Interview With Meirion Jones

The Journalist Who Exposed Jimmy Savile

                             

The two-part Netflix documentary Jimmy Savile: A British Horror story has told the story of Britain’s most prolific paedophile to global audiences for the first time. Many viewers who were previously unfamiliar with the story have expressed their amazement that Savile was able to get away with his crimes to some of the most powerful people in Britain.  The film’s director Rowan Deacon has said that she was not intending ‘ to blame one single person, one single department, one single thing for this — other than Jimmy Savile.’ 

But the film’s focus on Savile’s freakish personality and his ability to manipulate so many powerful people also raises questions about the institutions that he was able to penetrate.  One man who features heavily in the film is the investigative journalist Meirion Jones.  It was Jones, along with his BBC Newsnight colleague Liz MacKean and their researcher Hannah  Livingston, who first broke the Savile story in 2011.  At that time their film was pulled by the BBC, but it was shown the following year on ITV.

In doing so it finally lifted the lid on Savile’s Criminal past, and opened the way for all the stories and reports that have taken place since.  Meirion Jones came to the Savile story with a long track record of investigations that included oil dumping, the Florida votes in the 2000 US election, vulture funds and sexual abuse in the Catholic Church.  As a child he often visited his aunt, who ran the Duncroft Approved School in Surrey, which was also frequented by Jimmy Savile, where Jones met him for the first time. Years later, he began investigating the Savile story as a journalist with the BBC. I spoke to him about his work on the case.

Q: You played a large part in the Netflix Documentary. What  do you think of the result? 

A. I think they did an incredibly good job. I was expecting it to be a niche programme that catered to a very small audience.  Really, I’m astonished that it’s been the number one film, ahead of all the rom coms and thrillers on Netflix.  It’s been big in Europe, and it’s been top 10 in America. That to me is astonishing.

Q. How did you become involved in the investigation in the first place?

Well, when I was a teenager, my aunt ran a very strange institution called Duncroft, which was a half-prison, half-finishing school. It was a sort of elite one-off institution, which tried to deal with very intelligent girl criminals originally. 

Q. Why was it so strange?

A.  It was meant to be a progressive institution, although in practice the girls were often drugged when they misbehaved.  The rations each week included 40 cigarettes each if they behaved well and 10 if they behaved badly.  To raise money, my aunt would put on these big garden parties, you know, to try and buy mini buses that kids could be taken out on and so on. And you would get minor royals, Princess Marina, Princess Alexandra, politicians, film stars from the 50s like John Gregson and James Robertson Justice, and a whole array of people there. So in a way it wasn’t odd to see celebrities once or twice a year.  What was odd was Savile kept coming back.

Q. How old were you when you saw him there?

A. Savile started appearing when I was about sixteen. And I thought it was odd. I thought he was hiding something.

Q. What made you think that?

A. His catchphrases, you know ‘now then boys and girls’ and ‘as it happens’ and all that. It felt like there was a screen in front of him.  I didn’t think he was evil or anything. I just thought it was the first time I’d really met somebody from the world of television. I sort of assumed that everybody must be a bit like that.

Q. So what age were you when you began to put two and two together?

A. The first time these rumours appeared in print was 1990 when Lynn Barber wrote a profile of Savile.  It immediately made me think back to him taking out 14 year old girls in his Rolls Royce from the grounds of Duncroft, and it all looked in a different light to me. So from 1990 I thought he was probably a paedophile and by then I was at the BBC, but I was in the wrong bit of the BBC. We now know that going back to 1973, senior managers, you know that the head of Radio 1 and 2 knew about these allegations and knew that Savile was bringing underaged girls back to his flat and did nothing about it.  Their only concern was that it didn’t come out in the papers.

Q. When you first began to think of doing a programme on Savile, with Liz MacKean and others, did you sense any kind of resistance from the BBC, this idea that he was a protected VIP character?

A. I wasn’t getting to the point I was saying to senior managers ‘I’ve got the story, I need to run it’ at that point.  Far from it. I was discussing this with ordinary journalists at the BBC. So there wasn’t anything to wall it off at this stage

Liz MacKean 1964-2017

Q. When did you think there was?

A. Only really when they suddenly stopped the programme [in 2011]. I hadn’t thought they would do that. I mean there were hints of it.  There were some people who were already expressing doubts about whether we should do that.  You were getting a mumble of some people saying ‘we really don’t want to go digging into Jimmy Savile’, you know ‘It can only turn out badly for the BBC.’ But I genuinely believed that they would run the story and that we would go ahead. I had a very naïve view that the BBC was essentially a very good organisation – which it is in many ways – but goodness it ought to extend to doing something about themselves.

Q. This is one of the things that seems to happen in whatever institutions Savile was involved in – a few people maybe are saying something about him to someone else, and yet the whole thing just stops at quite a low ceiling of middle management and not really getting above that.  And then you wonder, how could that happen?

A. It's not true at the BBC. We know that in 1973, Douglas Muggeridge, the controller of Radio 1 and 2, knew about the allegations about Savile having underage girls back to his camper van. And more particularly that he’d been having underaged girls back to his flat after Top of the Pops.  Muggeridge and his deputy questioned Savile and he admitted it. Their concern was, would it come out in the papers.  That’s what they were worried about.

Q. So you have this situation with the BBC knowingly or not, facilitating paedophile activity.  How could this happen?  Is it a sort of bureaucratic inertia, or an obsessive fear of reputational damage? It seems to be something that all the institutions dealing with Savile had in common.

A. These institutions are getting more out of Savile than they would by investigating any damage to his victims. So in the case of the BBC, look at its ratings: 20 million people watching their biggest star. And they don’t want to hear anything that’s going to imperil that.  In the case of the charities and the institutions – he’s raising 10 million pounds for Stoke Mandeville -  and in all those institutions there are allegations being made and the management does not want to hear them. And then, those institutions themselves are very dependent on Royalty and government approval.

The BBC needs the license fee, the institutions need royal patrons, and this is a man who has made himself a friend of the royal family and friend of the Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. He’s a man who’s been put in charge of Broadmoor by the government. He’s been put in charge of Stoke Mandeville.  He’s incredibly powerful and extremely difficult to go for. And the other thing that’s absolutely key is he picks out vulnerable victims. He picks out institutions where he knows there’ll be vulnerable people who will have difficulty resisting him and who won’t be believed. 

So imagine what would have happened if at the time, half a dozen Duncroft girls had come forward and gone to the local police force. Does the police believe half a dozen girls, some of them with criminal records, drugs, probably God knows what, or do they believe one of the six most prominent people in Britain?  It’s incredibly difficult for anyone to register any sort of complaint.

Q. It also seems as if some people within these institutions may have accepted Savile’s own ‘moral ledger ‘ that if he’s doing some good then it doesn’t matter if he’s doing some bad, especially when he’s dealing with people who have no value in the eyes of British society.

A.100 percent. They were not seen as worthwhile or important people. They were seen as scum.  And if he was doing something that was wrong with them, then how did that balance against the fact that he’s raising 10 million for Stoke Mandeville or something?

Q. Andrew Neill says in the programme that the ‘nation failed itself.’ But that is so general, it implicates everybody and nobody. It doesn’t really hold institutions to account.

A. I agree.  At the top of these institutions, there was at least a doubt or a worry, or knowledge, that they were not going to go there. That anyone who tried to raise it would be steered away from it.  It’s clear that the BBC knew.  Even in 2010 when the BBC high ups were talking about whether they’re going to do an obit or not.  And they’re saying they can’t do an honest film about him  because of the dark side.

Q. You say at one point in the programme that the whole world around Savile had to change before the truth could come out. How much do you think it has changed?

A. First of all, in terms of women and vulnerable people being believed it has changed recently. In terms of institutions, we are still failing.  In many countries now, it’s the law that if you are the head of a school or a hospital or the church and you know of allegations of abuse, you have to report them. If you don’t, you will go to prison. In Britain we have no such law.  So the way it’s dealt with, is a blind eye is turned for as long as possible.  If it becomes too much of a problem, that person is given a good reference and they go elsewhere.  And the problem is got rid of, and that is a very simply change we can make.

Q. Do you think this is a very British way of doing things?  This sweeping under the carpet of anything that can cause reputational damage and an institutional unwillingness to face up to or acknowledge failure?  I’m thinking not just about Savile, but about the Iraq war, Brexit, Grenfell.  The British method is you have white papers, you have inquiries, you have lessons learned, and somehow at the end of it, no one’s responsible.

A. That’s a really good connection with the Iraq War.  The Hutton Report is very much like the Janet Smith report. In that report it uncovers all the evidence that the government lied to us, and then Hutton  comes to the conclusion that it didn’t. So read the report, not the conclusions. And the same is true of the Janet Smith report.  There’s all the evidence in there that the BBC knew, that people knew, and then the conclusion is ‘everything is fine.’ And I think that’s a very British way of compiling a report.  So if you read the detail, and you read the annexes, and everything else, you get a very good picture of what was going on, but the actual official report at the end of that says quite the opposite.

Q. Yes, its bizarre really. It’s a historical, cultural, political pattern that in some ways explains the situation we’re in now, when we can’t hold a prime minister to account for his own lawbreaking.  You’re dealing with a country that can’t go forwards, because it won’t go back and look over what it’s done wrong.

A. I don’t think it’s just Britain that does that. I think we’re particularly bad at it. But other countries have been covering up child abuse for years. Another really important factor in this is libel. I know journalists from the sixties who tried to expose Savile, right the way through to the eighties, nineties.  Every time you’re faced with a wealthy person with massive connections who will go to court. You are going to be in libel court. 

It is going to cost you half a million, a million to go to court.  At the end of the day your witnesses are fourteen year olds from dodgy backgrounds against somebody who can put Prince Charles, the Pope, and the Prime Minister in as character witnesses.  What hope have you got?  You have no hope whatsoever. It doesn’t even get to court.  Your lawyers say there is no way we can tell this story.

The role of libel laws in protecting wrongdoing in this country is huge, and again, we need a reform.  If that can be reformed then the outrageous situation in which Fleet Street knew from the sixties that Savile was a paedophile and yet was never exposed, that should never ever happen again.

Q. That’s a very important point, especially when dealing with accusations that journalists didn’t do anything.

A. There were many, many occasions when journalists tried to expose him and failed.

Q. Do you think we’ve reached a point when that scale of abuse could not happen again in Britain? 

A. No. As far as the institutional abuse is concerned, we have not taken the obvious measures to prevent that happening again.  We’re still just as exposed to institutional abuse as we ever were.

Q. What about the police role in this? 

A: The police thing is interesting. I know women who went to the police at the time, and were basically pushed aside at the door by the police officer they went to see. I know junior police officers who went to senior police officers and said ‘look we’ve had this complaint’ and they were pushed back on.  And it goes all the levels up. So Chief Constable wants a knighthood when they quit.  Are they going to get a knighthood if they go after Prince Charles’ mate?  

There were very strong pressures there for people not to do anything.  Again and again you see officers working together to intimidate the victims

Q. Some of this is similar to the failure to investigate the allegations against Wayne Couzens before the murder of Sarah Everard.

A. At the bureau [Bureau of Investigative Journalism] we’ve done a lot on domestic violence by their own officers.  And again and again you see officers working together to discredit the victim, to intimidate the victim, even when the victim is a female police officer.

Q. Is the Savile investigation closed? Is it over?

A. Every time I say anything about Savile more people come to me,  who have not been recorded as cases. So since the Savile film came out, I’ve had somebody come to me who was abused at Broadmoor as a nine-ten year-old and never reported it.  And his brother who was a similar age, was also absued at the same time by Savile.  At another children’s home in Staines, about a mile from Duncroft, somebody’s come forward from there and said that Savile used to turn up in his mobile home and have underaged girls in his mobile home.  There are 400 official victims who reported in.  There would have been at least 100 who died before we got to that stage in 2012.  There are at least 100 who’ve come to people like me who’ve not reported it.  So you’re probably talking about 1,000 to 2,000 victims.