It was all odd. Very odd. Max Clifford was never a BBC man, but rather was always employed by what the BBC would sneeringly have referred to as “the Murdoch Press”. In a bizarre collision of past and present, Max made his biggest breakthrough into the world of PR with the story of Freddie Starr and a hamster. His puppet-master career never looked back until he was washed away by the same tsunami of filth that had first enveloped Freddie. Whilst Freddie climbed out from the raging torrent a few weeks ago, Max has found himself drowned by those same murky waters.
‘Max … believes in exposing the hypocrisy of sleazy Tories… Nor will you learn much about Max’s role in the case of Nadine Milroy-Sloan, a fantasist who claimed she had been sexually assaulted by Neil and Christine Hamilton…’
I wondered if in 2014 the Guardian would label a victim called Nadine Milroy-Sloan a “fantasist” or rather a “victim who must be believed”. Max’s antipathy to the Tories seemed to stem from what he saw of National Health hospitals as he spent much of his daughter’s childhood years in and out of more than one. It appears that he never encountered Jimmy Savile however, since Jimmy doesn’t merit a single mention in Max’s biography.
What seemed at first a merely bizarre aspect of the Savile Revelations was its party-political development.
The entry of Tom Watson MP into this matter seemed quite bewildering at first. The Labour politician had become a national figure as a result of the Hacking Scandal. His disapproval of underhand journalistic methods at News International had led to his being celebrated as the man who ‘humbled’ Rupert Murdoch, an achievement Tom likes to see celebrated, not least by himself.
Watson though shares a significant area of commonality with the Murdoch Press. He hates paedos. (Well – who wouldn’t). Whilst Watson’s role in the demonising of Murdoch is celebrated by everyone including himself, his role in demonising Gary Glitter in concert with the Murdoch Press in 2001, is less well-known.
The disgraced pop star, Gary Glitter, has made a comeback album and is planning to tour again, The Telegraph can reveal. Last night, an MP demanded that David Blunkett, the Home Secretary, take action to ban the sale of the recording. Tom Watson, the Labour MP for West Bromwich East and a leading member of the House of Commons Home Affairs Select Committee, said: “It is disgraceful that this convicted paedophile should be allowed to peddle his wares.
“I am writing to David Blunkett to ask him to intervene to stop it being distributed in Britain. I am also asking the British Phonographic Institute (BPI), which governs the industry, to do all in their power to prevent it being distributed. “I am surprised that any record company would have anything to do with this man, we cannot have young children falling under his spell.” Mr Watson is also asking the web server which carries Gary Glitter’s official fan site to close it down.
Gary Glitter had of course found himself in this predicament in 2001 largely because of the News of the World, the same newspaper Watson now glories in having been instrumental in labelling as part of a corrupt organisation. It’s worth reflecting upon how instrumental that newspaper was in the snuffing out of Glitter.
… under cross-examination by Trevor Burke, the woman said she was paid £10,000 by the News of the World for the story of her relationship with the singer. In the contract, she could be paid a further £25,000 by the newspaper if the star was convicted of having pornography or sex with underage girls, Mr Burke said. The woman insisted that she decided to speak out after hearing of Mr Glitter’s arrest over a well-publicised case. She denied she had made her allegations in order to make money from the newspaper.
What adds further hollow resonance to Watson’s outspoken intervention in 2001 is that the Home Affairs Select Committee he was part of, was taking an inherently hostile approach to the way UK Law was approaching historic allegations of sexual abuse and Watson could not possibly be unaware of the implicit hazards of the UK Law in this area of UK jurisprudence.
Watson however was as unambiguous as the Murdoch Press had been, about the irredeemable ‘wickedness’ of Gary Glitter. There was to be no Rehabilitation of Offenders for paedos. Watson’s government in 2003 rebutted every single recommendation for change that was made by Watson’s Committee. The Murdoch Press was to remain as implacable in 2008 as Watson had been in 2001. There would be no respite for Gary. No hiding place. No social rehabilitation for this outcast, this prisoner of societal disgust. Tom must have heartily approved.
What was it I wondered that could so unite Tom Watson with his hated Murdoch Press in this way? The answer may also lie in 2001. That was the year of the Dave Jones historical abuse allegations case.
Ironically, just days before Jimmy Savile died in 2011, Dave Jones was interviewed by the left-leaning Independent newspaper. Jones was scathing about his treatment by the UK Police, and their legal procedures, as approved of by the CPS and the British Legal Establishment.
He had been falsely accused of the vilest of crimes by former school pupils, some of whom had been told by police officers “trawling” for witnesses that they could get compensation. “Of all the things you could accuse me of, this was the worst,” Jones said. “I would rather have been accused of murder… I never had the opportunity to say anything because the witnesses were found to be lying in the first few days of the trial anyway. They were after money and I couldn’t understand why the police couldn’t see that, why it had got to that stage. But they had trawled, left calling cards. “And they were incompetent. One person who made accusations wasn’t even [at the school] when I was. Surely that’s easy to find out. I’d heard so many stories about them raiding houses and taking computers. They didn’t do that until Ann, my wife, wrote an article saying they hadn’t been to the house – and then they did, someone must have thought ‘tick a box’. They didn’t even realise Ann had worked at the same place. I lost faith in the judicial system and Ann has never got over it and is still bitter.
One sentence struck a very strong chord with me: One person who made accusations wasn’t even at the school when I was. I shall return to that issue with respect to Duncroft in my next blogpost.
Information about what lies behind these Historical Abuse cases is hard to find. The legal system demands secrecy about the Accusers – even after the case is over. This anonymity seems predicated on the basis that children are involved in child abuse prosecutions and their future lives should not be hampered by a “reputation” trailing after them. Such legal logic that might make sense for a 9-year-old makes no sense at all in the case of adults, but it is the lawyers who make the rules and they make them to suit themselves and they seem to have made these particular rules for a very good reason of their own. The reason sometimes slips out into the public sphere. In Dave Jones’ case it was explained by Lynda Lee-Potter in the Daily Mail in about 2003. Lynda was actually writing about another case of a celebrity accused of paedophilia in the early years of the Millennium: Matthew Kelly. However in the course of that article she remarked:
Two years ago, I interviewed the family of football manager David Jones who was falsely accused of abusing children. His sweet-faced 16-year-old daughter Chloe told me how she’d been terrified of seeing her father named in the News of the World’s weekly list of paedophiles. ‘Other people probably looked and thought, “Oh, those disgusting child abusers”,’ she said. ‘I thought, “What if one of these men is innocent?” and some of them were.” David Jones lost his job and a year of his life before he was cleared. He’s convinced that the evil accusations made by a rent boy, a convicted arsonist and an armed robber…
In 2009, in the Liverpool Echo, a further detail was leaked, as Dave Jones’ book was finally published (after legal wrangling). It was entitled No Smoke Without Fire:
A transsexual arsonist took the stand to give evidence against me. This was my first chance to see the whites of the eyes of one of these people who had made up such disgusting lies about me. This was a person who was serving a prison sentence and who, we had discovered, had undergone a psychiatric report six months earlier in which he mentioned everyone who had supposedly abused him (at the care home). There was no mention of me in it…
As I read these old reports some aspects of the Savilisation of Britain began to come into focus for me. The mantra of ‘Victims must be believed’ had always puzzled me. Why would I NOT believe a Victim? Could the reason be that if ‘the Victim’ was most likely a rent boy, a transexual convicted arsonist or an armed robber I would be automatically inclined to begin to doubt their word? I recalled that various victims in the Savile revelations were plainly ‘victims of society’. One Savile victim I recalled had had details published about her: Three of her children were taken into care as babies, and a fourth at ten years old. More of a victim of society it’s hard to imagine. No word about, or from, the children though.
Suddenly the attitudes of a socialist politician proud to be described by The Sun as ‘a fundamentalist zealot’ made a whole different sort of sense. Historical Child Abuse Allegations seem to have become a frontier of the age-old British Class War! The rent boys, transsexuals, arsonists and armed robbers are the victims of the fundamentally unfair UK society. They must be believed because they are victims of an unfair society. Once I’d made that leap in my political thinking another early aspect of the Savile Revelations made much more sense.
This Class War aspect was reflected in the recent Panorama title: The Power to Abuse. The BBC journalists were all part of the same perverted sexual-political mind-set. Those ‘in power’ did not just economically exploit the lower classes, they sexually exploited them too! We were plunging into a disguised Victorian Melodrama involving cruel Squires and Barons! But how did the very working-class Jimmy Savile end up fitting into this New Age scenario of class warfare? The BBC Panorama voice-over explains:
18:50 …From early on Power mattered to Savile. Dan Davies interviewed him in his later years. Savile told him about befriending powerful people back in Leeds… In 1983 Savile told The Sun about his violent past and sexual exploits. Honours Committee papers from the time show the expose almost scuppered his chances of a knighthood…
In 1990 Savile finally got his wish. He became Sir Jimmy…. 19:54
In the two years since this entire nonsense started, Jimmy’s ascribed motives seem to be shifting from spending every minute of every waking day seeking chances to have sex, to spending every minute of every waking day waiting and hoping to join the Ruling Class! Jimmy was not just a sex abuser, he was something much, much worse. He was a Betrayer of the Working Class!!
Another passage in Lynda Lee-Potters 2003 article took on a whole new significance:
The police know that individuals continually invent malicious stories about famous people. They do it out of malice, envy, for money or a pathetic yearning to feel important. They know that the current position, which allows the accused to be named without a shred of evidence, is an added inducement to the greedy, malevolent or mad.
I was left thinking Lynda knew just what she was talking about, but it wasn’t just the police she should be talking about either. There’s a whole lot more going on.
Power to the people!!
No matter how politically correct a cause might be, the real test of it is whether it relies upon Truth.
In the case of Jimmy Savile we now know that the crimes he was accused of at the BBC, and at Duncroft around 1974 were not true. He was innocent. What sort of Society prosecutes innocent people and finds them guilty despite all the evidence? Lessons from the History of Politics suggest it could be Us.
©Moor Larkin