Every so often a story appears in the newspapers which, while it might seem on the surface sensational and arresting, actually leaves you feeling somewhat less than astonished, all things considered. There have been at least two of these stories recently. The first, in the Daily Telegraph, alleged that Scotland Yard was investigating suspiciously large sums of cash apparently paid into the bank account of the Labour MP for Leicester East, Keith Vaz. I bet that very few people who have ever heard the words ‘Keith’ and ‘Vaz’ used in a conjoined sense will have smacked their foreheads upon reading this story and muttered to themselves: ‘Gaw, Keith Vaz, hey — who’d have believed it?’
I ought to point out here and now that while a complaint has been lodged with the Parliamentary Standards Commissioner, Keith himself has insisted that it is all a lot of stuff and nonsense and the money is perfectly above-board and tickety-boo, all half a million quid of it. So perhaps it is just that there seems something amiss about Keith that makes people suspect that he may have trousered vast amounts of money on the sly, based on no evidence whatsoever (other than the appearance in his bank account of the vast sums of money, that is). Or perhaps it is all in our minds.
Which brings me to the other less than astonishing story. There were clearly quite a lot of people in the country who could watch Jimmy Savile doing his hideous now-then now-then stuff on tv without feeling their flesh begin to crawl, but I have never met any of them. As has now been made apparent, there have been rumours for years about his penchant for young girls and now, a year after he’s dead and therefore beyond the remit of both the police and libel lawyers, the allegations have finally surfaced. People who knew him for decades — Paul Gambaccini and so on — are coming forward to say how unsurprised they are. It is alleged that he abused at least ten girls at a boarding school in Surrey, back in the 1970s.
As Gambaccini said, people have been expecting this story to emerge for 30 years and more. There was even a hoax script from the programme Have I Got News For You? in which Savile was challenged directly (and somewhat crudely) by Paul Merton and Angus Deayton about his predilection — all made up by someone else, of course, which only adds to the ambivalent nature of the story: it was sort of always in the public domain, but sort of always wasn’t, at the same time.
So rumours abounded. But my guess is that even if you hadn’t heard those rumours, you wouldn’t have been terribly surprised when these allegations at last surfaced. Would you have left your daughter alone with this hyperbolic albino Yorkshireman who wore shellsuits and bling and seemed rather too tactile for his own good when the kiddies were around? The girls in the school were apparently afforded no protection, though.
As ever, the BBC is now being criticised for having tried to keep a lid on all this stuff while the bloke was alive, the implication being that it wished to protect its star (who at the height of his fame in the 1980s was able, somehow, to draw in large television audiences). In particular, those ectoplasmic ‘BBC bosses’ are being accused of having prevented the broadcast of a lengthy Newsnight report into Savile’s behaviour following what was believed to have been a Scotland Yard investigation after which no charges were brought.
The programme’s editor, Peter Rippon, has said that no pressure was brought to bear on his programme not to run the report and that it was shelved for sound editorial reasons. I suspect that this is largely true. It seems to me unlikely, mind, that Newsnight would have embarked on such an investigation without various bureaucrats being aware of the matter. And the instinct of such bureaucrats is almost always to say ‘no’ rather than ‘yes’ to a tricky and controversial investigation, in order, to put it bluntly, to protect their own backs. Too often they are concerned with finding reasons not to broadcast something, rather than the reverse — and this is one explanation of why the BBC does comparatively little in the way of investigative journalism.
The executives may well have had in mind what might happen if the story was allowed to see the light of day: it is possible, if not probable, that the very newspapers now excoriating the BBC for a ‘cover-up’ would then have been going for the corporation’s throat, -accusing it of the baseless defamation of a much-loved television personality who had served the BBC and the nation blamelessly for more than 40 years. And interviews with Jimmy, in which he spoke of his sense of betrayal, and with the managers of Stoke Mandeville Hospital, the institution for which Savile raised a lot of money and where he was a frequent visitor, would have howled their own outrage.
The BBC cannot win. And this is one of the reasons that, when it embarks on controversial investigative journalism, the burden of proof needs to be that much greater than might be required by, say, the Daily Mail or even Channel 4 News. In this case, it needed to prove stuff that it was quite beyond the abilities of the police to prove. I suspect that this is why Rippon exercised his right, as an editor, not to proceed. It was not a cover-up, it was the legitimate question: what if we’ve got it wrong?
No such problem now, of course: Savile died last October. And any and all allegations can now be cheerfully flung in his direction with no prospect of legal comeback. Was he so powerful, when alive, to have had such power over the police, the press and broadcasters? Or is it simply that today the burden of proof required is rather less onerous?
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