Verdict on Leveson: don’t blame the Press for Cameron’s pantomime of blunders

In certain countries – including not a few in the so-called free world – I couldn’t write what you are about to read. Laws would proscribe such anti-Establishment heresy, though not in Britain…not until now, that is, where the Leveson Report threatens to challenge that.

In his defence, the judge walked a tightrope over his inquiry into the ‘culture, practices and ethics’ of the Press. Because whatever were to be his findings, m’lud was inevitably stuck between the proverbial rock and hard place.

His first option was to modify the status quo – beefing up the Press Complaints Commission (PCC), with greater representation from the laity or even a judge like himself.

Inevitably, this would have laid Leveson open to accusation by certain vested interests that he buckled to the print barons and we hacks would be toasting his health in the Last Chance Saloon

His second was to recommend a new, independent body to police newspapers and, after long deliberation, Leveson plumped for it. However, if implemented it will signal a monumental blunder in the wake of the earlier one, which established his inquiry.

I’ve no criticism of the judge, who did a commendable job with an impossible brief and his observations are fair, balanced and objective.

JUDGING THE JUDGE: Leveson’s observations were fair, balanced and objective

Yet, his recommendations patently fail to square a circle he desperately sought to avoid: state licensing of the Press, totally contradicting his insistence, ‘This is not and cannot be characterised as statutory regulation’.

It can and will. Moreover, any short-term gain risks being outweighed by long-term dangers of future regimes moving the goalposts. So, small wonder David Cameron is squirming.

The inquiry might have made for compulsive telly viewing, much of it a pantomime of hot air from celebrity whingers grinding axes. But it was a monumental political gaffe to have unleashed Leveson in the first place.

The PM hung it on legitimate concern of ‘havoc’ – the judge’s own word – wreaked on innocent families, like that of murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler, by rabid newshounds, blatantly oblivious to their own rules of engagement.

A likelier reason, though, was Cameron trying to amend for – as his critics claim – naivety in supping with the media devil, only neglecting to take a long spoon. As Icarus flew lethally too close to the sun, he made the cardinal error of getting too cosy with The Sun newspaper (and News of the World) luminaries, Rebekah Brooks and Andy Coulson.

Nonetheless, appointing Leveson was a silly, political knee-jerk, and one that threatens to nail Cameron for posterity as the PM who chanced 300 years of Press freedom on the toss of a judicial inquiry. In doing so, he ignored wiser heads, like Thomas Jefferson, one of America’s founding fathers, who noted, ‘the liberty of speaking and writing guards our other liberties’

What pains me as, I believe, a conscionable journalist is I’ve been hung out to dry with a bag of rotten apples that lurks within every profession, business and industry.

TOO CLOSE FOR COMFORT?  Cameron is paying the price of his links with Murdoch luminary Rebekah Brooks

Because the overwhelmingly vast majority of us scribes don’t eavesdrop on other people’s voice-mail, hatch plots with dodgy MPs and bung coppers moolah. We see our role as uncovering and reporting the truth, but as fallible humans we don’t always get it right.

In the main I think we do, because of the 50,000-plus stories that appeared in UK publications last year, the PCC received 7,341 complaints, 719 of which were deemed to have breached the voluntary Editors’ Code of Ethics (yes, we actually have one!).

That reinforces my opinion Leveson was a crass over-reaction. Because Britain already has rigorous laws against bribery, phone-hacking and corruption, not to say protection of human rights, without having a judge reaffirm them, as Ms Brooks and Mr. Coulson will testify.

The country also has some of the world’s sternest libel laws. And, as a one-time senior, UK national newspaper executive, I have long experience of such counterweights to media excess.

Nonetheless, in a career spanning over 40 years, very occasionally and for sound reasons, I’ve supported decisions that were legally risky.

Hand on heart, I did so not simply to land a scoop, but to reveal injustices, connivances, scams and hypocracies the public deserved to know the truth of, because there are some powerful, arrogant people who abuse their positions of trust and deserve to be outed.

Sometimes, only a probing, fearless media can do that.

Which is why a lynch mob of certain aggrieved MPs salivated for Leveson to bring in a guilty verdict over the Press. The reason? Look no further than the Daily Telegraph’s exposé of their grubby expenses rip-off – based on illegally-leaked information – and the ‘entrapment’ by the Sunday Times of certain lords a-leaping for cash in return for breaching lobbying rules.

Even the dead, disgraced News of the World, sunk in the phone-hacking morass, wasn’t all boobs and celeb trash. It conducted some genuinely admirable investigations, one of the last being to bowl out a clutch of Pakistani cricketers involved in match-betting fixes.

Meanwhile, in hindsight, would you feel David Mellor – the ostensibly squeaky-clean family man-cum-political populist – still merited power, having been outed by The People over his extra-marital tryst with Antonia de Sancha?

And how would you have liked unctious Jonathan Aitken as PM – once a distinct possibility – before he was impaled on his own ‘sword of truth’ and jailed for perjury and perverting justice, after being exposed for his iffy links to Arab businessmen and lying through his teeth in a libel action against Granada TV’s World In Action?

OLD NEWS: But even the defunct News of the World produced some admirable investigations

So would you be better off without a free, self-regulated Press, warts and all, or one at the mercy off government?  Alternatively, will you prefer your ‘news’ delivered by an anarchic, unpoliced Internet, where crackpots abound and Twitter twits compound libels, like misnaming Lord McAlpine a paedophile?

As several MPs sagely noted last week, state regulation of the Press is ‘absolutely pointless’ when people are able to use the Web to spread ‘lies and slurs’.

And consider: was the Leveson Inquiry solely about the ‘culture, practices and ethics’ of the Press or were other dimensions in play, a back-story so to speak?

Because, in our dog-eats-dog menagerie, some media gloried in the bloodbath of the tabloids. Unsurprisingly, most enthusiastic were standard-bearers of the illiberal Left, the pious Guardian and the haughty BBC, despite the serial cock-ups of the Jimmy Savile affair exposing its inherent hypocricy and journalistic ineptitude.

Both harbour agendas, The Guardian because anyone who disagrees with its prejudices must surely be wrongheaded and the Beeb because it feared a Murdoch takeover of Sky TV would shove it further down the road of decline.

So, too, does a cabal of righteous, self-appointed lobby groups, like the Media Standards Trust, which spawned the Hugh Grant-led ‘Hacked Off’ campaign.

Hence, despite the best intentions of Lord Leveson, his inquiry was essentially a trial of the Murdoch media, set against a Left-versus-Right political backdrop.

Its recommendations are still to be fully weighed, dissected and debated. But the final verdict rests with politicians, who equally shared the dock with the Press.

Which prompts me to ask: since when did the guilty decide the fate of co-defendants?

The strange case of Jimmy Savile – harmless oddball or devious pervert?

As a shy, retiring 14-year-old, occasionally I’d be goaded by bigger, older kids into wagging off school at lunchtimes and bussing it down to the Plaza dancehall, in city-centre Manchester, for a jive and the chance to chat up real, live girls (ours was an all-boys school, by the way).

Frankly, haunted by adolescent insecurities, I wasn’t much good at either. Manfully, though, I tried to appear hip – ‘cool’ still meant ‘a tad on the cold side’ in those days – but confess I was mainly a wallflower, hiding behind a carton of Kiora orange squash and chain-smoking Woodbines.

One day the manager/DJ spotted me and said, ‘Go on, get stuck in there, kid, and pick yerself a bird. They’re all crying out to drop their knickers, ‘cos I know that’s why they there ‘ere.’

It was probably sage advice from this mature, outrageous extrovert, a legend in his own ballroom. So I grabbed my school blazer from the cloakroom and ran like the wind.

That was the only time I met Jimmy Savile. But I was unsurprised he went on to forge a unique showbiz niche, hosting Top of the Pops and Jim’ll Fix It.

Years on, as a Fleet Street journalist, as much as Savile was feted – especially for an overarching compulsion to do good works – we hacks often pondered what lay behind the clownish veneer of lank, blond tresses, Churchillian cigar, garish tracksuits and loony, yodelling Savile-speak, immortalised by such catchphrases as: ‘How about that, then, guys and gals’, ‘as it ‘appens’ and ‘goodness gracious’.

That he was a conundrum, an exceedingly private man, a confirmed bachelor living with his ailing, devoutly-Catholic mother  – ‘The Duchess’, as he unfailing referred to her – in Leeds, only honed media appetites to peel away the mask.

JIM’LL FIX IT: But did he do more than that to vulnerable, under-age girls?

Unless it was in his rapacious quest for publicity, he rarely appeared with women, though he claimed in his autobiography he made many conquests…‘on trains and, with apologies to the Hit Parade, boats and planes (I am a member of the 40,000 ft club) and bushes and fields, corridors, doorways, floors, chairs, slag heaps, desks and probably everything except the celebrated chandelier and ironing board.’

It punctured speculation he was a closet gay. But still we mused if not that, was there some darker secret lurking beneath that made him shun in-depth interviews?

In his 84 years he probably gave only two of any merit. One, with Dr. Anthony Clare, as part of the In the Psychiatrist’s Chair series, revealed Savile to be ‘a man without feelings’.

The other was a ghastly insight by Louis Theroux, in 2000, later voted one of the top 50 documentaries of all time.  When Louis Met Jimmy scratched deep below the surface and what emerged was a grotesque portrait of an ageing, obsessive weirdo – Savile was 73 at the time – who rarely socialised and kept his late mum’s clothes impeccably clean and hung in the wardrobe of her bedroom that was his shrine to her.

Savile, though, was nothing if not clever. He rarely raised his head over the parapet of controversy and protected his image ruthlessly.

But – in ITV’s documentary, Exposure: The Other Side of Jimmy Savile, aired earlier this month – the veteran DJ defended paedophile pop star Gary Glitter, saying. ‘He just watched a few dodgy films and was only vilified because he was a celebrity. It were [sic] for his own gratification. Whether it was right or wrong is up to him as a person.’

Glitter was jailed for four months in 1999 for downloading 4,000 images of children and then deported from Vietnam for assaulting two girls aged 10 and 11 in 2008.

The programme also featured several women who claim they were molested – in one case raped – by Savile. Another was said to have been raped at the age of 14 by the star in his dressing room at BBC Television Centre in 1974, while others said he rewarded them with cigarettes and tickets to his shows if they performed sex acts on him in his Rolls-Royce.

OBSESSIVE WEIRDO: But questions are surfacing, asking was he more than that

In 2007 Savile was interviewed by police investigating an allegation of indecent assault in the 1970s at the now-defunct Duncroft Approved School for Girls, near Staines, Surrey, where he was a regular visitor. The case was dropped for insufficient evidence.

Then, in March 2008, Savile started legal proceedings against The Sun for linking him to the child abuse scandal at the notorious Haut de la Garenne children’s home in Jersey.

Initially, Savile denied ever visiting the place, but later admitted it, following the publication of a photograph showing him at the home surrounded by children. The local police said in 2008 an allegation of an indecent assault by Savile there in the 1970s had been investigated, but again there’d been insufficient evidence to proceed.

There were also media claims Savile carried out indecent assaults on a nine-year-old girl and her sister, aged 11, in 1971 at Haut de la Garenne, but no prosecutions followed.

However, the questions many now ask are: Even given his laudable support for worthy causes, what was Savile doing visiting homes for vulnerable children and were his paymasters at the BBC, where he was one of their most bankable stars, taking allegations of his potential child abuse seriously? They claim they did.

But Esther Rantzen, the former BBC presenter and founder of the ChildLine child-protection charity, notes, ‘Maybe it was just the fact that Jimmy knew everybody. We made him into the Jimmy Savile who was untouchable, who nobody could criticize.’

After Savile’s death, aged 84, in October, 2011, more women – now middle-aged and former children’s home residents – have found the courage to come forward and insist that, as under-aged girls, they’d been sexually abused by the veteran DJ and some had been ‘shared’ amongst a small coterie of his showbiz friends.

A common denominator in paedophile rings (like the one involving nine, jailed Asian men in Heywood) is that they groom susceptible teenage girls as sex slaves and pass them round, knowing the kids will be too intimidated to talk or the authorities won’t take their complaints seriously.

So was Savile following a similar pattern in manipulating and sexually abusing juvenile females over a long period of time, confident his power and status at the BBC would protect him?

One claimed she’d been to an orgy in Savile’s Broadcasting House dressing-room, where Glitter allegedly raped one girl and a star, who cannot be named for legal reasons, molested another.

What further places the Beeb in the eye of the gathering Savile sex-abuse storm is that a Newsnight investigation of him, after his death, was shelved for ‘editorial reasons’. This seems entirely out of character for the channel’s flagship news show, though a spokesman insists the story couldn’t be substantiated.

Naturally, there are those who say it is a gross injustice to denigrate a man, famed for his charitable deeds, posthumously, when he’s no longer here to defend himself.

Conversely, a growing number of women are crying out that Sir Jimmy Savile OBE – and others in his circle – did them incalculable, psychological and sexual harm when they were defenseless, vulnerable children in local authority care.

And their plaintive voices deserved to be heard.