The establishment was always covering up for Bob Boothby

Just after John Pearson finished writing The Profession of Violence, his celebrated biography of the Krays, both his and his agent’s officeswere broken into. Letters from Lord Boothby to Ronnie Kray had disappeared, as had a copy of the book’s manuscript. Pearson then received a telephone call from the high-powered lawyer Lord Goodman, who warned him that the book libelled Boothby. A subsequent phone call from Goodman to Pearson’s publisher led to the book’s contract being cancelled.

Mr Fixit, as Goodman was unaffectionately known, already had form as far as Boothby and the Krays were concerned, having in 1964 put pressure on the Sunday Mirror not only to retract a story about the relationship between a ‘prominent peer’ and a London gangster but to pay the peer a staggering £40,000 by way of apology. Had this been a story about the bacon of a rogue politician being saved by a bullying and unscrupulous lawyer, it might have been a minor matter; but Goodman was merely one participant in a major cover-up of Boothby’s indiscretions that involved both government and opposition parties, MI5 and the Metropolitan Police.

The Mirror’s mistake was to have suggested that there was a homosexual relationship between the peer and the gangster, whereas Kray was instead acting as a procurer of young roughs for Boothby, whose sexual tastes he shared. Boothby was a controversial but hugely popular figure, both as a politician and a radio and television personality, but in 1964 homosexuality was still illegal. He had a public reputation as a ladies’ man, but was in fact vigorously and recklessly bisexual and had been introduced to the Krays by a young cat burglar with whom he was having an affair. MI5 had been keeping tabs on him, but even an article in the National Socialist in 1963, which referred to ‘one of our most frequently televised peers’ visiting a male brothel in west London, seems not to have made Boothby any less careless.