Lord Tebbit: 'The establishment was to be protected'

An inquiry should be conducted quickly into missing files which may be linked to child abuse, Lord Tebbit, who served in the Cabinet in the 1980s, has told Andrew Marr.

The Home Office has said its own review last year found that 114 potentially relevant files could not be located.

Lord Tebbit told the Andrew Marr programme: "At that time most people would have thought that the establishment, the system, was to be protected.

"And if a few things had gone wrong here and there that it was more important to protect the system than to delve too far into them.

"That view was wrong then and it has spectacularly shown to have been wrong because the abuses have grown."