Jimmy savile

If you’ve ever wondered what it will look like when we colonise Mars, the answer is ‘Dubai’. I was there the other week. Bloody hell, what a place. You sit there on your unabashedly fake beach on your un-abashedly fake island, perhaps basking in the shade of a palm tree that plainly wasn’t there a decade ago, because this used to be the sea. And across the bay, which is of course a fake bay, you can see skyscrapers. Pleasure zone, business zone, shopping zone. You half expect to find Richard O’Brien prancing around in a leopardskin top hat, urging you to collect crystals. It’s a great place for a

Jimmy Savile and I were both born on 31 October, though separated by 30 years. Sir James would be 87 this week. While he lived, I must admit, this fact did not give me much fellow feeling with the famous disc jockey, knight and member of the Athenaeum (proposed for membership by Cardinal Hume); but since he has died, I have been distressed that absolutely no one will speak in his defence. What bothers me is the sense that no one knows fully what he did, and few have tried seriously to establish the facts. Operation Yewtree, conducted by the police and the NSPCC, would barely admit that it had not actually

As I write, the World Islamic Economic Forum is opening in London, the first time it has been held in a non-Muslim country. David Cameron boasts that investors will now be able to buy sharia-compliant British gilts. If the forum helps Muslim countries share their commercial expertise with one another and the rest of us, well and good. But should modes of global commerce be defined by religious allegiance? What would the conspiracy theorists say about a World Jewish Economic Forum? How would Saudi Arabia — or even Dubai — react to the suggestion of a World Christian Economic Forum taking place within its borders?  And once it is officially proclaimed a

One Aldwych, an Edwardian grand hotel near Waterloo Bridge, is serving a Jimmy Savile tribute tea. It is not explicitly called a Jimmy Savile tribute tea; of course it is not. That would be tasteless, and people would not come to One Aldwych to eat it; it might, in fact, be lucky enough to get a picket, a dazzling marketing dream. No, it is called the Scrumdiddlyumptious Afternoon Tea and it is tied, in sugary, monetised chains, to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, a musical featuring a man dressed as a Fisher-Price toy (and possible diabetic), child torture and obesity, and explicit abuse of small minority workers, which is playing

Steerpike is back in this week’s magazine. As ever, here is your preview: ‘One of Lord Hall’s predecessors, Mark Thompson, is toiling away as chief executive of the New York Times. But he’s devised a brilliant wheeze to give his old chums at Broadcasting House a bit of extra work. Later this month his newspaper will co-host a Social Media Summit at the Times Center in New York. Thompson promises an ‘exciting line-up’ including world-class media luminaries like Matthew Eltringham, ‘Head of Web Site and Events at the BBC Academy College of Journalism’, and Dmitry Shishkin, ‘Digital Development Editor at BBC Global News’. These sages will discuss ‘journalism’s current use

There are over 3,000 pages of evidence in the cache of transcripts, emails, statements and texts for the Pollard Review released by the BBC today. Some of the interviews covered familiar old ground, such as Jeremy Paxman telling the inquiry that it was ‘common gossip that Jimmy Savile liked, you know, young – it was always assumed to be girls’. But there are other points which are worth noting from today’s release. There may well be others: some of the evidence, as the pictures below show, was heavily redacted. 1. Newsnight was poorly resourced This was a problem referred to by many of those who gave evidence to the inquiry.

A very good article indeed by Charles Moore in today’s Torygraph, regarding Operation Yewtree and the astonishing news that Jimmy Savile nonced the entire country. You can read it here. There is a middle way, surely, between not believing anyone who says that they were sexually abused 40 years ago by Savile and believing, utterly, everyone who makes such an allegation. As Charles points out, the Savile report contains very little — if anything – in the way of evidence. But anyone who makes the sort of point Charles is making here will be howled down with the accusation ‘abuse DENIER!’ by the absolutist liberal left.

I was looking through an old contacts book the other day (something that sad ageing hacks find themselves doing) and found that a number of people I used to call are now in prison. There was old Abu Qatada’s mobile number: I’d interviewed him in 1999 for The Observer when he was first named as a terror suspect. He outlined then what became the standard line for Islamist apologists: ‘Why do we hate America, why are we enemies of America? This is a question that should be addressed to America. Islam is the enemy, you say it, the West says it. And by America’s action it made us the enemy.’

And still it goes on and on. Apparently Jimmy Savile was banned from Children In Need because it was thought he was a bit creepy. Did he try to touch up Pudsey, or something? I think we are getting ourselves into a self-righteous frenzy here. Savile was unspeakably ghastly. He was unspeakably ghastly before these latest allegations and he’s – probably, almost certainly – even worse now. But are we really going to exact revenge on pop stars who may have fondled a fourteen year old girl forty years ago? Were there any of those glam rock stars – Gilbert O’Sullivan excepted – who didn’t fondle fourteen year old girls?