Greville Janner
Greville Ewan Janner, Baron Janner of Braunstone, was a British politician, barrister and writer. He became a Labour Party Member of Parliament for Leicester in the 1970 general election as a last-minute candidate, succeeding his father. He was an MP until 1997, and then elevated to the House of Lords. Never a frontbencher, Janner was particularly known for his work on Select Committees; he chaired the Select Committee on Employment for a time. He was associated with a number of Jewish organisations including the Board of Deputies of British Jews, of which he was chairman from 1978 to 1984, and was later prominent in the field of education about the Holocaust.
Beginning in 1991, several allegations of child sexual abuse were made against Janner. Criminal proceedings brought in 2015 were halted by his death in December of that year; claims made against his estate were all dropped by May 2017, with Janner's family calling the claimants "false accusers" afraid of cross-examination. Carl Beech, whose accusations had led to the Operation Midland police investigation, was convicted for false accusation of Janner and others and jailed for 18 years; the Janner family subsequently criticised both the Labour politician Tom Watson for his part in the affair, and the system "where people are believed instantly before the evidence is examined". An enquiry into the handling of the case by officials began in October 2020. In October 2021, the enquiry concluded that the police "appeared reluctant to fully investigate" the allegations against Janner, and that the process had been marred by a "series of failings".
Early life
Janner was born in Cardiff, Wales, to Lithuanian Jewish parents, the son of Barnett Janner and Elsie Sybil, née Cohen. Janner and Ruth, his sister, were evacuated to Canada at the age of 11, because their parents anticipated a Nazi invasion of Britain. While in Canada, living with family friends, he attended Bishop's College School, Lennoxville, Quebec. Janner returned to Britain in 1942 and attended St Paul's School, London.At the age of 18, he served in occupied Germany working for the War Crimes Investigation Unit of the British Army of the Rhine for 18 months. Janner investigated cases of British airmen who were shot at Stalag Luft III, the prisoner of war camp. At weekends, he worked with Holocaust survivors at Bergen-Belsen. The army unit was closed in 1948 to Janner's dismay.
Later, Janner read law at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where he was President of the Cambridge Union Society, in 1952, and chairman of the university Labour Club. He became the international secretary of the National Association of Labour Students and president of Trinity Hall Athletic Club. Janner was able to attend Harvard Law School through both the Fulbright and Smith-Mundt Act awards.
After training, via a Harmsworth Scholarship at Middle Temple, he became a barrister in 1954 and was appointed a Queen's Counsel in 1971.
Public career
House of Commons and Jewish causes
Having unsuccessfully fought Wimbledon in the 1955 General Election, Janner represented Leicester North West from the 1970 general election until February 1974, succeeding his father, Sir Barnett Janner, a former Chairman of the Zionist Federation of Great Britain. His father announced his retirement from the Commons two days before candidate nominations closed in 1970, and his son was quickly chosen in his place. Posters imploring electors to "Vote Janner" had already been printed, and thus did not need to be scrapped.The younger Janner retained the reformed Leicester West from 1974 until his retirement at the 1997 general election. Janner chaired the Select Committee on Employment from 1994 to 1996. He lost this position because Conservative members of the committee acted against him. A potential conflict of interest existed as he was an advisor to firms the committee might investigate. He was succeeded in Leicester West by Patricia Hewitt.
Janner was president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, the main representative body of the British Jewish community, from 1978 to 1984, and was a prominent campaigner in the efforts to gain reparations for victims of the Holocaust. In parliament, and outside, he was involved in campaigning for the War Crimes Act 1991, lobbying the Thatcher government to allow legislation to bring those responsible for Nazi atrocities to justice. He was also a vice-president of the World Jewish Congress until 2009 and of the Jewish Leadership Council until 2015. He was president of the National Council for Soviet Jewry and the Commonwealth Jewish Council.
In 1988 he co-founded the Holocaust Educational Trust with Merlyn Rees, a body which successfully persuaded the British government to add teaching about the Holocaust to the National Curriculum in 1988. Janner stood down from the role in 2012. The Lord Janner Scholarship provides funding for ten schools to take part in the Trust's educational programmes each year.
Janner sought to foster good relations between different faiths and religions and wrote about this issue in his book One Hand Alone Cannot Clap. He co-founded the Coexistence Trust, a charity to combat Islamophobia and antisemitism.
House of Lords
Janner was created a life peer as Baron Janner of Braunstone, of Leicester in the County of Leicestershire in 1997. He was President and an Officer of the All-Party Parliamentary Group against Anti-Semitism. Janner was associated with the Labour Friends of Israel and in 2002 backed Stephen Byers to be chairman.In 2006, Janner was struck by Lord Bramall, a former head of the Armed Forces, during a heated row over the Middle East. In the incident, which occurred during the 2006 Lebanon War, the two men had disagreed in the House of Lords chamber after Bramall had made comments Janner considered too critical of Israel. Janner was hit in one of the rooms close to the chamber. Janner later sought the advice of fellow peers about how and whether to make a formal complaint against Lord Bramall, before deciding to accept an apology.
Janner continued to attend the House of Lords until December 2013. He was on leave of absence from the House of Lords from 13 October 2014.
Other
Janner wrote a number of books on public speaking and business communication, including On Presentation. In addition, he wrote extensively under the pen-name Ewan Mitchell. He was a former member of The Magic Circle and the International Brotherhood of Magicians.Personal life
In 1955, Janner married Myra Louise Sheink, who was originally from Australia and the niece of Sir Israel Brodie, the former Chief Rabbi of Great Britain and the Commonwealth. The couple had three children: two daughters and a son. Myra Sheink died in 1996.Lord Janner's younger daughter is Rabbi Laura Janner-Klausner, who was appointed Senior Rabbi to Reform Judaism in 2011. She is married to a brother of the Israeli writer Amos Oz. Marion Janner, his other daughter, was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire for services to mental health in 2010. Daniel Janner, his son, is a barrister and KC.
Illness and death
In 2009, Janner was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. Its advancing severity meant that by 2015 he required round-the-clock care for his dementia. At a court hearing in August 2015, a medical specialist acting as a witness for the defence said that Janner was experiencing the early stages of Parkinson's disease. Janner died on 19 December 2015 from complications of Alzheimer's disease, aged 87.Child sexual abuse allegations
Over the years, starting in 1991, specific allegations of sex abuse of children by Janner in the past—dating ultimately from at least 1955—were made to authorities. This did not lead to any official action, beyond Janner being questioned once, from the first allegations until 2015. After it was decided in 2015 that he should have been prosecuted earlier, the accusations were to be investigated in a "trial of the facts" in April 2016—Janner was deemed to be too ill for a criminal trial—but he died before this could happen, though his actions were included in a large inquiry into historical sex abuse.Statements to Parliament in December 1991
In 1991, the director of a children's home in Leicestershire, Frank Beck, was convicted of child abuse over 13 years to 1986 and sentenced to five life terms. During the trial, Beck accused Janner of having abused a child, and a witness said that while he was in care Janner had abused him. Janner could not say that Beck was lying until after the trial, because it would have been in contempt of court.Janner received cross-party support in the House of Commons after Beck's conviction. In a Commons statement, delivered on 2 December, he said there was "not a shred of truth" in the claims which had been made against him. In a debate on 3 December on the issue of contempt of court and third-parties being potentially defamed in court cases—essentially, according to another MP, dealing with the accusations against "an honoured colleague in the House"—Janner said he had received a letter from a former cellmate of Beck's, who had written that Beck was intent on implicating Janner as being responsible for criminal acts to "take the light off him ". Janner said that he had previously refused to provide Beck with references, and that Beck had "enlisted" the witness, Paul Winston, in an attempt to "frame" Janner.
Early police investigations and CPS decisions
Before the publicised 2014 police investigation, there were three earlier investigations, none of which led to a prosecution.Janner was interviewed by the police in 1991, when the prosecution case against Beck was being prepared. No charges were brought against the MP because of "insufficient evidence", although the Crown Prosecution Service said in 2015 that Janner should have been tried. The 1991 interview was the only time Janner was interviewed by the police. Accompanied by his solicitor, Janner has been reported as having replied "no comment" to the questions put to him. Janner and his solicitor, Sir David Napley, were in contact with the barrister George Carman QC in anticipation of a defence brief needing to be prepared if Janner was put on trial. Carman and Napley were surprised no charges were brought against him because of the weight of evidence, according to Dominic Carman, the barrister's son.
Further police investigations took place in 2002 and 2006; documents relating to Janner were not passed to the Crown Prosecution Service after the 2002 investigation. The former Director of Public Prosecutions, Lord Macdonald, told The Guardian in April 2015 that the penultimate CPS decision not to prosecute Janner in 2007 was actually made by officials in Leicestershire who did not contact head office in London about the case.
In September 2014, The Times reported that Mike Creedon, currently the Chief Constable of Derbyshire Constabulary, claimed that in 1989, while he was serving as a Detective Sergeant, senior police chiefs severely limited his enquiries into paedophilia allegations against Janner, despite "credible evidence" which warranted further investigation.