Selection Box

And so the Mail on Sunday affects only just to have found out about Peter Thornton and the Paedophile Information Exchange.

Lowering the age of consent to 14 was his own stated view. Not, or not only, that of any of his clients.

The BBC tried for nearly a week to pretend that it had never heard of the PIE, before showing its own archive footage to accompany its reports.

It is inconceivable that anyone who was watching the news 30 to 35 years ago has been unaware of that organisation, even if they might understandably have given it not a moment's thought since.

But the Mail titles are now flogging a dead horse.

Whereas some of us were publishing all of this, which the media and much of the public have always known, while Harriet Harman and Patricia Hewitt were in the Cabinet. Where was the Mail then?

Where was the Telegraph, from which I was sacked by a Blogs Editor with more than a little group loyalty to certain subcultures from the late 1970s and the early 1980s?

If you want to know why this story did not appear on Telegraph Blogs while the people at the centre of it still mattered, or in Hewitt's case were even still resident of this side of the world, then ask him.

His home address, his mobile telephone number and his personal email address are all given in this Who's Who entry.