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.