Harriet Harman has attacked the Daily Mail for launching a "politically motivated smear campaign" against her and her husband, Jack Dromey, over its claims they were linked to a paedophile rights campaign in the 1970s.
Labour's deputy leader condemned the "horrific allegations" and issued a rebuttal, after the newspaper claimed the couple and former health secretary Patricia Hewitt were apologists for child sex abuse when they were officers at the National Council for Civil Liberties (NCCL).
Harman said that while "the editor and proprietor of the Daily Mail are entitled to their political views and they are of course entitled to oppose what I stand for", they were "not entitled to use their newspaper to smear me with innuendo because they disagree with me politically and hate my values".
After calls from the tabloid for the Labour leadership to speak out on the issue, Harman was backed by Ed Miliband, who praised her "huge decency and integrity" and said he does not "set any store by these allegations".
Harman's attack on the Daily Mail echoes Miliband's decision to publicly tackle claims made by the newspaper last year, when it branded his Marxist academic father, Ralph Miliband, the "man who hated Britain".
In a series of articles, the Mail had accused the three senior Labour figures of working for an organisation with a relaxed attitude to paedophilia, as it claimed the NCCL proposed legalising incest and wanted to lower the age of consent to as low as 10 in a 1976 submission to MPs.
The group also granted "affiliate" status to the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE) – a paedophile rights campaign – in 1975, when Dromey was on the executive and Hewitt was general secretary. Harman did not join the organisation until 1978, but the Mail accused her of signing a document in favour of watering down child pornography legislation in that year.
Harman said the Mail was trying to make her "guilty by way of association", while Dromey, also a Labour MP, said the paper's allegations were "beneath contempt" as he had been at the forefront of public condemnations of the PIE and their "despicable views".
Harman said she had supported the equalisation of the age of consent for gay sex, but never campaigned for the age of consent to be lowered to 10. She also rejected the idea that she opposed the law on incest, saying the document referred to by the Mail was written before she started to work at the organisation.
On the allegation that she was seeking to water down a proposed ban on child pornography, Harman said the NCCL argued for measures to stop the criminalisation of pictures used for sex education or those taken by parents of their children on the beach or in the bath. She said anyone could apply to join the NCCL on payment of a fee and the PIE was just one of nearly 1,000 affiliated organisations.
"I was aware that because NCCL opposed censorship and supported gay rights, paedophiles had sought to exploit that and use NCCL as a vehicle to make their arguments. But by the time I came to work for NCCL this vile organisation had already been vigorously challenged within the organisation," she said.
In a separate statement, Dromey said he personally "took on" the PIE when he was chairman of the NCCL in 1976 and defeated a "loathsome motion" on the "so-called rights of paedophiles".
"As a lifelong opponent of evil men who abuse children, the accusations of the Daily Mail are untrue and beneath contempt," he said.
Labour sources said Miliband had also looked into the claims made by the Mail and "regards them as complete nonsense". Hewitt has not commented on the story.
Harman spoke publicly on the allegations for the first time in an interview with the BBC's Newsnight on Monday night, completely rejecting the "ugly insinuation" that her work was influenced by PIE. She said the group had been "challenged and pushed aside" in 1976 and all the "anxiety and controversy" about it was over by the time she arrived.
Harman said PIE was a front for "very bad people" and should not have existed but refused to say it was a mistake for the NCCL to take affiliation fees from the group. She accused the Mail of being a greater supporter of "indecency", claiming it is not above producing photos of "very young girls" in bikinis.
She said the newspaper had launched the attack because they hate her values.
A spokesman for the Daily Mail criticised the MPs for failing to say sorry and claimed the "belated statements of Ms Harman and her husband – full of pedantry and obfuscation – failed to answer the Mail's central points and deny allegations the Mail has not made … as for smears, it is a newspaper's job to ask awkward and controversial questions – questions that in this instance are still awaiting a satisfactory answer," he added.
Last year, Shami Chakrabarti, the current director of Liberty, who joined the organisation in 2001, issued an apology about the links between the NCCL and the PIE. In December, she said in a statement: "It is a source of continuing disgust and horror that even the NCCL had to expel paedophiles from its ranks in 1983 after infiltration at some point in the 70s."