A very British witch hunt – wild, furious and three decades late

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[/audioplayer]I suppose we must accustom ourselves to the fact that some 30 years ago Britain was in the grip of a terrible paedo–geddon — even if, at the time, we did not quite know it. More shockingly still, it was not simply light entertainers who were fiddling about up and down the country, with their cunningly coded messages to children about having an ‘extra leg’ and sinister injunctions to restrain kangaroos. It was, it seems, everyone. The Home Office has announced an enormous inquiry into the whole business, covering a considerable number of major institutions — the government, the BBC, the Church of England and so on.

Some large organisations are missing from the current remit of this inquiry (which will, of course, be headed by an expensive QC): the AA, for example, and the Methodists. But there will surely be room for a separate investigation dealing with them and others like them.