from Humans Are Free:

To upwardly mobile residents of Seventies North London, an old boy’s tie from University College School, Hampstead, was the ultimate social calling card.

The ranks of ‘Old Gowers’, as alumni are known, included a host of the great and good, from athlete Roger Bannister to film star Dirk Bogarde and the celebrated mountaineer Chris Bonnington.

Despite its fee-paying status, UCS was (and still is) run according to a liberal philosophy that included a statutory ban on religious education and a refusal to acknowledge, in any formal way, differences of ethnic or cultural background.

This made it the favourite public school of the local area’s social elite, who — in time-honoured tradition — were happy to overlook any principled opposition to private education when it came to the treatment of their own children.

The roster of pupils duly contained the offspring of many Labour grandees, including both sons of the party’s former Prime Minister, Harold Wilson.

A few years later, UCS would educate the likes of Tristram Hunt, the son of a Labour peer (and now Shadow Education Secretary), Jonathan Freedland, the Left-wing commentator, and Ian Katz, a former Guardian journalist who is editor of BBC2’s Newsnight.

Yet behind its historic red-brick facade there lay a troubling secret. For throughout this heady era, the UCS staff room was home to four paedophile teachers, who used their positions of authority to prey on teenage pupils.

In an autobiography titled Self Abuse, Jonathan revealed that he had ‘suffered repeated sexual abuse by two of the masters at UCS senior school for most of the three years I spent there’, from 1970 onwards.

The book devoted an entire chapter to this catalogue of exploitation, saying it began on a school trip when he was ‘barely 13 years old’ and Densham plied him with alcohol until he was ‘vomiting drunk’.

‘He begged me to take off all my clothes and get into bed with him,’ Self recalled. ‘What started as, effectively, a rape continued much in the manner of an illicit affair.’

The teacher, then in his 30s, would typically take his victim to ‘restaurants, pubs and a gay club in the Finchley Road’, before ending their liaisons by forcing him to have sex in his car (‘short and hurried’) or in a bedroom of his home in Ealing, ‘a drawn-out business’ Self found ‘abhorrent’.

Over the course of the abusive relationship, Self says that Densham introduced him to several other paedophiles connected to UCS, including former pupil Basil Moss, who ‘was always kissing me and pinching my bottom’, and two teachers from the UCS junior school ‘who made a similar nuisance of themselves’.

Self was then raped by yet another professional associate of Densham’s called Tony Ford, a UCS art teacher, who ‘became so insistent I have sex with him that in the end I gave in’.

‘I wouldn’t keep harassing you,’ Self recalled Ford saying on the day he finally consented. ‘But I know you have done it with Mike and it just isn’t fair that you won’t do it with me.’

This troubling saga generated a smattering of ugly headlines when Self’s book was published, just over a decade ago.

Yet, perhaps due to the fact that Densham and Ford were no longer around (one disappeared, one committed suicide, in murky circumstances) no proper police investigation was conducted.

Instead, to the presumed relief of the authorities at UCS, the saga of the Seventies paedophile ring was allowed to slide quietly into history. That was then, however.

The ring, led by politics teacher Michael Densham, pictured, was sensationally exposed in 2004 by the writer and entrepreneur Jonathan Self, who had attended the school with his brother, Will, the novelist

Today, things could be about to change. For, more than 40 years after Self was abused, events only a few miles from leafy Hampstead are about to return this sordid chapter in the public school’s history to the top of the news agenda.

To blame is Greville Janner, the former Labour MP, who has been splashed across the front pages in recent months.

The 86-year-old peer, a flamboyant amateur magician ennobled by Tony Blair, is at the centre of heated public debate over claims that for decades he was a prolific abuser of young boys.

Director of Public Prosecutions Alison Saunders announced in April that the police had sufficient evidence to charge him with 22 paedophile offences, including 16 indecent assaults and six acts of buggery.

She added, however, that he will not face trial on a single one of the charges, involving nine separate children from 1969 to 1988, on the grounds that he is suffering dementia, which means he is ‘not fit to take part in any proceedings’.

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