Was Scottish legal scandal a smokescreen for child abuse?

It was the scandal that shook the Scottish legal establishment - claims that a so-called magic circle of secretly gay judges and lawyers were making prosecutions against homosexual criminals disappear.

The false allegations included whispers about judges being blackmailed by so-called rent boys and a network of gay lawyers conspiring to ensure homosexual men were given a soft-touch by the courts.

It might all have been dismissed as gossip if it had not been enthusiastically promoted by one of Scotland's most admired and respected defence lawyers.

A BBC Scotland Disclosure investigation programme, Beneath the Magic Circle Affair, reveals that Robert Henderson QC may have been deliberately fanning the flames of the conspiracy to hide paedophile activity in the 1970s and 1980s.

Henderson died in 2012 but his daughter Susie, who is now 56, waived her anonymity to accuse him and some of his legal colleagues of sexually abusing her when she was a child.

Last year, Susie's testimony led to the conviction of lawyer John Watt, a close friend and colleague of her father.

Henderson was well-known in Edinburgh as the lawyer who had spread the rumour of the "magic circle".

He knew that prominent lawyers and judges with secret gay lifestyles would fear exposure.

Despite homosexuality being legal in the 1980s it was still largely hidden at the top of the legal world and could do damage to careers.

Henderson told anyone who would listen that he had a list.

He never revealed who was on it or what they were alleged to have done but the suggestion was that he could use it if he needed to.

And according to Henderson's daughter, he had things he needed to hide.

His daughter Susie told the BBC her father sexually abused her throughout her childhood.

She said: "He would take me for baths, and he would abuse me in the bath.

"I had my own room and I used to have all these dolls I'd put all round me, thinking that when he came to get me in the night, he wouldn't know it was me, because he wouldn't see I was a person."

And it wasn't just her father who was abusing her.

She was taken to "parties" from the age of seven where she was abused by some of her father's friends in the legal world.

"If I let them do it, and I didn't moan about it, I wouldn't get the beating as well," she said. "So it was much easier just to let them do it.

"It was just the way of life. I just presumed every man did that."

When she came forward in 2014, she told the police the names of the other men. One of them was John Watt.

She told the BBC her father took her to Watt's and said she had to do what she was told.

"Then [John Watt] lifted me up onto the couch, and he raped me. But he said I'd been a good girl, so I knew I wasn't going to get a beating when dad arrived," she said.

Police Scotland opened a full investigation into Watt after Susie came forward and they tracked down other victims of his abuse.

In 2019, an arrest warrant was issued for Watt, who was living in rural Oklahoma and last summer, he was found guilty of five charges against four victims.

Judge Lord Braid told the 72-year-old he had committed "vile" crimes of the "utmost seriousness and depravity" and he was sentenced to 10 years in prison.

Susie said she cried tears of relief at the verdict.

"It was like I'd been believed," she said.

"That was always my fear that nobody would believe me. I knew that I'd been believed, and that I'd got justice at last."

Watt's conviction and justice for Susie and the other victims led the BBC to re-examine his actions and those of Henderson and whether they had used the so-called magic circle to turn attention away from their own activities.

Central to the conspiracy theory about a gay mafia operating in the legal world was Tucker's list.

Colin Tucker was secretly gay and the rumour spread that when he was charged with embezzlement he had given his lawyers a list of powerful men within the legal establishment who were also homosexual.

It was to be used as leverage during his prosecution.

Tucker's lawyers were Henderson and Watt.

David Johnston, who was the news editor at Radio Forth at the time, told the BBC the list gained huge notoriety both in legal and police circles.

"People believed the list existed, they believed it was dynamite, and a lot of people acted accordingly," he said.

Kenny Farquharson, who worked as an investigative journalist for Scotland on Sunday, said the existence of this list was being read as a threat.

"It was, 'you come for me, and I will expose these people, I will expose their clandestine life, and I will reveal aspects of this world that people didn't know about'," Farquharson said.

One of the names said to be on the "list" was a sitting judge, Lord Dervaird.

The judge was married with children but police were made aware of "alleged homosexual activity" that could have risked blackmail. The Sun newspaper was on to the story too and threatening to publish.

Lord Dervaird handed in his resignation and quietly left the bench shortly before Christmas 1989.

The matter, it seemed, was resolved.

But soon, rumours that other judges were also secretly gay and open to blackmail were spreading fast.

Lord Hope, Scotland's most senior judge at the time, had no idea where the rumours were coming from.

In a bid to end the speculation, he decided to tackle the issue head on. He invited editors from Scotland's media to an unattributable briefing in January 1990.

"We assumed that he was just going to give us a briefing on the legal background to all this," said Magnus Linklater, the then editor of The Scotsman.

Then, the mood in the room changed.

"To our astonishment, [Lord Hope] began detailing the various cases that he'd been investigating," Mr Linklater said.

"He said he wanted to nail these rumours once and for all and he started going through them. To our amazement, we heard details of individual allegations against individual judges which he had looked at, and then in his terms, disposed of."

Rather than quash the rumours, Lord Hope's briefing was splashed across the front pages. The quiet resignation of one judge quickly became a story about five.

Despite the headlines, no other judge was ever named and no evidence of wrongdoing was ever found.

At the same time as Henderson was using the "Tucker list" to spread rumours in the legal establishment, Lothian and Borders police were carrying out a seemingly unrelated investigation.

Operation Planet was an investigation into the alleged abuse of young boys recruited into sex work as so-called rent boys and abused by older men.

In all, 57 charges were brought against 10 people on a range of crimes relating to sex with these boys.

In the weeks before the case went to court, it was claimed one of the so-called rent boys in the case was about to testify that the trial judge was one of his clients.

Suddenly, there was a risk that should the case go to court, there could be huge embarrassment for the legal establishment.

The source of the rumour seemed to be a lawyer defending one of the accused. That lawyer was Robert Henderson.

After years of speculation, intensified by controversial cases, Lothian and Borders police commissioned a report led by Det Ch Insp Roger Orr.

He told the BBC it was supposed to be an internal report.

"It was an intelligence-gathering operation, essentially," he said.

"It was never designed to be an investigative report under any circumstances."

Orr was given 14 days to pull together cases where the police felt questions were unanswered. They included the embezzlement case against Colin Tucker, his supposed list of secretly gay legal figures, and the Operation Planet case into "rent boy" abuse.

Roger Orr's conclusion was that these cases warranted further investigation.

Despite this, the decision was taken by police chiefs to lock the Orr Report away.

That's until it was leaked to the Edinburgh Evening News.

Its revelations led to William Nimmo Smith QC, who went on to become a judge, leading an inquiry into the affair.

In 1993, Nimmo Smith concluded there was no evidence of a conspiracy to pervert the course of justice in any of the cases noted in the Orr report.

The "magic circle" affair was brought to an end and the infamous claim of a "list" was debunked.

The statement from Colin Tucker's trial, which both Henderson and Watt had kept, was found to contain the names of no senior legal figure other than Lord Dervaird.

The question of why Henderson was so keen to make people believe he had something more damning was left unanswered until now.

Journalist Mr Farquharson told the BBC: "I do look back on Bob Henderson in particular, and I ask myself, did Henderson use the 'magic circle' to distract from another circle of criminality? And I think he probably did."

BBC Disclosure's "Beneath The Magic Circle Affair' is on BBC iPlayer and on BBC One Scotland at 22:40 on Tuesday 31 January.

Additional reporting by Helen Andrews.