Should a blue plaque in honour of the paedophile politician Lord Boothby in Eaton Square be removed?
The Rt. Hon. The Lord Boothby KBE (1900 – 1986) was up there with Jimmy Savile and Rolf Harris. He liked little boys and hung out with such delights as the Christian pop singer Cliff Richard and the Kray twins and after his death it took decades until he was exposed for what he truly was: A fat bully and a paedophile.
Nicknamed “Bob” in polite circles and “The Palladium” (because he was “twice nightly”) elsewhere, a Blue Plaque was erected outside the insignificant politician’s home between 1946 and 1986 at 1 Eaton Square in Belgravia, London, SW1 after his death. It remains there in spite of the fact that Boothby is someone who, given what he did to innocent children, does not deserve to be remembered in any positive way.
Two stories to keep beside you
A gutter paedo
Jailed paedophile Rolf Harris pens a disgusting song titled ‘Gutter Girls’ According to The Sun, jailed paedophile Rolf Harris hasn’t learnt his lesson and has written yet another song mocking his victims. Titled Gutter Girls, the repugnant, disgraced entertainer is said to see it “as a ‘classic’ Rolf song, with a didgeridoo and […]
Paedos and platitudes
Is it right that Amanda Platell faces a police investigation for looking at child porn? Amanda Platell, the former press secretary to William Hague, wrote an article in yesterday’s Daily Mail in which she examined how easy it is to access child pornography. Later in the day, Mark Williams-Thomas, the “child protection expert” who […]
Some will cite the row in Oxford over demands to remove a statue of Cecil Rhodes in support of keeping the plaque in Boothby’s honour, but that is an invalid comparison. Rhodes, like or loathe him, was a figure of international historical relevance and Boothby simply was not. Anything Boothby achieved in his lifetime in the public arena can only be described as unimportant whilst what he did in private was utterly vile. It is, I suggest, time to erase memories of Boothby in the same way that Leeds has sought to eliminate anything and everything relating to Jimmy Savile: The plaque to Boothby simply must go; there is no reason to keep it.
Vipers in Hollywood
Elijah Wood shows courage in speaking out about child abuse in Hollywood
Elsewhere yesterday, the actor Elijah Wood suggested “Hollywood has its own Savile scandal” in an interview with The Sunday Times. Wood told the paper:
“You all grew up with Savile – Jesus Christ it must have been devastating”.
“[There are] a lot of vipers in this industry… There is a darkness in the underbelly… Victims can’t speak as loudly as people in power”.
Mr Wood must be saluted for speaking out but in Britain such activities have and continue to be covered up also. The public must not forget this and in spite of claims of a witch hunt, we must never allow abuse to be swept under the carpet again. Victims of abuse by the powerful, whoever they may be and whatever drugs or criminal activities they may have subsequently turned to due to their damaged mental states, deserve justice and it is time that it was done.
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Readers have their say
18 comments
The Boothby blue plaque degrades all the other blue plaques and should be removed forthwith.
I totally agree. It surely devalues the building. Who on earth would want to live in a memorial to a paedophile?
A paedophile, maybe?!
It doesn’t appear to be an official blue plaque because the genuine article has Greater London Council or English Heritage written at the top. I couldn’t find it on the English Heritage site or on Wikipedia. It looks like an unofficial knock-off of a blue plaque put up by somebody – maybe an owner of the house, who knows?
It is on the Wikipedia list of Blue Plaques but the date it was errected is unknown (unlike what Lord Boothby got up to with innocent little boys).
The building, I know, was redeveloped in the 1990s but I am not sure if it went up then but obviously it was put up after Boothby’s death in 1986 and not before then.
………or a “close friend or relative ” of his.
Robert Baden-Powell has a plaque on his house in Kensington. He had a huge collection of naked photo’s of boys, and used to visit Geoffrey Wheatley Cobb, on his ship set up to train boys, ‘Bounty Boys’TS Foudroyant. Cobb was a well known paedophile, and had to move the ship from Falmouth to Portsmouth because of complaints from parents..
Until his death in 1929, the Falmouth-based painter Henry Scott Tuke used the ship and its trainees as subject matter, naked boys. The ship is now HMS Trincomalee has become the centerpiece of the historic dockyard museum in Hartlepool, and Geoffrey Wheatley Cobb has been airbrushed into an ‘entrepreneur’.
A word to the wise; put your can opener back in the kitchen drawer
Totally wrong for it to be there, tear it down or put up anther one which reflects the truth about the disgusting fat creep.
Well said. I totally agree. Add the word “paedophile” or remove it.
Keep it. It is simply a geographical locator. Let history show the extent of his interests(which were many) From cuckolding Harold MacMillan and, together with Tom Driberg and Guy Burgess notorious cottaging homosexualists.
You are entitled to your view but he was a) not historically significant and b) a paedophile. If a plaque to him should be kept, then any in honour of Jimmy Savile and Rolf Harris should be kept also. It makes utterly no sense and the plaque to Lord Boothby must go.
Boothby was Parliamentary Private Secretary to possibly our most notable prime minister, Winston Churchill. He founded a political party, the anti-Fascist Popular Front. He later held junior ministerial office and was ennobled. He had a notorious affair with another prime minister’s wife Dorothy MacMillan. He appears in many biographies and received much critical contemporary media coverage
You may not like it, but by most judgements this was “historically significant”.
You may not like it but I would suggest these were simply footnotes and minor footnotes at that.
In my formative years, an East End villain once warned me ‘ Us gangsters is one thing, but Eton, Oxford and the Guards – them’s the real villains ‘ or was it Eton, Sandhurst and the Guards?
Don’t the Guards get recruited from the MI5-MI6 or is it the other way round? I can’t remember.
Transgender toilets, we are entering a Liberal period, he is not a paedophile, but an adult attracted to younger persons, and political correctness will eventually force us to accept them and even allow them to marry kids. Intolerance will not be tolerated. Equality for all.
Rhodes, as well as Boothby was a notorious pederast and homosexual.
Both were as well, of course highly racist unscrupulous men.