Thursday 11 October 2012

Chequered

Jimmy Savile stayed at Chequers for all eleven New Year's Eves when Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister. They were as close as that. What with that and Hillsborough, she must curse every morning that she wakes up. The net is tightening around her. A state funeral? She'll be lucky to get an unmarked ditch.

Thatcher enthusiastically supported the regime in Chile, even holding it up as a model for Britain. The rape of children in front of their parents as a form of torture was standard practice there. Sexual abuse also was and is routine in controlling the child labourers from whose employers, if they can be so described, she and her successors have preferred to import coal rather than exercise and defend national sovereignty by tapping into this Island's own vast reserves of that fuel.

Comments pointing out these facts are of course being instantly removed from Telegraph Blogs, which I admit is part of the fun of posting them there. Such media interests are determined that questions only be asked about the BBC. And only about a frightfully Northern and frightfully working-class person who made frightfully lowbrow television programmes for frightfully enormous numbers of frightfully common people.

Compare and contrast that site's, and not least its editor's, treatment of this story with its reaction to the revelations around a man whom that editor had actually known and, in another capacity, employed, namely the late Fr Kit Cunningham.

Once again, we were urbanely informed that "everyone knew". But also that we only indicated how far below the salt we were by not knowing, or by objecting either to the deceit or to the acts themselves, or both. Fr Cunningham, you see, was posh.

And he certainly was not so crude as to be interested in girls. That, frankly, is what Damian Thompson really holds in such distaste about Jimmy Savile. Yes, even more than the class thing and the regional thing.

In turn, that attitude is causing the line to blur between Damian Thompson the character, with his Daily Telegraph column and his position as Editor of Telegraph Blogs, as well as formerly as Editor-in-Chief of the Catholic Herald, and the actor who plays him, whose name the character has been given in accordance with the grand old tradition of British comedy, even though the two of them have absolutely nothing in common.

10 comments:

  1. Damian Thompson. He gave you a chance with Telegraph Blogs didn't he?

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  2. Five years ago, I think. But it feels longer. No one who is anyone can believe that I ever stooped to working for that man.

    Ah, Telegraph Blogs! The battle-scarred survivors from that never-ending online nervous breakdown on the part of its editor should have an annual dinner or something.

    But on-topic, please.

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  3. You have published tow high powered books since then. But the second one has an important section on Thatcher as well as the part described in your post yesterday, "the most comprehensive study ever published of the indulgence of the sexual abuse of adolescents by the liberal wing of the British Establishment in the 1970s and 1980s." Why nothing on Thatcher and Savile? Why nothing on Savile at all?

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  4. I completed it earlier this year. But I might do another edition next year, once the next book is out of the way. A new edition including this, among other things.

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  5. The book already calls Thompson by name a public sinner to be denied the Sacraments except in danger of death because of his treatment of you over your Telegraph blog which you linking to blaming him by name for Israeli war crimes against Catholics in Palestine and Lebanon. Pity you didn't include his address, it's in Who's Who. Can you put it in any future edition? And any chance of a future edition of the first book, which presently denounces only "the Ordinariate's most vocal media supporter" or some such form of words for trying to flood the Church with practising homosexuals like himself? Any chance of a second edition saying the name?

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  6. Alright on topic, you are spot on about the actor/character thing. As you know he is very out gay very out atheist in real life. The Telegraph character is a work of fiction.

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  7. Yet he is treated as the arbiter of orthodoxy.

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  8. I can't help feeling that if it weren't for the prospect of Damian Thompson one day opening his door to a hail of bullets from some Arab Christian militia, you would have laid back and died on an operating table or a hospital bed years ago. Or your own bed. Forget Thatcher cursing every day that she wakes up. You curse every day that you wake up and nobody has rubbed out Damian Thompson or Oliver Kamm in that order.

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  9. There is a name above theirs. But they are at two and three, not that it stops there.

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