Dimbleby describes the Jimmy Savile scandal as ‘one of the worst in the BBC’s history’. He denounces Savile as ‘a persistent paedophile who prowled the corridors of the BBC without anyone stopping him’. He continues ‘the man was a horror, it is extraordinary that the BBC should have failed to come up with the truth about Savile’. In fact what is extraordinary is that neither Dimbleby, nor anyone else at the BBC, has ever carried out any investigation into the veracity of the ITV Exposure programme which created the ‘scandal’ in the first place. Instead he has credulously swallowed the mendacious fabrications in the programme which have comprehensively deceived both the public and mainstream media, as summarised in this analysis http://bit.ly/2dybGYs
After his highly prejudicial introduction Dimbleby then turned his attention to the aborted Newsnight feature about Savile proclaiming that ‘it should have been the BBC story because they, Newsnight, had it’. Meirion Jones, the Newsnight producer of the proposed Savile feature, now makes an appearance, observing that shortly after Savile’s death he was ‘already looking at Savile and thinking that we need to tell the truth and we are in a position where we can do so’.
In the Dimbleby programme Jones falsely asserted that Surrey Police ‘believed Savile was a paedophile’, in fact no such claim was made. The CPS correctly decided there was insufficient evidence to prosecute as outlined in this previous post https://bit.ly/3gtDc9K On hearing this revelation the Newsnight editor Peter Rippon decided that there was no longer any justification for going ahead with Meiron Jones’s expose. He also had some concerns about the credibility of the main witness Karin, the apparent collusion between ex-Duncroft pupils, and the discovery that a Surrey Police letter claiming that Savile was ‘too old and infirm’ to be prosecuted was a forgery. Meirion Jones strongly disagreed with this decision believing that it was necessary to expose Savile as a ‘paedophile’, as this would put a stop to the broadcast of the Christmas Savile tribute programme the BBC was planning, to which he had taken strong exception.
So why was this BBC producer in a position to ‘tell the truth’ immediately after Savile’s death. The reason was that he is the nephew of the headmistress of Duncroft school and as a child had witnessed visits of Savile there in the mid 1970s. He had formed a fixation in his own mind that Savile was visiting the school to sexually abuse teenage girls. He had made contact with some former pupils on the Friends Reunited website, and one of them Karin was making veiled accusations against Savile. Following Savile’s death Jones contacted Karin and she agreed to be interviewed on camera.
The programme then goes on to show extracts from the interview with Karin. She claimed that Savile, in exchange for sexual favours, arranged for her to go to BBC Television Centre and appear on his TV show. Both Meirion Jones and Dimbleby uncritically accept that Karin is telling the truth, but fail to ask themselves a few obvious questions. To begin with she claimed to be 14 at the time, but evidence has since emerged that she was within a few weeks of her sixteenth birthday. Both Savile and Karin would have known that the decision on which girls would be chosen to attend the TV show would rest with the headmistress, and that Savile would be unable to influence her decision. Moreover, as Duncroft was an approved school and the girls heavily supervised, it would have been near impossible for any male, however famous, to engage in sexual activities on the premises without it becoming widespread knowledge. In practical terms, Karin’s claim is, in reality, incredible.
The programme then goes on to outline the furore that overwhelmed the then BBC Director-General. As a result he decided to appoint a judge to discover ‘what the BBC knew about the criminal activities of Jimmy Savile’. The judge was Dame Janet Smith and the numerous shortcomings of her report and outlook are analysed in this previous post http://bit.ly/2mMrQza In the programme Dame Janet is provided with a platform to repeat her flawed conclusions and research that supposedly provided evidence of Savile’s guilt. Dimbleby does at least ask her the obvious question that ‘there were all these rumours swirling around but why didn’t the BBC pick up on them and allowed it to go on’?
The correct response would have been to point out that they were nothing more than rumours and that the BBC had never received any accusations about Savile through their complaints procedure. Instead, Dame Janet’s misleading response was that junior staff ‘knew that he took young girls in there, but they didn’t feel it was their responsibility to inform senior management’. In fact this supposition ignores the conclusion of her own report, since it found that neither senior nor junior staff had any evidence of Savile’s supposed offending on BBC premises, as all any of them had heard was rumour and gossip.
David Dimbleby now proceeds to give a distorted version of what the Newsnight feature was supposed to be investigating. He claims that Jones did not go to his editor about the failure of the CPS, but instead that he had ‘evidence that Savile was a paedophile’. Whilst it is true that this was the agenda of Jones it overlooks the fact that the Newsnight editor’s primary concern was always about how the police and CPS had handled the case. Once it was discovered that the CPS had decided the referral from the police in a professional and reasoned manner there would be no justification for broadcasting the Savile feature. Dimbleby is placing the obsessive belief of Meiron Jones that Savile was a ‘paedophile’ over the CPS conclusion that there was no justification for a prosecution.
Dimbleby then goes on to laud the BBC Panorama ‘investigation’ featuring Karin which was heavily influenced by the views of Meirion Jones. As a result of this programme BBC management carried out a complete u-turn away from supporting Peter Rippon’s decision for ‘sound editorial reasons’, to condemning his decision as ‘clearly flawed and wrong’, lambasting the BBC’s management system as ‘completely incapable’ of handling the matter, thereby creating ‘chaos and confusion’.
Dimbleby concluded that the ‘BBC’s failure over Savile’ was very badly damaging because ‘they failed to safeguard people on their premises, they hadn’t pursued the story against Savile when they had the opportunity to do so, and because they were pretending they weren’t even trying to investigate Savile but were looking at some other issue’.
Dimbleby’s conclusions are wholly unbalanced. He has accepted wholesale the version of events presented to him by Jones, and ignored completely the views of the Newsnight editor Peter Rippon who did not feature in the programme. Meirion Jones had for a long time been obsessed with the belief that Savile was sexually abusing girls when visiting Duncroft School. If he had been so confident of this belief he could have suggested a Newsnight investigation when Savile was still alive, rather than waiting to spring into action immediately after he died. Instead of manipulating and encouraging the wild claims of a couple of former Duncroft pupils, he could have personally quizzed his aunt about the background to Savile’s visits to the school. There is no evidence that he ever did this; instead he seems to have pursued his own vendetta against Savile as a means of bolstering his own career prospects and reputation by trashing the memory of the deceased celebrity.
Neither the Duncroft headmistress Miss Jones, nor any of her staff, heard any complaints that Savile had misbehaved during his visits. Moreover, neither BBC Newsnight investigators nor Surrey Police could find any other pupils to back up the allegations made by Karin, Meirion Jones and the ITV Exposure programme. Dimbleby’s failure to carry out an objective assessment of the BBC’s response reveals he is equally as culpable himself as the supposed failures for which he is condemning the BBC.
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