Sir Jimmy, the man who hid in plain sight
BEFORE he finally defected to Russia, the louche spy Guy Burgess often used to get roaring drunk in Soho pubs and proclaim, ‘I’m a spy! I’m a spy!’ at the top of his voice.
For most people, this only served to confirm that he couldn’t possibly be a spy. After all, they reasoned, if he really was a spy, he surely wouldn’t be telling everyone.
It all goes to show that sometimes the surest form of disguise is the truth. That way, everyone will think: ‘He must be joking!’
It was the technique Jimmy Savile seems to have employed throughout his long and peculiar life.
Most people’s vision of a paedophile would probably involve some combination of the following: 1) an elderly man with dyed hair; 2) grossly inappropriate clothes, like gold lamé shorts; 3) a lot gurning; and 4) a lot of gurgling; and 5) a beefy arm clenched tightly around the waist of a child.
As paedophiles go, Savile was no shrinking violet. Not only did he exhibit all five of the above characteristics, but he exhibited them all at least once a week on national television. For everyone, such extreme exhibitionism served to confirm that he couldn’t possibly be a paedophile. We all thought: ‘He must be joking!’ And he had two more characteristics of the paedophile: he pursued employment in areas that would give him regular access to children, and he sought the patronage of those in positions of power and influence.
In both these areas, he proved extraordinarily successful. Top Of The Pops and Jim’ll Fix It gave him the chance to lord it over starryeyed children, and at the same time he was taken up by the Establishment like no other entertainer, before or since.
As long ago as 1971, he was appointed a member of Lord Longford’s commission of inquiry into pornography. Ten years later, Lord Longford wanted to appoint Savile to another commission, this time on Mental After-Care. In 1988, the Department of Health suspended the management board of Broadmoor, and put him in charge.
He was also taken up by successive prime ministers. The then Leader of the Opposition, Margaret Thatcher, appeared on Jim’ll Fix It in 1977, greeting a little girl who wanted to be prime minister. ‘When I was small I didn’t think there ever could be a woman prime minister, but we hope you’re going to fix it, Jimmy,’ she cooed.
‘I already have done, privately, but I didn’t want everyone to know,’ replied Jimmy. After Thatcher reached No 10, she regularly invited him to Chequers for Christmas.
The Royal Family also took him to their heart. One of the revelations in Princess Diana’s famous Squidgygate tapes was that Prince Charles had asked Savile to advise the Duchess of York on how to improve her image.
Later, Princess Diana told her biographer, Andrew Morton, of the helping hand Savile had given the royal couple in 1985, when rumours of their marital difficulties had first surfaced, advising them to visit Dyfed in Wales, which had recently been devastated by flooding.
To pass undetected, the wellconnected paedophile must necessarily also be an expert on public relations. Visiting his London flat in 1990, just after he had been awarded his knighthood, the beady journalist Lynn Barber looked through congratulatory telegrams from the Prince and Princess of Wales and the Duke of Edinburgh, ‘and a very sweet home-made card with a stuck- on snapshot of Princess Bea, from the Duchess of York’.
Barber said she found touring the Stoke Mandeville wards with Savile ‘ a disconcerting experience: when he coos over a young woman paraplegic: “Aha, now I can have my way with you, my dear!” one can only pray that she appreciates the joke.’
With hindsight, one can see that he was, once again, employing the Burgess technique of using the truth as a smokescreen, and then hiding behind it. A few years later, my wife, Frances Welch, went to interview him at the same flat.
‘Where some people gravitate towards golf clubs, I gravitate towards hospitals,’ he told her. ‘They’re better than discos, those gaffs. They’re open 24 hours.’ At the time, it seemed like a joke.
THE interview was about his religious beliefs. Frances asked Savile whether he thought he would go to heaven or to hell. ‘If there was any argument at the golden gates, I’d offer to break St Peter’s thumbs and see how he fancies that,’ he replied.
Though religious — attending Mass every week, and confession every six months — Savile said he was not evangelical.
‘He zips up his baggy tracksuit top,’ my wife ended her description of their encounter. ‘“I don’t tell you to wear a tracksuit,’ he says with a lascivious glance. “And you don’t tell me to wear knickers.”’