Instead of looking at the BBC’s behaviour over the Jimmy Savile programme through the red mist of self-righteous hindsight, consider the editorial problem it presented at the time. You have already planned Christmas tribute programmes to one of your most popular contributors of the past 40 years (God knows why he was so popular, but that is the symptom of a wider cultural sickness). Then you hear that part of your empire is investigating child abuse allegations against him. You inquire, and find that, though highly alarming, the allegations do not constitute proof and are not clearly supported by other inquiries e.g. by the police. Obviously you cannot run both the tribute programmes and the child abuse programme. Which do you spike? Surely almost any editor would run the tributes and at least postpone the exposé. He couldn’t can both because everyone would then ask why. Without clear, considered proof (which, even today, does not seem to reach court standard), it would have been crazy for the BBC to assassinate the character of its own hero. So, much as I love attacking the BBC, I decline to try to assassinate the character of its new director-general.
On 15 November, everyone in England and Wales will get the chance to vote for Police and Crime Commissioners. My father, who takes such processes seriously, went off last week to a public meeting in Battle to hear the Conservative candidate for Sussex. Apart from the candidate, a ‘pleasant woman’ who had run a number of dance halls specialising in what my father thought she said was ‘modern jive’, there were two local Tory bigwigs present, one bigwig’s wife, and two other members of the public. That was all. My father is firmly opposed to elected Police Commissioners, on the grounds that they will try to impose repressive policies demanded by an ignorant public.
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