The Secret World

The Jimmy Savile pedophilia scandal is turning into Britain’s version of the Marc Dutroux case. Dutroux was a Belgian child molester whose activities led to suggestions that he was a supplier of victims to and protected by a ring of prominent and powerful persons. After his conviction thousands marched in the street demanding a search for the others.

The Others.

Do they exist in the Savile case? Now what started off as a handful of victims coming forward to denounce Savile, a former star at the BBC who died last year has turned into gigantic case involving 300 ‘victims’; 400 lines of inquiry; 130 interviews according to the Metropolitan Police. The more rocks they turn over, the more slimy things crawl out.

Reuters now reports that there may have been a ‘pedophile ring’ at the BBC involving the corporation’s stars, some of whom may even be currently employed. There’s even an American connection. The incoming CEO of the New York Times was a former director general of the BBC who is now being asked why he killed a story exposing Savile’s misdeeds at the publicly funded media corporation. The public editor of the NYT writes:

On Tuesday, the director general of the BBC, George Entwistle, was grilled by Parliament about his role in the events at the well-respected British media company.

A tough investigative committee is raking him over the coals about whether he knew what was going on when the BBC killed an investigative segment on its “Newsnight” program about a celebrity TV personality, Jimmy Savile, accused of sexually abusing hundreds of young girls. Mr. Savile died last year.

Killing the story has impugned the BBC’s integrity.

Mr. Entwistle, though, was not the director general of the BBC when all of this was going on last year.

That was Mark Thompson, who is now the incoming president and chief executive of The New York Times Company. Mr. Thompson was said to be in the Times Building on Monday for preliminary meetings, but he hasn’t started yet. In fact, Times reporters and editors were reminded on Monday in a style note not to refer to him in articles as the current president and chief executive.

Now a British member of Parliament has alleged that the Metropolitan police may have been aware, or could have been aware of a pedophile ring that reached all the way up into 10 Downing Street back in the mid-1990s. Citing evidence introduced convict to sex abuser Peter Righton, Labour MP Tom Watson says “one of its members boasts of his links to a senior aide of a former Prime Minister, who says he could smuggle indecent images of children from abroad.”

Righton was himself a prominent ‘protector’ of children. “a former consultant to the National Children’s Bureau and lecturer at the National Institute for Social Work in London, admitted two illegal importation charges and one charge of possessing obscene material. He was fined £900.” Just who those high ranking persons were is now the subject of speculation.

In the aftermath of Mr Watson’s remarks, media outlets speculated that he was referring to the late former Prime Minister Sir Edward Heath – who was the subject of unsubstantiated rumours about sex with under-age boys – or to Sir Peter Morrison, a former Downing Street aide who died in 1995.

However, The Independent understands that Mr Watson’s comments were not aimed at either Sir Edward or Sir Peter, but at a living person associated with Margaret Thatcher’s administration.

They are thought to involve the activities of the Paedophile Information Exchange, a pro-paedophile group in existence between 1974 and 1984, which believed there should be no age of consent.

That’s pretty heavy stuff. A possible prime minister, some cabinet or subcabinet officials, an undetermined number of people at the BBC, how many Others were there? One can begin by looking at the public shadow, the men out in the open, the Pedophile Information Exchange. PIE as it was called was a high-class version of the North American Man Boy Love Association (NAMBLA). It lobbied for the abolition of the age of consent in order to make children available for sex.

The Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE) was a UK pro-paedophile activist group, founded in October 1974 and officially disbanded in 1984.” PIE cross-fertilized with a number of the sexual advocacy groups prominent at the time….

Since the majority of enquiries were from England, PIE relocated to London in 1975 where 23-year old Keith Hose became its new Chairperson. Hose had connections with the South London group of the Gay Liberation Front (GLF). GLF thinking questioned the family as the basis of an economic, social and sexual system and certain sections of GLF favoured the abolition of the age of consent; their youth group had staged a march in support of this demand (however, it should be noted that the age of consent for homosexuals was 21 at the time, in comparison to 16 for heterosexuals).

Paedophile Action for Liberation had developed as a breakaway group from South London Gay Liberation Front. It was the subject of an article in the Sunday People, which dedicated its front page and centre-spread to the story. The result was intimidation and loss of employment for some of those who were exposed. It later merged with PIE.

Keith Hose wrote that ‘The only way for PIE to survive, was to seek out as much publicity for the organization as possible…. If we got bad publicity we would not run into a corner but stand and fight. We felt that the only way to get more paedophiles joining PIE… was to seek out and try to get all kinds of publications to print our organization’s name and address and to make paedophilia a real public issue.’

A campaign to attract media attention was not effective at that time, but Hose’s attendance at the 1975 annual conference of the Campaign for Homosexual Equality (CHE) in Sheffield, where he made a speech on paedophilia, was covered at length in The Guardian.

In the same year Hose also attended a conference organized by Mind, the national mental health organization, where it was suggested that PIE should submit evidence to the Home Office Criminal Law Revision Committee on the age of consent. PIE submitted a 17-page document in which it proposed that there should be no age of consent, and that the criminal law should concern itself only with sexual activities to which consent is not given, or which continue after prohibition bya civil court.

This explains another reason for the invulnerability of the pedophile rings. The connection with left wing and fringe groups would probably come to the attention of secret services like the KGB and they would recruit. One of their most successful spy rings was the Cambridge 5, whose members were talent spotted by Anthony Blunt. Blunt cultivated a homosexual network through which he recruited potential spies and sometimes blackmailed them into acquiescence. Miranda Carter describes the sort of man Blunt was.

From the moment of his exposure as a former Russian spy by the Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, in November 1979, Anthony Blunt became a man about whom anything could be said.

He was described as ‘the spy with no shame’. He was ‘an arrogant evil poseur’. He was a ‘treacherous Communist poof ‘. It was rumoured that at Cambridge he had seduced and blackmailed impressionable undergraduates into serving his nefarious schemes. He had been responsible for the deaths of forty-nine wartime Dutch Special Operations agents behind enemy lines; he might, indeed, have been responsible for any number of deaths. He had been involved in devious conspiracies with Louis Mountbatten—possibly to put Mountbatten’s relatives on the thrones of Europe after the Second World War. He had salted away a fortune abroad. He had brought about the suicide of one of his students, Virginia Lee. He had been a predatory homosexual, or even a paedophile with links to the Kincora children’s home scandal in Northern Ireland; he had blackmailed the Establishment into granting him immunity from prosecution by threatening to reveal proof that the Duke of Windsor had been plotting with the Nazis during the Second World War; he had been an authenticator of forgeries, and had connived with the French picture dealer Georges Wildenstein to sell a fake Georges de la Tour to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; he had stolen the credit for a book on Picasso from a pupil and colleague, Phoebe Pool; he had borrowed money from his friend Victor Rothschild to buy a Poussin, and never repaid it; he had cheated the elderly Duncan Grant out of a Poussin he had owned, subsequently using his influence to get an export licence to sell the picture at a hugely inflated price to a gallery in Canada; he had engineered the Courtauld Institute’s move to Somerset House in the Strand in order to deprive the country of a Turner museum, as part of a fiendish plot to ‘relegate British art to a secondary position’.

After his exposure, Blunt became a kind of screen on which fiction and fantasy were projected. There was little he could do about this. After the publication of one of the more extravagant stories he asked his lawyer, Michael Rubinstein, if he had any legal recourse, and was told that he did not: he had lost his good name, and it would therefore be impossible to sue for libel. He had in effect so defamed himself that no further defamation was possible.

Since homosexuality no longer carries the stigma it once did the potential of pedophile networks to any secret cabal would be plain to outfits like the KGB. The new homosexuality is pedophilia. Thus, the pedophiles in high places, if they exist, would be protected in depth, not only by the need to protect their social status, but the need to protect other entanglements.

How far will the British inquiries go? Probably not very far. The British Establishment, as with what Codevilla called the elite in America are a bi-partisan bunch. They may differ in politics but they protect each other. Jimmy Savile far from being at its apex, was probably one of its lowest rent members. Besides he is dead and is safe to beat up on. But as to the living — they will likely remain in the shadows, unshakable in their determination to survive, insatiable in their appetites.

One of the strangest things about pedophilia is that while groups like PIE and NAMBLA have some chance of respectability in ‘educated’ circles there is no chance whatsoever of acceptance among hardened criminals. Criminals tend to be creatures of instinct. And their invariable instinct is that child molestation is a terrible thing. No argument, no sophistry, no talking points will dissuade them. The untutored criminal senses something evil in that dark shadow by the door and will not go near it.

A pedophile may be lionized in the left-wing intellectual circles, but he is dead meat in jail. Fritz Lang’s 1931 film M ends with the summary trial of a pedophile, memorably played by Peter Lorre, before a jury of criminals.

I remarked to someone from the old Philippine underground that criminal prison was a far saner place than a jail full of ideologues. “Why?” he asked. “Because it is more human,” I replied. He reflected for a moment and started laughing. “You’re right,” he said. I nearly added that being right never bought anyone a cup of coffee. But the Others can always buy you a mug.