DESPITE being warned that one of her most senior Scottish MPs had physically struck a schoolgirl in the face and chest, Margaret Thatcher still awarded him a knighthood, it has emerged.

In 1988 a mother wrote to the then prime minister saying that her daughter had been attacked by Nicholas Fairbairn, who had served as the solicitor-general for Scotland.

Fairbairn was knighted just weeks later, in recognition of his “political service” to the nation. He was MP for Perth and Kinross until his death, aged 61, in 1995.

The previously unpublished documents were submitted to the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA), before being held in a government chief whip’s file entitled “MP’s unparliamentary conduct”.

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It contained a letter sent directly to Thatcher in June 1988 by a woman who claimed her daughter, then at school, was attacked physically — but not sexually — by Fairbairn near Fordell Castle, his Fife home, two years earlier.

“Mr Fairbairn approached her, shouted and repeatedly swore at her and struck her across the face and chest,” she wrote. “The police were called and they interviewed six witnesses who confirmed her story.”

However, the woman, a lifelong Tory supporter whose name has been redacted, insisted the senior investigating officer was reluctant to intervene. “The sergeant from Dalgety Bay station would not go to Mr Fairbairn’s home on the Saturday evening. He said he preferred to wait until the Sunday when Mr Fairbairn would have sobered up. The sergeant said he did not want to remain a ‘tea boy’ for the rest of his working life.”

She received a response from Thatcher’s principal private secretary which said: “The prime minister’s practice is not to comment on names which appear in the honours lists.”

A separate police inquiry has evidence that Fairbairn was in a paedophile ring operating among senior Scottish lawyers in the seventies.