Daily Mail COMMENT
AFTER spending £6.5million of licence fee payers’ money, the BBC yesterday published its 1,000-page report into how the grotesque paedophile Jimmy Savile was able to use Corporation premises across the country as his hunting ground. Truly, it makes for the most appalling reading. Dame Janet Smith identified 72 victims – including eight who were raped – as BBC staff turned a blind eye to Savile’s ‘monstrous’ abuse.
Horrifyingly, the youngest victim was only eight years old.
Over the course of four decades, an incredible 117 BBC staff heard ‘rumours’ about the DJ’s bestial behaviour, the report admitted – but nothing was done.
All in all, it is one of the most appalling sex abuse scandals of modern times which has brought international shame on the BBC. Yet has any senior manager who presided over this debacle been called to account? Of course not.
The Corporation’s vast armies of well- paid bureaucrats told the inquiry they knew nothing. And, despite conceding that ‘they would say that, wouldn’t they’, Dame Janet chose to believe them. The only person sacked, for allegedly not cooperating with the inquiry, was the veteran Radio 2 DJ Tony Blackburn.
It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that this was to shift attention away cynically from the fact the BBC’s upper echelons were all getting off scot-free. Just imagine how the Corporation would have reacted if the managers of a private company had shirked their responsibility in such a shameless way? The story would have led the sanctimonious BBC’s bulletins for weeks.
One of the great mysteries of the universe is why, when a full judicial inquiry was ordered by the Prime Minister into phone hacking by a now defunct tabloid newspaper, the BBC Trust was allowed to get away with commissioning its own investigation by Dame Janet. Is the molestation and rape of young girls on the Corporation’s premises really the less grave of these two matters?
Or is it one rule for the BBC and another for the rest of us?
What is certain is that Dame Janet delivered exactly what was expected from Day One: an expensive whitewash that fails Savile’s victims all over again.