Lord Brittan denies being guilty of rape

The Tory peer said in a statement that the allegation is 'wholly without foundation'

Leon Brittan has said he was handed the Dickens dossier but passed it on to Home Office staff (Getty Images)

Lord Brittan today denied being guilty of rape following the disclosure he had been questioned by detectives following a complaint from a woman.

The Independent on Sunday revealed that the 74-year-old former Home Secretary was interviewed under caution last month after a woman claimed she was raped in London in 1967.

The Tory peer said in a statement through his solicitors: “It is true that I have been questioned by the police about a serious allegation made against me. This allegation is wholly without foundation.”

Lord Brittan also defended his handling of document passed to him in the 1980s by the Tory MP Geoffrey Dickens which allegedly named paedophiles operating in Westminster. He dismissed suggestions that he failed to make enough effort to find out what happened to the paperwork.

“It has been alleged that when I was home secretary I failed to deal adequately with the bundle of papers containing allegations of serious sexual impropriety that I received from the late Geoff Dickens MP,” he said.

“This too is completely without foundation – as evidence from the Home Office's own report supports.

“As I made clear in the statement that I issued on 2 July, I passed this bundle of papers to the relevant Home Office officials for examination, as was the normal and correct practice. I wrote to Mr Dickens on 20 March 1984 informing him of the conclusions of the director of public prosecutions about these matters (as set out in the interim report of the independent review set up by the Home Office).

“In this same report, Mr Dickens thanked the Home Office for the way in which the information he provided was handled and said in a speech to the House of Commons on 31 March 1987: ‘I should like to place on record my thanks to the Home Office and the departments within the Home Office for following up the cases that I keep sending to it. I should also like to thank the attorney general. They have been very helpful and a strength to me in my campaigns.’”