or local communities, not behind ivy-covered walls or in candlelit chapels.
But the abuse cases that do emerge from those elite spaces often come with layers of protection, cover-ups, legal footwork, and institutional denial. They take decades to uncover and often involve high-status individuals. So when they do finally break into public view, they carry a uniquely vile flavour: not just the horror of the abuse itself, but the corrosive power structures that allowed it to persist. That visibility distorts our perception. The stories involving private school heads, church leaders, MPs and knights of the realm get front-page coverage and TV documentaries. They feel exceptional and sinister. But they’re also rare — or, at least, rarely prosecuted.
Meanwhile, working-class abuse is often treated with cold detachment or quiet fatalism. When something horrific happens on a council estate, it’s chalked up to social failure or moral collapse. No one writes books or makes BAFTA-winning dramas about those cases. There’s no gothic architecture to add gravitas, no Latin mottos, no sense of betrayal by Britain’s supposed moral guardians. The same crime is interpreted through completely different cultural lenses depending on whether the abuser had a double-barrelled name or an ASBO.
This isn’t to say that private schools are breeding grounds for abuse. They’re not. But they often foster environments that are particularly effective at protecting abusers when they do appear. The power hierarchies, emotional suppression, culture of deference, isolation from family, and obsession with institutional reputation all combine to create what you might call ideal conditions for silence. Many of these schools were, historically, designed to break down boys emotionally and rebuild them into stoic administrators of empire. And, surprise surprise, systems that train people to suppress emotion and obey hierarchy don’t always handle abuse disclosure very well.
The real issue isn’t that posh people abuse more. It’s that they have better tools to get away with it. Wealth buys silence. Status buys credibility. A long list of old boys in the legal system, the press, and Parliament buys protection. And when things finally come to light — often decades later — we get a soft-focus obituary, a carefully worded statement from a school, and maybe a few lines about “troubled times” and “unfortunate events”. No one calls it what it is: institutional complicity.
This is where the British class system shows its teeth. It doesn’t just determine who gets access to opportunities or power — it shapes who is believed, who is punished, and who gets to rewrite history. We remember the “fallen angels” — the pervy bishop, the disgraced headmaster, the knighted broadcaster — not because there are more of them, but because the betrayal of respectability makes them stand out. In reality, plenty of working-class children are abused by family members or neighbours, and the system fails them too. But those stories don’t threaten institutions in the same way. They don’t shake the pillars of church, school, or state. So they’re forgotten faster.
Britain doesn’t have a paedophile problem limited to class. It has a truth problem. It has a transparency problem. It has an accountability problem. The structures that are supposed to protect children often protect reputations first. When abuse happens in private schools, it’s not the environment that causes it — it’s the silence, the insulation, and the institutional instinct to protect the brand over the body.
If we’re serious about child protection, we need to stop framing abuse through the lens of class stereotypes. The working-class predator isn’t more dangerous. The posh one isn’t more perverse. What matters is the system surrounding them — and whether that system works to expose them or cover for them.
Because predators don’t care about class. But institutions do. And the British ones, especially the posh ones, still know how to circle the wagons and protect their own.
I help to manage Slugger by taking care of the site as well as running our live events. My background is in business, marketing and IT. My politics tend towards middle-of-the-road pragmatism, I am not a member of any political party. Oddly for a member of the Slugger team, I am not that interested in daily politics, preferring to write about big ideas in society. When not stuck in front of a screen, I am a parkrun Run Director.
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