Tuesday 2 October 2012

The Savile Row

Now I know that Sir Jimmy Savile was innocent: Damian Thompson says that he was guilty.

Eccles has it right: 

Said a BBC spokesman, "We at the BBC knew nothing of his secret life as a Catholic. We naturally assumed that he was atheist in good standing, otherwise we would never have employed him. But it seems that he got up to some very questionable activities in his spare time."

If Esther Rantzen is telling the truth about how "everyone" knew, including her, but she still did nothing, then her position as President of ChildLine is now untenable. She and Julie Bindel, for whom I have a very great deal of time, are undoing decades of their own work by feeding both on and into the perception that child abuse is something mostly perpetrated by eccentric old bachelors who always did give many people the creeps. And where, pray, would that leave Damian Thompson?

Jimmy Savile was knighted by the Queen and knighted by the Pope. He did an enormous amount of work for charity, that object of unreserved hatred on the part of undergraduate cod-Marxists. He was a genuinely Northern and a genuinely working-class boy made good. He was hugely influential, even powerful, without ever having been to any university, never mind to Oxbridge.

Jimmy Savile made old-fashioned television programmes for mass audiences, which loved them and loved him. He did so on the BBC, as if that institution were any concern of the likes of him and his viewers. He was one of the best-known faces of popular culture while always entirely matter-of-fact about his faith in general and about his Catholicism in particular.

Jimmy Savile dared to exist as a single man, neither submitting to the rule of the New Matriarchy, nor making himself a figure of the pederast-founded, highly politicised homosexuality that has been the only tolerated zone of male space, in many ways since the early 1970s, but especially since the wilful destruction of the stockades of male employment in the 1980s. Cheered on, and still celebrated, by Damian Thompson.

No wonder that all the knives are out for his corpse. Blairism may have died on the platform of the Labour Party Conference. But it remains only too visibly alive and well elsewhere.

20 comments:

  1. The knives are out all right. All sharpened by David Lindsay. The Mabelgraph blog is anonymous. The Eccles and Bosco blog is both anonymous and satirical. But they and the rest take their lead from your named, photo-headed, entirely serious site and your comments elsewhere. Thompson's increasingly hysterical responses to criticism on Telegraph Blogs make it abundantly clear that he knows the game is up. He is obviously having a nervous breakdown and should have stayed on the booze. You did more than anyone else to get rid of him from the Herald. The main prize is now within our sights, the removal of Damian Thompson from Telegraph Blogs.

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  2. And Savile defended Paul Gadd/Gary Glitter.

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  3. Nothing, alas, unusual about that, as I set out yesterday.

    Even now, that would be treated entirely differently in the case of, say, an opera singer or a classical conductor. The sort of musician who appeals to the likes of Damian Thompson.

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  4. And you defend Savile ...

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  5. Thompson employed Kit Cunningham at the Herald and when Cunningham was exposed penned a Telegraph post about how "everyone" always knew about his late friend and not knowing about it only proved that you were one of the little people who didn't count. He has also bragged on there about Anglican ministers of his acquaintance who have interfered with underage boys. He is in absolutely no position to comment about Jimmy Savile now.

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  6. I'm sorry, David, but I can't agree with you on this. He might have done this, that or the next thing, but a significant number of allegations have been made which, taken as a whole, suggest that Savile might have used his public position in order to abuse young girls. The allegations will never become evidence, for sure, the time for that has passed of its own accord. I agree with you about the untenability of Rantzen's position. However, all that is ancillary to the core issue - I know nothing of the English law of evidence, but under Scottish law the 'Moorov doctrine' of evidence of similar fact would, in this case, almost certainly have permitted a prosecution to proceed if he were still alive and if these allegations had been made while he was still alive.

    What is truly disturning about this is that the secrecy continued right up to his death and beyond,
    nnd none of it ever had to be facilitated by a superinjunction. Makes you think, doesn't it?

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  7. And as I have said yesterday and today, that then puts the spotlight on, most obviously, Esther Rantzen, with her CBE "for services to children", but who is due to appear on television tomorrow evening to tell us that "everybody knew about Jimmy Savile".

    It also raises the whole question of underage sex in the decades when he was in his pomp. And that one could lead to all sorts of places. Somehow, it never quite happened after Jonathan King. But then, if Savile's, for the sake of argument, victims had been boys, then nothing at all would be being made of this now, except perhaps because he was a Catholic.

    A real can of worms has been opened up here. The only question is which one. The one that is opened up by his innocence? Or the one that is opened up by his guilt?

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  8. Brilliant concluding line from Eccles and Bosco: "Already, there are calls for Sir Jimmy to be posthumously stripped of his knighthood on account of his Catholic habits. There are many precedents for this, mostly dating from the 16th century."

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  9. Benjamin Britten's friendships with boys was celebrated by the BBC in a documentary a few years back as in that "nothing to see here - move along please" way for which British elites have become famous.

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  10. "Thompson employed Kit Cunningham at the Herald and when Cunningham was exposed penned a Telegraph post about how "everyone" always knew about his late friend and not knowing about it only proved that you were one of the little people who didn't count."

    Anonymous, please can you provide a link to this post?

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  11. Just to correct the first comment from Anonymous: no, I don't take my lead from David Lindsay, or anyone else. I thinks for meself.

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  12. You certainly do.

    But the myth of my power is a very persistent one, especially among those who devote great reams of their time to insisting most forcefully that no one has ever heard of me, no one reads me, and so on, and on, and on.

    Your site is unmissable. You are a genius.

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  13. @23:12, only the same way you could, by looking it up in the Telegraph archive.

    No post on this is allowed to have comments on Telegraph Blogs. Says it all.

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  14. You mentioned Jonathan King. In 1985 I was walking with my 15 year-od son along Bayswater Road towards Oxford St. A flash sports car pulled up and the driver asked directions to a particular music shop in Oxford St. It was Jonathan King. He then spoke to my son about his TV programme which concentrated on music from the USA. He wanted my son to join his viewers panel and gave him his card with his personal phone number on it. He said he liked to invite some younger people on his panel to London and would my son be interested. I knew nothing about his personal habits at the time but it was so obviously strange that someone in the music business living in London did not know the whereabouts of a shop in Oxford St. I smelt a very large rat and would not allow my son to contact him. Some years later the truth came out. I could not understand why other parents did not see it.

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  15. It was reported in Private Eye at the time, but no one paid any attention.

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  16. In fact, girls are far more likely to be the victims of child abuse than boys. The climate and what was 'accepted' and likely to be taken action against was certainly different then, particularly in relation to abuse against young women.
    Of course, the age of consent was also different for men and women, so Jonathan King was much more vulnerable to arrest than Savile, even though King's activities appear to have been far more consensual

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  17. Your views as a whole are bizarre. Sir Jimmy is innocent until there's a trial, however. Since there won't be, he's innocent forever.

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