No 10 adviser on porn curbs ‘collected pictures of young girls’
A TRUSTED aide of David Cameron who advised him on internet porn filters had a stash of indecent images of girls as young as ten, a court heard yesterday.
Patrick Rock, a key member of the Prime Minister’s inner circle, had been involved in drawing up government policy on tackling internet porn when he was caught with 20 pictures of girls wearing gold bikinis, hot pants and ballerina tutus.
The policy fixer, who later resigned from his post at Whitehall, has admitted downloading the images featuring nine girls on to his iPad.
But Rock, 64, claimed they were not indecent. His lawyer compared the youngsters’ provocative clothing and poses to Britney Spears in her music
‘Deliberately sexual in tone’
video Hit Me Baby One More Time, released when the pop star was 16.
Southwark Crown Court heard yesterday how the Oxford-educated former deputy director of policy, who had known the Prime Minister for 30 years, amassed the ‘erotic’ images of girls in skimpy swimwear, suspenders and leotards over three days in August 2013.
Some youngsters, known as ‘Princess’ and ‘Cutie’, were photographed in just a pair of knickers or hot pants and a bra. Other images depicted children pulling their dresses up or posing suggestively with an exercise bike.
Thomas Forster, prosecuting, said: ‘Each child is photographed in deliberate poses that were staged for the camera. The clothing the children are wearing is sometimes adult in style, indeed what an adult might consider sexualised or erotic clothing. The child is photographed in a pose that is deliberately sexual in tone, because they are scantily clad and their legs are often apart or they are showing their bottoms to the camera.’
The images of the girls aged between ten and 16 were freely available on the internet. Yesterday Sasha Wass QC, defending Rock, compared the stash to a swimwear catalogue. She said the unmarried former adviser may be more interested in ‘cute’ and ‘adorable’ youngsters than women his own age, but that he had done nothing wrong.
She compared his conduct to author Lewis Carroll who took naked pictures of youngsters who inspired his book Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland.
Carroll, who died in 1898, photographed Alice Liddell – the inspiration for his main character – many times, as well as her older sister Lorina.
Miss Wass told jurors many older men were attracted to ‘an allure that is youth’, adding: ‘You are being asked to judge whether a 64-year- old man who has never been in trouble should be criminalised for looking at clothed young girls.
‘Some of you will be old enough to remember a 16-year-old Britney Spears gyrating in a school uniform in the popular song Hit Me Baby One More Time.
‘She was wearing provocative clothing and her words, movements, could not have been more suggestive.’
Rock, of Fulham, west London, did not take the stand during the evidence, which lasted just over an hour before the jury retired to consider their verdicts. He denies all 20 counts of making indecent images of children.
The case continues.