Forgive me asking, but how do the police know Savile spent 'every waking minute' planning abuse?
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Anyone who reads the report about the former DJ Jimmy Savile is likely to come to the conclusion that he was a very wicked man who abused children on a scarcely believable scale.
Some of the allegations against him are gut-wrenchingly awful. He is said to have preyed on young children at a hospice and 13 hospitals, including a terminally-ill child at Great Ormond Street.
The weight of allegations, and the repetitive patterns of deviant behaviour, are irresistibly persuasive.
Allegations: Jimmy Savile is said to have preyed on young children at a hospice and 13 hospitals, including a terminally-ill child at Great Ormond Street
That Savile was a sick and perverted man there seems to be little doubt. And yet the report — a joint production by the Metropolitan Police and the NSPCC entitled Giving Victims A Voice — left me with a slightly nasty taste. So, too, has some of the hysterical reaction to it, not least from the police themselves.
The report effectively concludes that he must be guilty of all the allegations against him. They are actually referred to as ‘offences’, as though there is no doubt that he broke the law in every instance.
For perhaps understandable reasons, no victims are identified by name, though their allegations are accepted almost without qualification. Is it possible that one or two of them might have exaggerated or misremembered? Not according to the report. Everything is represented as proven, unchallengeable fact.
Even worse, perhaps, were the grandstanding and apparently attention-seeking remarks of policemen when the report was published last Friday. Its leading author, Detective Superintendent David Gray, asserted that Savile spent ‘every waking minute’ thinking about abusing children.
How can Mr Gray or anyone else know this? His is the excitable language of a low-brow fiction writer, not of a person responsible for an official report that is supposed to concern itself with verifiable evidence.
In a similar vein of hyperbole, Peter Spindler, the Metropolitan Police commander in charge of the inquiry named Operation Yewtree, claimed that the former DJ had ‘groomed the nation’.
Peter Spindler, the Metropolitan Police commander in charge of Operation Yewtree, claimed that the former DJ had 'groomed the nation'
Really? Savile’s alleged offences were, indeed, remarkably extensive. But to suggest that he single-handedly somehow made victims of us all is preposterous. It is to attribute him with vastly more malignant power than he possessed.
Moreover, Commander Spindler’s phrase implicitly lays all the blame on Savile, whereas it seems that other celebrities were also guilty of sex crimes against children. He may have been by far the worst offender, but he wasn’t the only one.
The report is so unremitting in its presumption of guilt on every count that one can’t help wondering whether the police are not trying to atone for their indulgence of the ghastly man when he was alive.
As Giving Victims A Voice concedes, there were lots of rumours and suspicions about his proclivities while he was being feted by all and sundry.
One journalist questioned him about them in an interview as long ago as 1990, as did another journalist, Louis Theroux, in a TV programme broadcast in 2000. A woman made an allegation of assault in the Eighties (the report admits the police file has been unaccountably mislaid) and there were three separate police investigations from 2007 to 2009.
If only the police had displayed a fraction of the zeal when Savile was alive that they show now he is dead. Of course, it is much easier to make accusations about the deceased than the living. That said, a really thorough investigation of the DJ before he died would surely have resulted in a criminal prosecution.
It’s not only the police who are trying to make up for past mistakes. It was reported yesterday that Whitehall mandarins have devised a bizarre plan to award Savile a second, posthumous knighthood so they can strip him of it. There is supposedly a constitutional bar that precludes removing knighthoods from the dead.
With the benefit of hindsight it is regrettable that such a gong was handed out to him in 1990. But now that he is dead and gone, he can’t suffer the ignominy of having an honour removed, as happened to the disgraced (and living) banker Fred Goodwin last year. The forfeiture committee is idiotically trying to make a show of distancing officialdom from Savile when the gate is shut and bolted.
Suspicions: Journalist Louis Theroux questioned Savile in a TV programme broadcast back in 2000
The media is also at fault for having indulged him — most egregiously the BBC, which nurtured and promoted the creepy monster notwithstanding rumours of his misbehaviour. The same BBC treated Friday’s report as though it were gospel in every respect.
To a lesser extent newspapers were also guilty of overlooking rumours of Savile’s activities while holding him up for adulation. That hardly justifies some of the wilder accusations against him that are surfacing.
Yesterday’s Sunday Express claimed he beat and raped a 12-year-old girl in a secretive satanic ritual at Stoke Mandeville Hospital in the company of other ‘devil worshippers’ in 1975. According to this lurid account, Savile wore a hooded robe and mask ‘in a candle-lit basement’ while incanting Latin.
The BBC treated Friday's report as though it were gospel in every respect
It sounds absolutely horrific, but did it happen? The story relies on the word of a therapist who allegedly spoke to the unidentified victim in 1992. This person reportedly recognised Savile ‘because of his distinctive voice and the fact that his blond hair was protruding from his side of the mask’.
Are you convinced? I’m not. No more than some of the more extreme ‘offences’ enumerated in the police and NSPCC report can this story be confidently stood up so that it would be taken seriously in a court of law.
But then you can’t libel the dead. We can say anything we wish about Savile, and he will never answer back. He can only attempt to explain his actions to the God in whom he said he believed.
My feeling is that he was a horrid, self-obsessed, vain little man who hurt a lot of people and probably ruined a number of lives. But we shouldn’t invest him with a destructive power greater than he possessed.
Nor should we automatically and unthinkingly find him guilty on every charge that has been made against him. Since he is dead, this denial of justice can hardly affect him — but it might affect, even warp, us. We should beware of the hysteria that leads us to embrace every bad thing said about the man.
The truth is that the BBC fostered a monster, that much of the media indulged him for many years and that the police, insufficiently curious and doubtless awed by his celebrity, failed to follow up proper lines of inquiry.
My fear is these lessons may be lost as the demonisation of Jimmy Savile grows apace. The pity of it is that he wasn’t stopped and prosecuted at the time. No amount of grandstanding by the police should obscure this simple fact.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2261888/Jimmy-Savile-report-How-police-know-spent-waking-minute-planning-abuse.html#ixzz2HxEOc6SZ
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