CEMETERYGATE

EVEN THOSE WITH A PRURIENT interest in the events behind the scandal that has led to former BBC star and ex-philanthropist and no doubt future-ex-Sir Jimmy Savile (pictured above) will be shocked to the medulla and chilled to the bones on reading or hearing the revelations of Paul Gambaccini, one of the more lucid of the DJs who were hired by BBC radio in the nineteen seventies.

 

WE HAVE UNFORTUNATELY BECOME used to hearing about character X or Y being a paedophile; or film star W or Z having an extra-marital affair, often, as it happens, with someone of a different sex to their legally wedded partner. These press outings have been taking place with such regularity that even “right-thinking folk” – should there be any such individuals besides myself and my good lady wife – are now hardened to such news in the morning papers.

 

OUR LONG, LAZY SUNDAY MORNINGS, forgiving the plug, may often now be filled with over-the-marmalade discussions, once we get beyond the “Pass the economics supplement, sweetness” and “Have you got the Style magazine over there, David?” stage, involving such niceties as “Oh, I see that Lord Jxxxxx Hxxxx (name withheld) has finally been caught with xxxxxxxxxx (fill in, from: boys, animals, his wife’s sister, his own sister, etc.), all of which have now become as much a part of a gentleman’s breakfast as brown toast and burnt bacon.

 

WHAT NO ONE WAS EXPECTING WAS THE NEWS from Mr Gambaccini today. We may not be able to understand what makes a grown man a paedophile when we do not share their mental problems; yet trying to understand what is going on in the mind of a man who volunteers to “help” ambulance crews to bring dead people to the morgue because, as Paul Gambaccini states, Jimmy Savile was a “necrophiliac” (my inverted commas), a claim he made today live on BBC Radio 5, is beyond us.

 

ACCORDING TO SAVILE HIMSELF, he just wanted to be with dead people at the end of their lives. We all might have thought it was innocent back then, but it is one more thing that has lost its innocence in this, the age of perversion. Savile stated about the “quiet time” he liked to spend with people who died in hospital: “One of my jobs is to take away the deceased. You can look after somebody, be alone with somebody, who has lived a whole lifetime, and I’m just saying goodbye and looking after him.”

HAS HE GOT NEWS FOR YOU

IT WAS TO MY GREAT SURPRISE that on television today I saw Lord Conrad Black, aka Baron Black of Crossharbour, also known as Federal Bureau of Prisons prisoner #18330-424 of Coleman Federal Correctional Complex, Florida, ostensibly selling a book that he has recently completed.

 

FORMER TELEGRAPH OWNER BLACK, perhaps one of the few remaining “media barons” in the full sense of the term, was interviewed by "burly bully" Adam Boulton on Sky News this lunchtime.

 

AMONG THE MOMENTS OF FUN during which the Baron was visibly irritated by Boulton’s questions, bordering on the rude at times when he called Boulton a "jackass", we were given the information that this week he will be appearing on the programme Have I Got News for You, run by Ian Hislop, the editor of Private Eye, the magazine which for years headed a campaign to have Black brought to justice for what were allegedly fraudulent activities, involving, perhaps, stealing pensions from the employees of one of his companies.

 

OF COURSE WE NOW KNOW that he was innocent of all charges, and that his three-year spell in prison was all some unfortunate mistake or miscarriage of justice. It remains to be seen – as Lord Black did not appear to know any details about the programme – how he fares when faced with Hislop himself. We will see this Friday.

EUROPEAN DEMOCRACY INACTION

ALTHOUGH CURRENT CIRCUMSTANCES may not provide the best examples of the reasons leading to this sentiment, there are times when one feels somewhat proud to be English and – in a wider sense – part of the democratic tradition that has produced the institutions and attitudes forming the gleaming lights in the modern world that are the United Kingdom and the United States of America.

 

THE RECENT RESIGNATION OF ANDREW MITCHELL, perhaps the third most important member of the governing Conservative and Unionist Party, is one of some events that show the enormous gap existing between the Anglo-Saxon notion of what politicians are supposed to be doing and the notion that appears to be prevalent in the world at large, and particularly among our European brother and sister countries.

 

“PLEBGATE” AS THE POPULAR PRESS now seems to be calling the Mitchell case, is remarkable for two aspects. The first of these is that the Chief Whip to the Government travelled about by bicycle, which is increasingly a trademark of upper class political Englishness; the second is, obviously, that such a grandee in, arguably, one of the most important countries in the world can be brought to his knees due to being rude to a policeman.

 

ANOTHER EVENT INVOLVES HAPLESS George “Boy” Osborne, Chancellor of the Exchequer and millionaire, who was caught travelling on a train from Cheshire to London Euston in the first class compartment only possessing a ticket for a standard carriage. The aspect of note here is the fact that he was on a train. And that he then happily paid the £160 “fine” or “excess fee”.

 

I WAS RECENTLY STUDYING a European Union document on “expenditure” (read “waste”) by politicians in Greece, Italy and Portugal, and was alarmed to see that the norm was for ministers to have an average of six personal private political secretaries and one twenty-four hour chauffeur-driven car (three drivers over a 24-hour period) in these countries, thus drawing – at least to my mind – a direct parallel between excess in political expenditure and national bankruptcy.. Perhaps the “troika-enforced” cuts in these countries could start out by getting more politicians to go by train or – perish the thought – by bicycle. Of course they could carry on being as aloof and insulting to the plebs as they have always been, but at least they could save their countrymen some cash.

SAVILE ROW

 

IT SEEMS RATHER REDUNDANT TODAY to want to discover whether in fact Sir Jimmy Savile OBE, the former “BBC icon”, “national treasure”, “children’s saviour” and overall heart-of-gold do-gooder was really a hands-down-kids’-knickers-come-and-see-the-puppies-in-my-dressing-room paedophile or not; weight of evidence, guys and gals, seems to be gathering to make any case against this being true almost impossible.

 

ACCORDING TO SOME, MUCH-LOVED SAVILE would find it somewhat more difficult today to endear himself to the nation given the fact that he was both a heavy chain smoker and heavy chain wearer, two elements of presentation which would be frowned upon in most decent dancehalls and TV studios in these our enlightened times.

 

YET IT APPEARS THAT THE MOST PROMINENT TRAIT of his character – ie that of his “feeling up” and “touching up” (as they used to say) of female guests on his shows, of grooming girls and of – to put it bluntly – raping girls in order to get them a place on his rather pointless and bizarre TV shows – was either ignored or tolerated by everyone at the BBC, principally, and at all of the entities for whom he would put in an appearance; including, worryingly, Stoke Mandeville Hospital.

 

I CANNOT BELIEVE THAT ANYONE who came into contact with this absurd man did not think that, as my late father used to say about him, he was not “a full shilling”.

 

THE SADDEST ISSUE INVOLVED in all of this rather grim business is that now that someone has lifted the cloak on the crimes supposedly committed by Savile, everyone is now coming forward to say that they “always thought” he was “odd”, or “we always knew he was messing with youngsters”, or “most of us thought something was wrong”, or “I found him in his dressing room with a young girl, naked” – all of these quotes are taken ipsa verbissima from interviews or statements made by contemporaries of Savile over the last week.

 

WE HAVE NOT YET GOT TO THE STAGE when people who saw, and understood, that a girl was being raped and did not report it can be convicted under the law. Or have we? One tends to think of the film “The Accused”, written by Tom Topor and directed by Jonathan Kaplan.

 

THE LEGAL ARGUMENT AND THEN ROW OVER what one can do with the – if one thinks about it – hundreds and hundreds of men and women who must have known what he was doing with these poor girls may rattle on for some time. The best the BBC can do is to assure us that there are no more Saviles hanging around waiting for a break.