The Elm Guest House allegations

That a network of senior British politicians, intelligence officers and other public figures abused boys trafficked from a children's home to the Elm Guest House in Barnes in the late 1970s and early 1980s; that the network extended to murder; and that police and the establishment concealed it for decades.

The guest house was real and had been raided in 1982, its owners charged with running a disorderly house — a documented event about which the identities of those present were never established, which is the vacuum the later claims filled. In 1990 Chris Fay, a campaigner and convicted fraudster, said he had seen a photograph of a former Home Secretary with a boy, shown to him by the guest house's co-owner weeks before her death; a list of names circulated from him. In October 2012, in the weeks after the Jimmy Savile revelations, the MP Tom Watson told the Commons of evidence suggesting a paedophile network with connections to Parliament. From 2014 the claims of a witness known as 'Nick' — Carl Beech — were carried at length in the press and on the news website Exaro.

The men most damaged were mostly dead or elderly, and could not be restored. The wider cost was to the people the case was supposed to be about: the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, running in parallel, was documenting real institutional failures at exactly the moment the Westminster ring collapsed, and the collapse gave every institution it examined a ready-made rebuttal. This entry sits deliberately next to the confirmed cover-ups in this archive — Mount Cashel, Kincora, the football clubs. The existence of documented institutional concealment is precisely what made an invented version of it so easy to sell, and so expensive to disprove.