A ONE-TIME diplomat with a distinguished career is facing jail after being convicted today of child sex abuse.

Stanley Wilkinson, 70, was released on bail while medical reports were prepared but a judge warned that custody is “inevitable” when he appears for sentence on September 20.

Wilkinson, of Lavender Court, Sittingbourne, told a jury at Maidstone Crown Court that he began his career with the Air Ministry after leaving school. He then completed two years' National Service and joined the Foreign Office in 1954.

His said his career took him to various parts of the world, including eight years in America, and his last posting was to Zambia. He stayed for two years and retired as First Secretary in 1988.

The court heard that his victim was subjected to a catalogue of sexual abuse from an early age.

She said Wilkinson started by touching her indecently and eventually progressed to trying to rape her. She was unable to tell anyone about her ordeal for some years.

Wilkinson, she said, had warned her to keep quiet, adding: “No-one would believe you, anyway.”

She eventually told a police officer that she had an image in her mind of him being in the Foreign Office and her mother not believing her.

The girl, now aged 18, said the first time anything happened was when she was playing in the garden of his then home in Periwinkle Close, Sittingbourne, when she was aged about six or seven.

He asked her to give him a cuddle and picked her up. “He just lifted me up like you would a baby,” she said. “Then he put his hand down my trousers and started touching my bum.”

She claimed similar incidents happened a number of times. He would touch her bottom or, more often, she said, her private parts.

The girl wept as she was interviewed by police in March last year.

“It was just touching at first,” she said. “That was when I was about nine and when he lived in Sheerness. I used to think of a brick wall and just try to blank it. I used to be in my own little world. He would pounce like a tiger or something. He was like an animal.”

When she was about 10 or 11 she was in his garden of his present home and he pulled her into the greenhouse and tried to rape her. "I just kicked him and I had to run away,” she said. “I just kept moving and kicking.” She ran to Sittingbourne station and caught a train back home.

There was also an occasion, she said, when Wilkinson tried to make her touch him.

Wilkinson, denied two charges of attempted rape, three of indecent assault and one of indecency with a child between July 1992 and July 1998. He was convicted of all charges by a 10-2 majority.

Wilkinson, who married in 1956, denied in evidence that there was any truth whatsoever in the allegations. “I believe she’s lying,” he said.

Asked by Judge Michael Neligan if he was claiming that somebody put the girl up to it, he replied: “I believe so.”

Wilkinson was in January cleared of four charges of indecent assault on another girl, now aged 11, between October 22 2000 and January 31 last year. Judge Anthony Balston stopped that trial and directed the jury to find him not guilty.