Sleaze Britannia

Jimmy, Savile, Kincora Boys Home, and the Scandals that Cannot Speak their Name

The British often like to peer into the bedrooms of dictators. When dictatorships fall, we have almost come to expect a torrent of sleazy revelations to come pouring out of their bedrooms, the wilder and more depraved the better. We like to imagine fallen tyrants as if they were characters in a de Sade novel; decadent libertines locked away in some castle where they are able to pursue their morbid desires unchecked by legality or morality.

Stories of rape or the sexual abuse of children and minors, whether real or invented, have a morbidly salacious appeal, even as they confirm that the regimes that oversaw them are fundamentally evil and rotten to the core. Thus it seems logical that Stalin’s vile NKVD chief Lavrenti Beria was a sexual predator who used to cruise Moscow looking for young girls to rape.

Of course the elderly Mao used to have young virgins brought to his bedroom because he believed it would make him live longer. Naturally Kim Il Sung established a ‘pleasure brigade’ of young women for the same reason, Idi Amin had sex with his sister, and Ceaucescu’s son Niku’s house contained a ‘rape room’.

The list is endless, and I’m not denying the truth of these allegations, but it is worth questioning the assumption that sexual depravity is an inevitable consequence of dictatorships that are already bad enough, if only because it can blind us to the abuse of power in the bedroom that is also perpetrated in democratic countries.

There was a time when we assumed that powerful men could not get away with such things in our country because a) our system has checks and balances that limit the abuse of power both publicly and in private, b) the British are inherently nicer than other people and so are our leaders and c) British sexual life is all a naughty Carry On film and picture postcard stuff of the kind that Orwell liked, populated by red-faced men in seaside postcards, Benny Hill chasing blondes around, Sid James’s wink, three-in-a-bed ‘romps’ with vicars.

Recent events have disabused us of these illusions - up to a point. We now know that the necrophiliac knight and child rapist Sir James Savile was able to get away with some of the vilest sexual crimes in British history, with the active complicity of the police, hospital executives, politicians, BBC big shots and many other members of the great and good, all of whom chose to look away or did not reveal what they knew.

We know this generically, but not specifically, because the extent of this collusion has yet to be revealed and much of it has already been swept under the carpet, and so has the network of power that nurtured and protected Savile.

Accountability has largely been reduced to removing him from Top of the Pops reruns in an attempt to erase the former national treasure from public consciousness as comprehensively as Stalin once removed Trotsky from photographs of Lenin. And then there is the small matter of a paedophile network at Westminster involving leading politicians, who according to two former Scotland Yard officers, were considered ‘untouchables.’

If the allegations that have surfaced so far are true, then these politicians were part of a network that forced young children from care homes to take part in sex orgies, in which at least two boys may have been murdered.

Lavrenti Beria should eat his rotten heart out, because he obviously didn’t need the NKVD. Not with a government that mysteriously seems to have destroyed or lost a crucial dossier which might have shed light on these events.

Or a prime minister like Margaret Thatcher, who once told one of her ministers to ‘clean up his sexual act’ because he was having sex with children from care homes and did nothing when he didn’t ‘clean it up.’ Or a government like the one we had in 2015, which appears intent on doing everything it can to sabotage any attempt to carry out a full investigation into those events, probably because so many Tory politicians may have been involved in them.

And it isn’t only politicians. There are also the ‘celebrities’ whose names continue to crop up in connection with the Elm Street guest house. There are the M15 officers who appear to have used abused boys at the Kincora Boys Home in Belfast as ‘bait’ in an intelligence operation during the ‘dirty war’ in Northern Ireland in the 1970s.

When it comes to rape and sexual abuse, certain individuals and institutions are just too big to fail. Take our own Prince Andrew, who last year agreed to settle Virginia Guiffre’s lawsuit accusing HRH of having sex with her, in an arrangement supposedly facilitated by Epstein and Robert Maxwell’s daughter.

On one hand the fact that Andrew settled suggests that he must have been lying when he previously denied even knowing Guiffre. In addition, there is plenty of evidence around to suggest that Andrew’s relationship with Epstein deserves closer investigation. But this is not going to happen, because some men, like banks, are too big to fail, or at least to fail completely.

So far, the British media and public have been far more exercised by Meghan Markle and Prince Harry than by Prince Andrew, and there is certainly no political appetite for asking questions about why a royal who is eighth in line to the throne was so closely involved with one of the most notorious paedophiles in recent history.

For some men, power will always bring a license to have sex with whoever they want, and it also brings impunity, whether their power stems from absolute rule or the willingness of democracies to allow certain categories of men to behave according to an entirely different set of standards to everyone else.

Too many people in this country prefer to look away when powerful men use their ‘establishment’ connections to behave in this way. This is why the Liberal MP Cyril Smith was able to abuse young boys throughout his life. It’s why Savile was able to abuse so many girls in plain sight. There will be others, whose names have not been revealed.

This is what the powerful will always do, and there will always be people willing to cover-up for them. In dictatorships the public never finds out about the depravity of their leaders until after their deaths, because most people are too frightened to speak about what they know or think they know.

In a country like ours, coercion is not required. More often than not, the public doesn’t want to know, and too many of those who do know have no interest in telling them.