Lord Lester, 82, became "obsessively attracted" to a young woman and repeatedly pestered her for sex after they met through work.
2
Lord Lester is set to be suspended from the House of LordsHe told the political campaigner: "If you sleep with me, I will make you a baroness within a year."
And he persuaded her to stay with him and his wife – only to make aggressive passes at her, leaving her terrified he would attack her.
A standards committee concluded that the veteran peer had "offered her corrupt inducements to sleep with him" – bringing the House of Lords into disrepute.
The watchdog recommended that he should be chucked out of the Lords until June 2022 – the longest suspension since WW2.
The punishment must be officially approved by the whole House of Lords in a debate expected later this week.
Lord Lester's victim, who has a partner and children, had a meal with the peer and a number of charity workers in the House of Lords which went on so long she missed her train home.
He invited her to stay at his house in London – insisting that his wife was keen to meet her.
The woman said: "In the car on the way to his house, he kept repeatedly missing the gearstick with his hand and instead very firmly placed his hand on my right thigh.
"The first time it happened I thought it must’ve been an accident, but when it continued I realised it was not. I removed his hand and asked him to stop. He just smiled.
"I felt incredibly uncomfortable knowing that I was on the way to staying at his house. He continued to grope my thigh for the length of the journey, despite my protests."
When they reached the house, Lord Lester showed the woman to a spare bedroom – and pointed out that his own room was nearby.
The victim was so terrified she propped a chair against the drawer and slept in her clothes, saying: "I feared Lord Lester might come into my room in the night."
The next morning the peer grabbed her by the waist and chased her around the kitchen, then told her he had "strong feelings" towards her.
Shortly afterwards, they attended another House of Lords meeting and he again tried to convince her to sleep with him.
Pointing to the Palace of Westminster, Lord Lester said: "If you sleep with me, I will make you a baroness within a year."
He added that if she was a "good girl" he could go on a dirty holiday with her.
After the woman rejected his advances, the peer stopped inviting her to events in Parliament and threatened to stop supporting her cause.
Lord Lester was sacked as a Lib Dem frontbencher when The Sun exposed the scandal in February this year.
The probe by the Lords privileges and conduct committee was triggered when the victim, who has asked to remain anonymous, filed a formal complaint last year.
The watchdog initially recommended that Lord Lester should be thrown out of the House of Lords for good – but after he appealed, they reduced the punishment to four years because the current stricter rules were not yet in place when his offence took place.
A Lib Dem spokesman said: "Anthony Lester has been suspended from the Liberal Democrats and is no longer a member of the Liberal Democrat group in the House of Lords."
Lord Lester is known as a campaigning barrister who helped bring pioneering equality laws onto the statute book.
The Lords report into his behaviour said: "The tragic irony of this case is that for decades past the respondent has been one of the most widely known, effective and admired of those campaigning for racial and sexual equality in this country, a renowned supporter of human rights and freedoms across the board."
Lord Lester, a privately educated Cambridge graduate, became a QC in 1975 and later worked as a deputy judge.
He was an adviser to Home Secretary Roy Jenkins in the 1970s, was appointed to the Lords in 1993 and was handed a job as a constitutional expert by Gordon Brown.
Source: Read Full Article