The Savile Layers.

The questionable behaviour of the late Jimmy Savile continues to make headlines, and it’s beginning to reveal layer upon layer of sordid issues. It isn’t just about Jimmy Savile any longer.

Let’s be sensible about this. Jimmy Savile was a top ranking TV and radio DJ. As such, he was inevitably part of the sex, drugs and rock ’n roll culture which permeated the popular music business since at least the late fifties, and probably before. I see no reason to believe that he was alone in habitually enjoying sexual relations with legally underage girls. I think it reasonable to suppose that it was probably commonplace, since it was commonplace enough in the wider culture and continues to be so. That’s layer number one.

Layer number two concerns the allegations that many of his exploits were not consensual, but amounted to assault, sometimes of the most serious nature and made against the most vulnerable people. That’s a different matter, but there’s no means of redress in the case of Savile because he died last year. In his case at least, it’s now a matter of history.

Where this starts to get really interesting is when we come to layer number three. It’s now emerged that senior managers at the BBC covered up an expose of not only Savile’s activities, but the wider issue of a culture of abuse and illegal promiscuity in the organisation going back a long way. The media, the Prime Minister and other senior politicians are taking a holier-than-thou attitude to this, claiming that public confidence in the BBC has been seriously damaged. I agree, but my trust and confidence in the media and senior politicians is pretty much at rock bottom, too. And guess what…

Layer number four: Allegations are now starting to emerge that a powerful paedophile ring existed at the BBC, and that it was linked to Parliament and the Prime Minister’s Office.

Well now, how long have I been saying that there’s a dangerous, dishonest and dirty world existing beneath the supposedly ‘civilised’ veneer of the Establishment? And how long have eyes-wide-shut people been telling me that I’m just being silly and paranoid? And how many people in other supposedly ‘civilised’ countries in the western world will continue to imagine that it happens elsewhere, but not among their own politicians, and media people, and police, and educationalists, and religious figures, and youth workers, and showbusiness personalities…

Watch this space, and let’s see how the Establishment manages to paper over the cracks that have been increasingly appearing over the past year or two, as I expect they will. People do so need to believe that everything’s deep down clean, you see. That’s the problem.