Maggie and Hattie

The universal media protection of Margaret Thatcher as the Savile case unfolds is just jaw-dropping.

The only two arrests have been of her outspoken supporters and generous donors, a category which also included both Jimmy Savile and Jonathan King. Savile, moreover, was a close personal friend of Thatcher's. Her closest parliamentary aide's abuse of boys has finally moved from a very open secret to no secret at all, and her Downing Street is on the brink of exposure as the meeting point of all the paedophile rings in these Islands, possibly in Western Europe.

If she were in better health, then she would already have been arrested, first over Hillsborough, and then again over this. Frankly, is she really all that ill, rather than merely very old? Has anyone bothered to demand an objective assessment of her health?

It is all very well to go on about Harriet Harman and what was once the New Left. It is all very well to plagiarise one of my books in order to go on about Harriet Harman and what was once the New Left, even if, by your own admission, you yourself once gave a job on a Catholic paper to a paedophile priest precisely because he was a paedophile. But by 1997, when Harriet Harman and what was once the New Left got in, the damage had already been done.

It had been done in the 1980s by the sociologically indistinguishable New Right, which always had a more coherent position in that it always did believe in the economic system in which prohibitions on drugs, say, or on sex between adults and children were impossible. The New Left came round to that economic view and thus became New Labour. But the New Right, called Thatcherism while in power, always did see the join, and always acted accordingly.

Hence, for example, Margaret Thatcher was surrounded by Jimmy Savile, Gary Glitter, Jonathan King, Peter Morrison and all the rest of them, giving a paedophile a range of Cabinet positions from which to implement a succession of her flagship policies.

Once the generation of Conservatives actually formed by Thatcherism staged its coup after having lost the 2010 General Election, it enacted legislation that the previous Labour Government had specifically ruled out, so that men who had had sex with 16-year-old boys (or boys who could have passed for 16, or what have you) while the age of consent was 21 had their records wiped clean. Give that a moment to sink in.