Rolf is innocent OK

One of the biggest miscarriages of justice in Britain during the present century has been the conviction of the entertainer Rolf Harris following several allegations of historic sexual offences. The full background to his trials is outlined in a recent book by William B. Merritt who was his defence team’s specialist investigator. His revelations confirm what many have suspected that Rolf was innocent of all the charges brought against him, and that he was the victim of an organised campaign by the authorities to obtain celebrity convictions in the wake of the Jimmy Savile furore.

Rolf Harris was found guilty of all twelve charges he faced made by four accusers during his first trial in 2014. He was one of a number of aging celebrities who attracted a police investigation arising from the hoax ITV Exposure programme which peddled numerous fabrications against Jimmy Savile, summarised here http://bit.ly/2dybGYs . The fallout from this duplicitous programme created widespread outrage that Savile had ‘escaped justice’ for all the many ‘crimes’ he was posthumously found guilty of in the kangaroo court of public opinion, fomented by a hysterical campaign of demonisation whipped up by the media and some politicians. Under the aegis of the Metropolitan Police’s Operation Yewtree a witch hunt of well known celebrities was instigated to deliver scapegoats to appease the baying mob. They struck gold with their biggest scalp, Rolf Harris.

It is worth examining each of the accusers’ claims during his first trial. The first and most damaging was that Rolf carried out an indecent assault against an eight year old girl while attending an event at a small community centre in Havant, Hampshire. This was alleged to have taken place in autumn 1969, nearly 45 years before the trial. No evidence was presented that Rolf Harris had ever visited this community centre. Police investigations were unable to track down any local residents who could recall his attendance there. At the time Rolf was a major TV star and his appearance would almost certainly have generated enormous publicity in such a location. Given the complete lack of any corroborating evidence it is a mystery why this charge was allowed to stand. Despite all this the jury found Rolf Harris guilty and his accuser received £22,000 in compensation.

During this first trial Rolf Harris did not employ his own investigative team. Instead his defence team had to rely on the evidence obtained by Operation Yewtree officers, which the specialist investigator Mr Merritt described as ‘later exposed as being inept and biased’. Rolf appealed against the Havant community centre conviction and this time employed a team of investigators to uncover evidence that should have been presented at his trial. The outcome of their research was that many new facts came to light which proved that Rolf Harris had never attended this community centre, and that his accuser must therefore have been lying. In November 2017 the three appeal judges unanimously agreed that Rolf’s conviction on this charge was unsafe, and his conviction was quashed. However, the false accuser still retained her compensation and she never faced a charge of perjury, showing that the trial was less about justice and more about pursuing the ‘believe the victim’ agenda.

The second accusation against Rolf was that he indecently assaulted a 13 year old girl during the recording of the BBC TV game show It’s A Knockout. This allegedly took place nearly forty years previously in a Cambridge park. The complainant testified that this event had taken place in 1975 at Parker’s Piece, a green in the centre of Cambridge. In reality the TV recording took place at another site, the Cambridge City football ground. Despite getting the location wrong the accuser’s account was accepted by the prosecution. Rolf’s defence team produced irrefutable evidence that he could not have appeared at this event as at the time he was performing in a concert in Canada. However, Rolf then made a claim that was to cost him dearly when he stated that he had never been to Cambridge prior to 2010.

This attracted widespread publicity, and it prompted a new witness to come forward to inform the police that Rolf had participated in ITV’s Star Games programme from 1978. This event was held in yet another location known as Jesus Green to the north of the city centre. Television footage confirmed that Rolf Harris had indeed been a participant at this event. At the time this was revealed his defence team had based their case on refuting the 1975 claim. But in mid trial the judge made the highly prejudicial decision to allow this charge to be changed to incorporate the newly revealed 1978 event. This meant that the accuser’s age had been changed to 16, the venue had been changed, the TV programme had changed and the broadcaster had changed. No adjournment was allowed to provide the defence team an opportunity to investigate these changes, and the complainant was not recalled to the witness stand to explain the serious inconsistencies in her evidence. Additionally, the investigator Mr Merritt has uncovered evidence to suggest that in 1978 the accuser was living in Oxford, not Cambridge.

The prosecuting counsel took full advantage of Rolf’s belief that he had never visited Cambridge before 2010, with the underhand objective of convincing the jury that he had lied deliberately to cover up his appearance at the Star Games in 1978. This was entirely false as Rolf Harris would have attended thousands of events during his career. It was common practice to bring celebrities by coach to these kinds of events, held in parks that are interchangeable with hundreds of others throughout the country. Over three decades later Rolf would have had no reason to recall that the Star Games event had been held in Cambridge. Despite all the inconsistencies in the evidence Rolf Harris was found guilty of this charge.

The third accuser accounted for seven of the charges brought against Rolf Harris at his first trial. She had been a close friend of Rolf Harris’s daughter for many years and was the first to contact the police with her complaints. He was accused of grooming her when she was in her early teens. Rolf Harris admitted that he had sexual relations with her after she had turned 18, but that this had always been consensual and continued intermittently until she was in her late twenties.

After their relationship ended she telephoned Rolf to ask for £25,000 to finance a bird sanctuary in which she had an interest. Rolf Harris refused her request, the result of which was that the accuser’s parents were then told about their affair and Rolf was threatened that the newspapers would be informed if he did not give her the money. The accuser’s father wrote to Rolf to inform him that he was disgusted with his behaviour. Rolf burnt this letter but eventually reconsidered by deciding to reply asking for forgiveness, but making clear that all sexual activity had been consensual. This letter was used extensively by the prosecution, and was distorted to make it appear as a confession when in reality it had been sent as an issue of conscience.

One particular comment in Rolf’s reply to the father would cause him problems. During a holiday he told the accuser when she was 13 that she ‘looked lovely in her bathing suit’, which the accuser as an adult retrospectively distorted as being ‘just the same as physically molesting her’, which is of course utterly delusional. This correspondence took place in the mid 1990s but the accuser waited until November 2012 before contacting the police. The police held numerous interviews with the accuser during the course of which she changed part of her initial statement. Rolf’s defence counsel referred to this extensive police involvement as a ‘rehearsal’, describing the actions of the Yewtree officers as ‘grooming a witness’. Despite the lack of any real evidence Rolf Harris was found guilty on all seven charges.

The fourth accuser was a 15 year old member of an Australian theatre youth group on a five week tour of England in 1986. She accounted for three of the charges against Rolf, claiming that he had carried out indecent assaults against her in a pub during an informal dinner. Nobody in the crowded pub had noticed anything untoward, nor did the accuser tell anyone at the time about what had supposedly happened to her. Rolf Harris denied the allegations made against him pointing out that there were inconsistencies in her evidence concerning the timing.

This accuser first contacted the British police when the allegations against Rolf were being extensively covered in both the British and Australian media. However, before doing this she had previously contacted an Australian publicist who agreed to sell her story through his media contacts. He obtained a contract for A$60,000, but the publishing outlet interested in her story insisted that she must first report her allegations to the police which she did. As a result Operation Yewtree detectives flew to Australia to take a statement from her, but with a strange lack of professionalism, appeared unconcerned that she had sold her story to the media prior to the trial.

During the trial this accuser claimed that the assaults took place at the start of the tour and because she had been so affected by what had happened she lost about a stone in weight during the tour, an outcome that appears highly unlikely. However, research carried out by Rolf’s defence team proved that the pub dinner took place near the end of the tour. When challenged about this she responded that it had taken place so long ago and she could not be expected to remember everything. It was also discovered that the arrangement of the seating and the tables in the pub made it impossible for an assault to have take place as she described that involved sitting on Rolf’s lap. Despite all the inconsistencies the jury again found Rolf Harris guilty on all three charges.

As well as a lack of any real evidence each accusation appears to be highly improbable on practical grounds. Three of the accusations occurred in crowded venues or events where there would have been plenty of witnesses. Such behaviour would be reckless, and carrying out a sexual assault in such circumstances appears almost incomprehensible by a celebrity likely to be under constant observation by the public. The remaining accuser, the close friend of Rolf’s daughter, appears to have been happy to be a regular visitor to the Harris home in her teens when the alleged grooming was supposed to have taken place. She appears to have never raised Rolf’s alleged grooming behaviour with her friend, his daughter. Moreover, even when she was demanding money from Rolf she never accused him of carrying out any illegal acts when notifying her parents about their relationship.

The investigator Mr Merritt was critical of the way the police had conducted the case against Rolf. He considered that the police were ‘neither prepared, nor adequately trained, to handle the number of historic sexual abuse cases’ they were now being asked to investigate. As a result they changed their normal procedure for gathering evidence. Rather than seeking evidence that could stand on its own, they undertook fishing expeditions to persuade women to ‘come forward’ to make allegations against celebrities. This was done on the theory that ‘they can’t all be wrong’.

This assumes that everyone who came forward was honest and nobody would make a false allegation tempted by the promise of significant financial compensation coupled with an assurance by the police that they would be believed. Since there would be no risk of prosecution, as shown by the bogus Havant claim, unscrupulous opportunists would have nothing to lose by making false accusations. Not all of these are necessarily made by compensation seekers; some can bear a grudge and seek revenge, whereas others are subject to false memories, often prompted by questionable therapy techniques.

Mr Merritt is critical of the bad character evidence that Rolf was confronted with at his trial. These witnesses were used to bolster the evidence of the complainants whose own evidence was regarded as too weak to stand on its own. According to Mr Merritt, the police refused to carry out ‘even the most basic checks to ensure that the evidence being provided by a bad character witness is genuine’ adding that the police ‘chose to accept anyone who was prepared to slate Rolf Harris’. At the commencement of his first trial Rolf had no previous criminal convictions and there was nothing untoward in his history. Despite this the prosecution went to great lengths to convince the jury that there was a ‘dark side’ to Rolf Harris, insinuating that he was a sexual predator, experienced in grooming young girls.

As a result of his convictions a further seven women made allegations of sexual assault against Rolf. They resulted in eight fresh charges which Rolf Harris faced in two trials held in 2017. This time Rolf did not make the huge mistake at his first trial of relying on the police to carry out an investigation. Instead, he appointed a team of private investigators led by Mr Merritt. As a result of the thoroughness of their enquiries they were able to provide compelling evidence that Rolf was innocent of all the charges made against him at the two later trials. Full background details on how this information was gathered are provided in Mr Merritt’s book. As a result Rolf was acquitted of all the later charges.

One can only agree with the conclusion of Mr Merritt that the ‘conduct of the Operation Yewtree detectives and investigators, in overlooking and ignoring evidence that supported Rolf Harris’s innocence, cost him both his freedom and his good reputation’. There have been many calls for a retrial. Although, due to his advanced age there are questions as to whether Rolf would be willing to endure further legal proceedings, a retrial appears to be the only realistic option if he is to clear his name and reclaim his reputation.

How to topple a prime minister

Prime Minister Boris Johnson has won a confidence vote by 211 votes to 148. Whilst hardly a ringing endorsement it should be remembered that it was an improvement on the 160 votes he achieved from 312 MPs in the parliamentary leadership contest over Jeremy Hunt in 2019. The Conservative Party is a broad coalition which ranges from those who would be much happier as members of the Liberal Democrats, to those who against all the odds still continue to espouse traditional conservative principles. So there will always be a significant number of MPs who would prefer an alternative leader for reasons of personal character or policy differences.

Boris Johnson is not a conservative in any meaningful sense of the word as in reality he is a social liberal. He supports the net zero policy on climate change, was an enthusiastic attendee at ‘gay pride’ marches when London Mayor, appears unconcerned about open ended immigration from all around the world. He retains invasive and divisive ‘equality’ legislation, demonstrates minimal opposition to delusion transgender thinking, has done nothing to curb the growth in so called ‘hate crime’ legislation, supports same sex marriage but has introduced measures to further undermine traditional marriage. Many Conservatives have accused him of presiding over the expansion of socialist economic policies. So by any definition he is a long way from being a true conservative.

Nevertheless he is despised by the liberal politically correct class. This is because more than any other individual he delivered a victory for Brexiteers in the EU referendum. This was the first occasion in decades that liberals had suffered a reversal in their creeping, gradualist yet vociferous political agenda, and their fury knew no bounds as shown by the no holds barred campaign to overturn the referendum decision. Moreover, since becoming Tory leader he had the temerity to deliver a Conservative government with a huge majority, which further increased liberal loathing.

Since that election victory liberals have mounted a vocal campaign to destroy Boris Johnson’s premiership. Until late last year this had gained relatively little traction with the electorate. But matters changed when after repeated attempts the Metropolitan Police agreed to opposition requests to investigate the alleged breaches of covid regulations in Downing Street. The campaign to demonise the Prime Minister on this matter was orchestrated by the opposition parties and enthusiastically taken up by the BBC and other liberal minded media outlets.

For months on end the news agenda was dominated by a continuing drip-drip of revelations under what became known as ‘Partygate’, the primary instigator being the supposedly politically neutral BBC. Hardly a day went by without the public being informed of potential illegal gatherings at Number Ten, all supposedly presided over by Boris Johnson. The most egregious emotionalism was employed, particularly by Labour leader Keir Starmer. Wholly outrageous comparisons were made between grieving individuals being unable to visit dying relatives at a time when Downing Street staff were accused of ‘partying’. Those employing this kind of unprincipled emotional blackmail never asked themselves in what way would those experiencing grief have been affected by the events in Downing Street.

It is still unclear why any of the gatherings at Downing Street and Whitehall investigated by the police were contrary to covid regulations. It would clearly have been a breach if outsiders had been invited to social events but no evidence appears to have come to light that this occurred. Everyone at the ‘parties’ appears to have been a member of staff present at their workplace, socialising with colleagues who they would have worked with together throughout the same day. The only difference is that food and drinks were being consumed, and the conversation may have been primarily social rather than work related. Thus nothing was being done that would have added to the spread of covid as everyone involved had already engaged, through normal workplace activities, in the kind of close physical contact which would have facilitated the spread of the virus. So they are being demonised and criminalized solely for consuming food and drink in the workplace.

Despite all this the Partygate issue has successfully alienated many voters against both Boris Johnson and the Conservative Party. The mantra has taken hold that lawmakers should never be lawbreakers. But as outlined above it is very unclear whether any laws have really been broken since nobody knows the criteria used by the police in deciding who should be issued with fixed penalty notices. Despite all the fuss Boris Johnson received just one fine, for the bizarre ‘crime’ of accepting a birthday cake in his office, which he did not solicit and which he was not involved in the presentation. It is a mystery why he never appealed against this outrageous abuse of the criminal justice system.

The job of Prime Minister is to preside over the running of the country, concentrating on issues of national and international importance. It is not his responsibility to act as an office manager as plenty of senior civil servants are employed to oversee the smooth running of Downing Street. No Prime Minister should ever become involved in the minutiae of office management or in supervising the behaviour of the workforce, which would be a very poor use of his valuable time that should be more productively employed on far more important matters. So his claim that he was unaware of any Downing Street social activities is entirely credible.

So the campaign to destroy the premiership of Boris Johnson has succeeded in severely weakening him. He has not yet been toppled but we can be sure that this operation, led by the subversive mouthpiece the BBC, will continue until its objective has been achieved. This is the modus operandi used by liberal activists to brainwash the public through their distorted manipulation of the media, promoting through relentless negative tactics their one sided agenda to blacken the reputation of their opponents.

Is the covid hysteria finally over?

Covid infections are currently running at over 100,000 per day, significantly higher than during the lockdowns, yet neither the media nor politicians appear to be paying much attention. Nobody is any longer arguing that we should all stay at home, wear masks in shops and on public transport, get tested frequently, or maintain social distancing to ‘control the spread’. So why are most people now behaving in this apparently reckless fashion when covid has most certainly not gone away?

Part of the answer is that virtually everybody has either been triple vaccinated, and/or gained natural immunity by contracting covid. As a result if they do become infected again they are appreciably less likely to die or become seriously ill. So the element of fear for most people has considerably diminished. There is also a general acceptance that because the Omicron variants are so contagious any curbs or restrictions on behaviour are pointless as everyone is now vulnerable to infection despite the precautions. So the question that now needs to be asked is whether the lockdowns and restrictions were ever necessary in the first place? Could we not have responded to covid in the same way as for flu and stayed at home for the period when we felt ill?

The truth is that a large part of the media, politicians and the public succumbed to a mass hysteria generated by the alarmist fears of a very small coterie who claimed an expertise about how best to handle the response to the pandemic. In the UK this source was the tiny but highly influential group of people on the Government’s SAGE committee who were allowed to impose their outlook on the rest of the nation. They asserted that they were ‘following the science’ with the result that politicians, media and public were unable to challenge their recommendations since, in a climate of fear, they were all unwilling to overrule the perceived authority of this supposedly expert elite.

In reality the science of covid was very uncertain in the early stages. Nobody really knew how contagious it was, who it was most likely to affect, what caused the spread of the virus, or how serious it would be when caught. The panic began in Italy with images of people dying on trolleys after hospitals were overwhelmed. The Italian government imposed a national lockdown, and similar lockdowns were quickly implemented in other European countries. By the time the virus caught hold in Britain the media and opposition parties were all clamouring for a lockdown. In March 2020 the government duly imposed a national lockdown for three weeks to ‘flatten the curve’.

It would be pointless with hindsight to criticise the government for this decision, as they were under enormous pressure faced with a new virus of unknown severity. They quickly introduced a number of new temporary ‘Nightingale Hospitals’, but in the event these were scarcely used. Meanwhile the NHS prioritised treating covid patients, thus creating the current lengthy backlog of cases as the treatment of patients with less serious medical conditions was delayed. It would be nearly three months before the lockdown was lifted and restrictions were gradually relaxed during the summer 2020.

Infections fell to a very low level in summer 2020 but bizarrely the government chose that moment to mandate the use of masks on public transport and in shops. No reason was ever given for this change, and no evidence has been provided since that masks make any difference to the spread of the virus. This was confirmed by the Danish study, the fact that infections decreased rapidly in the spring of 2020 without masks, the fact that they rose sharply in the autumn of 2020 when mask wearing was compulsory, and later in the pandemic, when Scotland retained compulsory mask wearing when it had been abandoned in England, yet Scotland still suffered the highest rates of infection in the UK. More disturbingly mask wearing became a virtue signalling fetish for those on the left of politics. Witness the absurd spectacle of the opposition benches fully masked up after the restrictions were lifted, at a time when the Conservative benches were almost mask free.

We are supposed to be living in a freedom loving democracy but during the period of covid alarmism the government was able to impose the most draconian restrictions on the population at the stroke of a minister’s pen. What was worse was the almost total compliance by the public who accepted all the restrictions on their freedom with relatively little challenge. Anyone unwilling to conform to this agenda was quickly denounced as a ‘covidiot’, someone supposedly prepared to take risks with the public’s safety for their own selfish ends.

There was little debate as to whether the restrictions themselves might be a bigger threat to the public than covid. Adverse consequences were ignored such as delayed diagnoses and operations, loss of education to school children, permanent damage to the economy, the loss of many small business in hospitality and retailing, the devastation of the travel industry, the adverse effect on the mental health and wellbeing of the nation, and the curtailment of living a normal life for a whole population placed under what amounted to house arrest. The fear generated through covid alarmism trumped all of these concerns.

Yet despite all these adverse consequences the government imposed two further damaging lockdowns , aided and abetted by the opposition parties and the BBC who all wanted earlier, deeper and longer restrictions. The Welsh authorities imposed a well publicised ‘circuit breaker’ which achieved nothing but this did not prevent the alarmists calling for England to follow their lead. The Scottish regime as a matter of principle consistently imposed longer and deeper restrictions than England but in the end they made no difference to the eventual outcome.

So all the evidence shows that the lockdowns, social distancing, mask wearing and endless testing made little difference to the eventual outcome. Infections in Britain were close to the average, Sweden with far fewer restrictions did better, Peru with some of the severest restrictions ended up with the highest level of infections in the world. The death rate was about 0.3% of the population, almost all of whom were over the retirement age or suffered from long term conditions such as obesity or diabetics. So the government should now ‘do the right thing’ and issue an amnesty for all those convicted of a breach of covid regulations and return their fines.

The most disturbing element of the covid hysteria was not so much the totalitarian nature of the government’s response, but the self abasement of the public, happy to collaborate in their own subjugation. The explanation for this mass aberrant behaviour was the campaign of fear drummed up by the government, the opposition parties and the mainstream media, most particularly the BBC. The ramping up of fear has been the playbook of totalitarian regimes throughout the ages, and the authorities had no qualms about employing this technique to impose their will over covid.

The biggest danger for the future is that the political establishment, now realising how easy it is to manipulate the public into compliance with their agenda, will regard the covid response as a precedent and employ similar authoritarian measures in the future. So expect campaigns from vocal woke obsessives demanding similar levels of state control on such issues as the climate change hoax, homosexual proselytising, delusional transgender beliefs and still further capitulation to militant feminists, Islamists and black activists.

Liberals’ self hatred

For a long time British ‘progressives’ have been engaged in a hate campaign against themselves. As a matter of principle their default position is to despise their country, their culture, their race, their system of government and their class. This process has now reached absurd levels of self flagellation and delusion. White liberal racial guilt plays a large part in facilitating this process, as shown by the pernicious doctrine of ‘white privilege’. So it is worth examining one aspect of this deranged iconoclastic agenda which has recently started to manifest itself - the way that black people are currently portrayed in the media.

The issue of race has been the issue which more than any other has attracted the moral grandstanding of ‘progressives’. Paternalistic concerns for the supposed discrimination faced by ‘people of colour’, as we are now supposed to describe them, are merely an opportunist vehicle that has been co-opted by liberals to promote their own virtue signalling superiority. However, the sentiments are largely insincere, since liberals are no more likely to socialise or befriend black people than the average white person. In short, the race question is merely a platform amongst many others which the vocal left exploit for their wider political ends.

There appears to be a very simple rule amongst ‘progressives’ which is to invariably bend over backwards to accept the validity of a black person’s viewpoint, but to never give the benefit of the doubt to a white person in a similar situation. Our employment and race relations laws are all based on this assumption, and so can be used by black people to pursue their own self interests, in a manner that is not open to white people. The only exception to this outlook is when black people identify with, or express right wing views, when mysteriously they are treated with the same degree of contempt as whites. So the expectation of liberals is that their client groups should conform to approved stereotypical notions rather than to think for themselves.

Until about the early 1980s black people were largely invisible in advertising, and usually only appeared in TV dramas when portraying non-Europeans in realistic real life situations such as for example a government representative from an African country. This was regarded by most people as completely normal as well as perfectly acceptable, and there was absolutely no clamour from the public to introduce black characters into dramas were the audience would normally expect an exclusively white cast, or to bring more black faces into advertising.

But matters gradually began to change when black characters started to be introduced into drama situations that previously would have been exclusively white. The numbers were still relatively small, the assumption being that the public would gradually be more willing to accept the occasional black character as a legitimate feature of the storyline, and thus avoid alienating too many viewers who might prefer to watch programmes exclusively showing their own kind. This was in accordance with the policy of introducing small incremental changes as the most effective way of furthering the liberal agenda.

More proactive commentators criticised this approach as ‘tokenism’, demanding that more be done to improve ‘diversity’ and to increase the profile of black people in the media. Gradually the number of black characters started to increase, but the type of roles they played was circumscribed. They were very rarely portrayed as villains or criminals; instead they were disproportionately presented as the good guys fighting injustices, or occupying positions of higher rank or authority, bringing much needed guidance, advice and leadership to junior white colleagues.

In advertising, black faces first started to become apparent in publicity posters and documents issued by left wing local authorities. But commercial organisations still resisted breaking the white monopoly on imagery, presumably fearing that the inclusion of black faces would alienate many white people from buying their product. But eventually black faces started to appear in commercial advertisements also, and gradually these numbers started to increase. It was noticed that there was no pushback against this trend in the media, since to raise concerns would inevitably risk accusations of ‘racism’ and bigotry.

Today we have reached the absurd situation were more than 50% of advertisements feature black people, where mixed race couples are promoted as the norm, where nearly every TV drama has a disproportionate number of black characters, where historic costume dramas falsely and inaccurately include black characters, and where white historic figures are increasingly played by black actors. All this has occurred with little if any discussion or debate in the media. It is unclear who is driving this agenda, whether it is media and advertising regulators, or the management of commercial companies anxious to appease vocal woke activists or employees. But what it does demonstrate is the extent to which white liberals are consumed with guilt and self loathing for the newly discovered original sin of being born with white skin, an agenda that the mainstream media are too cowardly to challenge.

Boris vs Keir vs Jimmy

The prime minister has recently come under attack for repeating in Parliament a long standing claim on the internet that Sir Keir Starmer, when Director of Public Prosecutions, had personally failed to prosecute Jimmy Savile over alleged sex offences. Boris Johnson in rebuking Sir Keir in this way was clearly annoyed by the orchestrated campaign, led by the BBC and opposition parties, to destroy his premiership by drumming up public anger and hysteria over reports of workplace drinks at No.10 during lockdown. It is worth investigating whether Boris Johnson’s critique of Sir Keir has any merit.

The Surrey Police investigation into Savile has previously been outlined in this earlier blogpost http://bit.ly/2dybGYs. This took place during the 2007-9 period and covered three allegations. The first was that Savile had forced a pupil of Duncroft approved school to place her hand on his groin in the TV room, the second that Savile had kissed a choir girl visiting Stoke Mandeville hospital and put his tongue in her mouth, and the third that Savile had engaged in sexual activity with a pupil in a building known as Norman Lodge located in the grounds of Duncroft. The file was sent to the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), then under the leadership of Sir Keir, and the decision was reached by the CPS was that there was insufficient evidence to warrant a prosecution.

As a result of the furore that ensued after the broadcast of the ITV Exposure programme in October 2012, the CPS, still under the leadership of Sir Keir, commissioned a report by Alison Levitt QC to investigate the reasons for not prosecuting Savile. Although the facts provided in her report are extensive, thorough and detailed, the analysis and conclusions are grossly unrealistic, almost bordering on the delusional.

The report was commissioned during the fallout from the ITV Exposure programme (the numerous fabrications presented in this were debunked in the previously mentioned blogpost). Like the BBC Smith report (outlined here http://bit.ly/2mMrQza) the Levitt report was based on the premise that Savile was a serial predatory sex offender and the conclusions and reasoning were tailored to conform to this belief. She claims to have ‘tried to ensure as far as possible that I have judged the cases on the basis of what was known at the time, rather than the information today’. But it is clear from reading the report that she has accepted wholesale the prevailing narrative about Savile’s supposedly predatory behaviour, and this has deeply influenced her outlook and findings.

Her report also covered an investigation by Sussex Police into a single separate allegation involving a woman in her early twenties. This occurred in 1970 but was not reported until 2008. Unlike the Surrey allegations Savile was never interviewed by police about this, so it is not possible to know his response. After discussion with the police the complainant decided that she was not prepared to take the case forward as ‘it was a long time ago and she did not have access to the information the police required’ declaring she did not want ‘any more hassle’ about the matter. In the circumstances it is clear the CPS decision not to prosecute was the only option available. With regard to the allegation relating to Norman Lodge at Duncroft the Levitt report agreed with the conclusion of the CPS that ‘no prosecution could have taken place because the behaviour complained of did not amount to a criminal offence’.

With regard to the two remaining allegations investigated by Surrey Police it should be noted that neither of the complaints were made by the individual allegedly assaulted. In the case of the Duncroft TV room incident the complaint was made by a former pupil who claimed to have witnessed the alleged incident. This involved Savile taking the girl’s hand and placing it on is groin. When interviewed by the police she said that ‘she did not think much of what had happened’ and did not want to make a statement. Savile denied that this had ever happened, pointing out that it would have been impossible with so many witnesses present. The incident appears to relate more to some teasing suggestive horseplay, than an assault of a sexual nature, and in any case Savile was the object of the claimed touching, not the girl.

With regard to the Stoke Mandeville hospital allegation the complaint was made by her sister, a former Duncroft pupil. It was alleged that as the sister was about to board the coach for home, Savile called her over asking for a goodbye kiss. The girl was expecting a kiss on the cheek but instead ‘he kissed her on the lips and put his tongue inside her mouth’. She was shocked by this incident but the only person she told about it was her sister. In a statement she declared that she ‘never considered going to the police about the incident. I thought it was so insignificant at the time. I think it would have been a waste of police time’. Savile denied the incident had taken place again pointing out it would have been impossible with so many witnesses present. It is difficult to disagree with the assessment of the girl that the police at the time would have shown very little inclination to investigate what most people would regard as a relatively trivial incident.

In both of these cases the CPS reviewing lawyer stated that the determining factor in reaching his decisions was that he had been told by police that the alleged victims were ‘adamant’ that they would not go to court, and that one of them would ‘suffer’ if forced to take part in a prosecution. Given all this he took the view that ‘there was no point in considering the matter further as there was nothing more that could be done’.

In her report Alison Levitt disagreed with this approach. She ludicrously claimed that the allegations were ‘serious’ when in reality they were very minor and where even the alleged victims did not consider any need for the police to become involved. She makes much of the fact that none of them were informed that there were other complainants and that the CPS should have recognised this and ‘built’ a prosecution. She also claims that there was no collusion but in reality the former pupils making the complaints had been in contact on the Friends Reunited website.

The CPS was undoubtedly right not to prosecute, not only because those most affected refused to take part, but also because any jury would find it impossible to convict such relatively minor infractions, with such slender evidence, after such a long period of time. A prosecution in these circumstances would have been an abuse of the legal process, and any witnesses would likely have been torn to shreds by the defence counsel. Alison Levitt’s unbalanced conclusions can only have been made in an attempt to appease the baying mob outraged by the fabrications they had credulously swallowed after the ITV Exposure programme. The report however did confirm that in the case of the Stoke Mandeville kissing incident there was no mention of Savile previously ringing the girl’s home or her writing to him, as falsely claimed in the Exposure programme.

So it is true that Sir Keir Starmer was never personally involved in the decision not to prosecute Jimmy Savile, although it is somewhat surprising that he was never informed about a case involving such a well known national celebrity. Starmer accepted the finding of the Levitt report in full, which was clearly a disreputable and unprincipled attempt to distant himself from the entirely correct decision of his reviewing lawyer. In so doing he placed appeasing the public loathing of Savile over the facts and evidence of the cases, and the interests of natural justice.

Boris Johnson should also be condemned, not only for suggesting that Starmer was personally responsible for this decision and for his supposed ‘apology’ after the Levitt report, but also for assuming as truthful the grotesquely exaggerated nature of the complaints against Savile. This criticism can also be levelled at the aide of the prime minister who resigned, denouncing Johnson’s implication that Starmer ‘was personally responsible for allowing Jimmy Savile to escape justice’ through ‘an inappropriate and partisan reference to a horrendous case of child sex abuse’. She is completely wrong on both counts, as it is clear from her gross exaggerations that, like Johnson, before sounding off she had done nothing to investigate the facts behind the decision of the CPS not to prosecute Savile.

To conclude, the prime minister was right to condemn Sir Keir but for the wrong reason. He should have condemned him for disreputably failing to support his reviewing lawyer who made the absolutely correct decision not to prosecute Savile.

The Global Doomsday Cult

The two week long climate alarmism farce in Glasgow has finally ended in the usual manner, with all countries promising to do something about their emissions, but few of them willing to take any meaningful steps to actually reduce them. So COP 26 has followed the same pattern as the previous 25.

This can only be good news as it will signal to a global audience that the carbon net zero fantasy can never be achieved. The reason for this is quite simple, that for the foreseeable future all countries will continue to be heavily dependent on fossil fuels for their energy. Coal, gas and electricity are all reliable, relatively cheap sources of energy, whereas the renewable alternatives such a solar and wind can be intermittent and unreliable, and are generally more expensive, requiring subsidy. This position will continue until such time as more effective and economical battery power becomes available, or baseload nuclear energy can be delivered on a large scale.

Britain is probably the most fanatical country in the world in its attempt to decarbonise its economy. Most of the low hanging fruit such as wind farms and solar panels are getting close to their likely peak, if the lights are to remain on. Moreover, a significant amount of our industrial production has been lost to China and other countries, thus artificially reducing the UK carbon footprint, as those products previously produced here are now imported.

It is claimed that opinion polls show that a large majority of the public support the government’s target of achieving net zero by 2050. This is probably unsurprising as all the major political parties currently share this objective, which has been accompanied by a growing drumbeat of alarmism by many media outlets, particularly the BBC, which continually portrays extreme weather events as ‘evidence’ of climate change.

In reality the climate is exactly the same as it was over 200 years ago, since the end of the ‘Little Ice Age’, as anyone can confirm just by walking outside their door. During this period extreme weather such as floods, droughts, storms and heat waves have occurred on a regular basis. Previously these were rightly ascribed to unusual weather conditions, not as now, the default group think that pins the blame on ‘climate change’.

Since the relatively easy steps to reduce CO2 emissions have already been taken, it means that future plans to achieve the net zero target will have a much more direct impact on the public. COP 26 was an attempt to create a putative world government in which all countries can be coerced into signing up to a menu of restrictions such as approved energy sources, heating systems, type of car purchases, reduced air travel and how much meat and dairy produce they may consume, etc.

It is likely that only rich western nations will make any serious attempt to implement this agenda. They may however discover that this top down policy, adopted to appease zealous vocal minorities, may not have the wider public support which opinion polls currently show. Once the general public start to discover the extra cost and practical difficulties of electric cars, the huge expense and relatively poor performance of heat pumps, the unreliability of wind and solar power without the back up of coal leading to power cuts, the petty restrictions on travelling by air, and incessant government propaganda and interference in their lifestyle and the food they consume, their resistance will start to grow. If additional controls such as rationing through carbon allowances are added to the mix their disenchantment will be complete.

Currently all parties support this madcap climate obsession, but the weakest link appears to be the Conservative Party. Several backbenchers are beginning to voice their scepticism, supported by the right wing media. Once the net zero policies start to bite these rebels are likely to start causing trouble, just like what happened over the European Union, another issue where the electorate had become disenfranchised, following a stitch up by the major parties. Let us hope that we do not have to wait as long for the climate lunacy to be abandoned.

ITV Savile mendacity part 2

To mark the tenth anniversary of his death ITV have broadcast another gratuitous ‘documentary’ about Jimmy Savile, Portrait of a Predator. Needless to say, it is very light on evidence and facts, but has no shame in peddling numerous smears, disinformation and exaggeration, still considered necessary to bolster the ongoing societal demonisation of Savile, an agenda shared in equal measure by the authorities, mainstream media and general public.

ITV were of course responsible for the original source of the Savile deceit with the broadcast of the Exposure programme in October 2012 fronted by the former Surrey detective and self styled ‘child protection expert’ Mark Williams-Thomas. A summary of the extensive fabrications included in this travesty are outlined in this earlier post http://bit.ly/2dybGYs compiled from extensive research carried out by several indefatigable internet bloggers, most notably Moor Larkin and the late Anna Raccoon.

The main focus in this latest programme featured what appear to be the personal opinions of detective Gary Pankhurst, who was one of the team involved in the Metropolitan Police Operation Yewtree, which co-ordinated the accusations against Savile. Pankhurst’s default position is invariably to always accept the claims of any Savile accuser without having to go to the bother of carrying out any investigation into their allegations. He additionally never misses an opportunity to present all of Savile’s activities in the worst possible light, whether as manager of a dance hall, disc jockey, TV and radio presenter, voluntary hospital porter, fundraiser for Stoke Mandeville hospital, his role at Broadmoor psychiatric hospital, and his close association with royalty and politicians. Pankhurst maintains that all of these activities were a front for Savile’s ‘predatory behaviour’ which allowed him a cover to present himself in a favourable light to deflect attention from his nefarious behaviour and thus render him ‘untouchable’ through his ‘controlling and coercive’ character.

It should be remembered that (apart from the convicted false accuser Carl Beech) none of the allegations received by the Metropolitan Police in Operation Yewtree were investigated, as it was considered that since he was deceased such investigations would serve little purpose. Once this knowledge became known it allowed several hundred claimants to come forward with accusations against the safely dead Savile, aware that they would receive little scrutiny from the police, whilst at the same time rightly believing that their claims would be assiduously promoted by the NSPCC and compensation seeking lawyers. As a result the Savile estate of several millions was emptied by these compensation claimants as were the coffers of the BBC and NHS.

Another contributor was the ‘investigative journalist’ Meirion Jones and former producer for the BBC Newsnight current affairs programme, in which role he was responsible for investigating claims made against Savile by former Duncroft approved school pupils. However, the proposed programme was shelved when it was discovered that the claims involving the police included a forged letter. Jones strongly disagreed with this decision and later colluded with Mark Williams-Thomas in the preparation of the ITV Exposure programme. So he is hardly a neutral witness, since he continues to parrot fabrications arising from the Exposure programme.

The programme first turned its attention to Top of the Pops. A member of the 1970s pop group Sparks claimed that back stage Savile strutted around in a ‘menacing’ manner with his ‘heavies’. Another witness was a woman who as a young girl in the audience claimed that Savile ‘inappropriately’ touched her when he was presenting the programme. When she complained to the floor manager he brushed her concerns aside. For once, this claim has the ring of truth as Savile was undoubtedly a touchy-feely person in the presence of the opposite sex. Unfortunately, this was commonplace behaviour at the time and was not regarded as particularly unusual by many people, although it is of course invasive. It should be remembered that many women also engaged in this practice at the time and some probably still do so, with little public censure. More seriously, the programme alleged that Savile ‘sexually abused’ many of the teen girls on Top of the Pops, without providing a shred of evidence to back up this claim, other than the Dame Janet Smith BBC report whose ‘findings’ were comprehensively debunked in this previous post http://bit.ly/2mMrQza, again with research provided by the aforementioned intrepid internet bloggers.

The programme then moved on to a new witness Kelly who was a regular dancer at Top of the Pops from the age of fourteen. She clearly enjoyed her time there, being invited to bars at BBC Television Centre where she was ‘plied with champagne’. Later the girls would be invited back to Savile’s dressing room, which according to Pankhurst provided an opportunity for Savile to ‘groom’ them. Kelly claimed that Savile made advances to her but she rebuffed him and left. Pankhurst interpreted this as Savile ‘testing’ the girls to discover who was ‘compliant’, and example of the mind reading of which he appears to have quite a talent.

Although Pankhurst’s ‘insight’ is pure speculation, we can be sure there was never any shortage of teen girls willing to enter Savile’s dressing room, and they would all have been old enough to be well aware of why he might be seeking them out. It was common knowledge that these ‘groupies’ were only too willing to throw themselves at popular DJs and pop bands (excepting Sparks of course). This would have attracted little censure from BBC management at a time when sexually permissiveness was at the vanguard of the ‘progressive’ counter culture, to the consternation of ‘conservative reactionaries’ such as Mary Whitehouse who was regularly lampooned as a repressed prude by BBC top brass.

Dame Janet’s report into the BBC speaks of the ‘moral danger’ faced by the teen girls, in language little different to the outlook of Mary Whitehouse. A self flagellating BBC management accepted the Smith report in its entirety, and so have u-turned completely from ridiculing the anti permissiveness of Mary Whitehouse to fanatically embracing the ‘moral danger’ espoused by Dame Janet. So which of these two outlooks is correct, both adopted in different eras by self styled ‘progressive’ liberals.

Kelly was friendly with another Top of the Pops dancer Claire McAlpine, claiming that Claire went back to Savile’s dressing room on several occasions. Kelly became aware that Claire was pregnant, suggesting that Savile was responsible. A picture of Claire standing next to Savile is juxtaposed with the revelation that Claire had committed suicide. The clear implication behind this disgusting smear is that Savile was the culprit responsible for her death. However, as revealed in the Dame Janet report the individual concerned was another DJ. This segment demonstrates the depth the programme was prepared to sink in order to mislead viewers.

The programme then moved on to Jim’ll Fix It with Pankhurst again repeating his trope that this was done to allow Savile access to children with the connivance of BBC management. However, as the investigative blogger Moor Larkin has revealed in some depth, Savile’s involvement in the programme was normally kept to the bare minimum, confined mostly to the show’s presentation. Once again Pankhurst is given free rein to make the most outrageous evidence free assumptions about Savile’s motivations and behaviour. The programme then goes on to cite various opportunities Savile supposedly had to continue his ‘offending’ all of which are pure speculation without evidence. As one former BBC employee said ‘everybody knew what Savile was up to but nobody knew what to do about it’. So there we have it, all you needed was rumour and hearsay to condemn and convict Savile as a sexual predator. For the record the BBC never received any complaints about Savile’s behaviour during his lifetime.

The programme then moved on to denounce his charity work with the smear that it ‘protected him from suspicion’. According to Pankhurst ‘Savile’s association with hospitals was particularly concerning because of the vulnerability of people he preyed upon’. A former Stoke Mandeville patient called ‘Pauline’ (shown only in silhouette) was confined to a wheelchair. She claimed that Savile entered her room, put his hand up her skirt and indecently assaulted her. She froze and was unable to scream, realised she could do nothing about it as Savile was widely regarded as some ‘God sent angel’ and then ludicrously blamed herself for what he had done. She claimed that this incident had ruined her life and that she could no longer stand people touching her. It was then suggested that nobody would believe ‘victims’ but would instead believe Savile, a position incidentally which has now been completely reversed.

It seems beyond belief that ‘Pauline’ would have failed to mention a violation such as this at the time, either to nurses or to her family. If it had such a devastating impact as she claims her change in behaviour would have been noted by her parents who would have sought an explanation. There were over sixty complaints made about Savile in the NHS report relating to Stoke Mandeville hospital authored by Kate Lampard, all of them having one thing in common, they were made as a consequence of trawling after the ITV Exposure broadcast. It should be noted that Sylvia Nichol, who worked for over forty years at the Stoke Mandeville Trust, stated that in the many years she had known Savile, she had never seen anything but ‘good honest behaviour’ from him, and confirmed that nobody else working there had mentioned anything being amiss. Janet Cope was Savile’s secretary at Stoke Mandeville for twenty eight years until he sacked her. Although admitting he was not always an easy man to work with, she also refutes all the claims made in the Lampard report, insisting that they could not be true.

Next up is Savile’s association with the royals. A clip of Prince Charles visiting Savile’s Glencoe cottage in Scotland is shown, dismissed as a ‘publicity stunt’. Predictably Pankhurst condemns Savile’s relationship with the royal family as ‘giving him a veneer of respectability’, thus providing him with a high degree of protection since ‘if you attacked Savile you would be attacking those who surrounded him’. His strategy was ‘to latch on to powerful people, including politicians, to hide the dark secrets that surrounded him’ so that ‘those with suspicions were powerless to challenge him’. Because of these high profile connections Pankhurst claimed that this prevented the police from investigating him. The reason that all of this shameless nonsense can be repeated unchallenged is a result of the collective groupthink arising from the original Exposure programme, which has been swallowed by the mainstream media without investigation. In reality, nobody at the time thought that Savile’s behaviour was in any way untoward, despite being sometimes eccentric. It is only in retrospect, through the prism of his continual demonisation as a predator, that his behaviour can be presented in these twisted terms.

The programme ended with the allegations relating to Duncroft approved school with Meirion Jones falsely claiming that Savile had regularly spent the night there, that he had abused girls, and that he was allowed to get away with his ‘predatory behaviour’ by inviting girls to his TV show. None of this has any basis in fact as explained in detail by the former pupil Susan on the Anna Raccoon blog. She was the Duncroft girl who was responsible for Savile being invited to the school in the first place. She has debunked all of Meirion Jones’ false claims, which demonstrates again how desperate this programme was to mislead viewers about Savile. Additionally these claims were investigated by the Surrey Police who found no evidence to back them up. Moreover, Margaret Jones (Meiron Jones aunt), the headmistress at the time confirmed that neither she, nor any of her staff, had received any complaints about Savile arising from his visits.

The programme finished by demonising Savile ‘for casting a long shadow over the nation’ and who had ‘a catastrophic effect on the lives of hundreds of people through his offending’, concluding that Savile ‘was a prolific sexual predatory offender’. All of this without a shred of evidence, or any pretence of carrying out even the most cursory investigation into any of the claims or accusations. All the evidence obtained by those who (unlike this programme) have researched this matter suggests that Savile was careful to restrict his sexual advances to those over the age of consent (and with their consent), since to do otherwise would risk destroying his reputation and celebrity status.