Victim-Centred, Locally-Led?

With no diplomatic background, one of Jeffrey Epstein’s closest friends has been made the British Ambassador to Washington. The Government that has made that appointment is now being taken to task over its failure to inquire into certain other grooming gangs.

Like you, I have never met a paedophile. I mean, we may have done, in the way that we may have met a Muggletonian. But we are wholly unaware of having done so, you and I both. I apologise to any Muggletonian reading this. Yet this country’s cultural and political elite cannot get out of bed, if that, without tripping over one or more nonces. And every single time, our betters had had no idea. Or so we are invariably expected to believe.

The truth is that like illegal drug use, the sexual abuse of children, especially but not exclusively adolescent males, is fundamental to cultural and political power in this country, both those practices themselves and the opportunities that they presented for blackmail. That in turn crosses over with the endemic sexual harassment and assault of male staff who are barely, if at all, into adulthood.

It has all come out about Margaret Thatcher’s friends. She knew about Cyril Smith when she arranged his knighthood. Jimmy Savile’s knighthood was rejected four times by the relevant committee, until she absolutely insisted upon it for the man with whom she spent every New Year’s Eve, and on whose programmes she was so obsessed with appearing that her staff had to ration those appearances. Her closest lieutenant was Peter Morrison. Unlike the then Prince of Wales, she would have had sight of every file on Laurens van der Post.

Smith was a highly eccentric and largely absentee MP for a tiny minority party, but he was a Thatcherite avant la lettre, who had left the Labour Party when he had started to see cars outside council houses. Thatcher’s father was also a Liberal until all of that fell apart between the Wars, and he was never a member of the Conservative Party. He, she and Smith were politically indistinguishable.

That the Radical Right put out pamphlets demanding the legalisation of paedophile activity was mentioned in Our Friends in the North, which was broadcast in 1996. Our Friends in the North is so integral to subsequent popular culture that one of its four stars went on to play James Bond, another was the first Doctor of this century’s revival of Doctor Who, and neither of the others is exactly obscure.

That Thatcherite MPs were likely to commit sexual violence against boys with the full knowledge of the party hierarchy formed quite a major subplot in To Play the King, the middle series of the original House of Cards trilogy. To Play the King was broadcast as long ago as 1993. Of the generation that was now in its pomp, every politician and commentator saw every minute of that trilogy.

Moreover, anyone who came to political maturity in what were then the newly-former mining areas will have been made fully aware that the miners in the dock, all the way back in 1984 and 1985, routinely made reference to the proclivities of the Home Secretary of the day, Leon Brittan. Those proclivities were common knowledge from Fife and the Lothians, to County Durham and the southern part of Northumberland, to South Yorkshire, to Derbyshire, to South Wales, among other places. Nothing was carried in the papers or included in the court reports, but the pit villages never needed Twitter in order to circumvent that kind of censorship.

Yvette Cooper has a former mining constituency. Yet she thinks that those grooming gangs which were currently attracting attention should be investigated only by the Police. She should tell that to the veterans of the Battle of Orgreave, along with the Hillsborough families, the victims of the spycops, and numerous others, including Doreen Lawrence, on whose reputation Keir Starmer had long traded.