Smile for the Camera The Double Life of Cyril Smith

No politician pandered to the media's appetite for personality more than Liberal MP Sir Cyril Smith during the 1970s and 1980s. With his remarkable girth and regular appearances on the chat show circuit, blurring the lines between politics and show business, Smith was a larger-than-life character in a landscape of dull, grey men. Yet 'Big Cyril' was anything but the gentle giant he sought to portray. In November 2012, Rochdale's current MP Simon Danczuk outed Smith in the House of Commons as a serial child abuser. In Smile for the Camera, Danczuk tells how Cyril Smith rose from poor beginnings to become a dominating political figure in the Northwest and nationally, and used his extraordinary profile to conceal a spectacular abuse of power: systematically grooming and sexually abusing young boys, often in care homes he helped to establish. Smith's story begins as an illegitimate child in the grinding poverty of post-war Rochdale. This background kindled a ruthlessness that drove him on to eventually take over his home town, running it as his own personal fiefdom in which he could do as he pleased. This is a story deeply rooted in time and place. Smith's dark side was obscured by his overbearing personality and went unnoticed by the public at large.