Harvey Proctor

It is not easy to feel sorry for Harvey Proctor.

In 1987 he stepped down as a Conservative MP when he was charged for gross indecency, having been caught in a tabloid sting that involved flagellation games with rent boys. At the time, the age of consent for male homosexual practices was twenty-one, and the evidence was clear that Proctor genuinely believed that his partners were not only consenting but of age. They weren't, though they were over sixteen, our current age of consent.

Many of those who might have supported him, as the victim of press intrusion and of an unjust law, were reluctant to do so, since his attitude to race and immigration had already alienated most of civilised society. And many of those who had previously supported him precisely because of that attitude - well, they were now alienated by the revelation of his sexual proclivities.

Daily Mirror 21 May 1987

So, not many people have ever sympathised with Harvey Proctor. Nonetheless, it is worth reading the statement he issued yesterday, denying any involvement in an alleged child-sex ring at Westminster.

In the statement, he quotes extensively from what he says is 'the police disclosure document given to my solicitors two days before my first interview with the police'. And when you read the allegations as bald statements, you can see Proctor's point: 'My situation has transformed from Kafka-esque bewilderment to black-farce incredulity.'

Because it is alleged that the circle of abusers included a (current or former) prime minister, home secretary, head of MI5, head of MI6 and chief of the general staff. These men would gather in private houses where they would rape, torture and kill young boys.

I wouldn't deny that there have been, and are, men who take sexual pleasure in the torturing to death of children, but they are vanishingly few in number, surely? For so many of them to have reached such senior positions in society simply defies belief. They didn't manage to do so in the Third Reich, but they did in Britain in the 1970s and 1980s? It's implausible that the holders of these posts were all homosexual, highly improbable that they were all paedophiles, and frankly impossible that they should all be homosexual, paedophile, sadistic murderers.

The only way of believing such a thing is to go the full distance and claim that the establishment is staffed by an alien species with an entirely different sexuality to that of human beings.

Yet even that wouldn't explain why this circle, if it did exist, would welcome the likes of Proctor. He himself admits that 'Edward Heath despised me', and adds: 'As an ex-secondary modern school boy from Yorkshire, I was not a part of the establishment.'

This is surely true. He was just about tolerated on the Tory backbenches in Margaret Thatcher's second term, but even there many regarded him as being an unpleasant oik. It's difficult to see such an impressive cast of grandees inviting Proctor into their homes in the first place, let alone encouraging him to join them in 'punching and kicking' a young boy to death.

The allegations are self-evidently absurd. And they run the risk of making all enquiries into old cases of paedophile abuse seem absurd by association.

There certainly were paedophiles in the upper ranks of the establishment. I wrote about the case of Sir Peter Hayman, for example, last year. And certainly things were covered up. But however appalling we find paedophilia, it is still in a different class of behaviour to child-killing. And however shocking we find it that action was not taken, averting one's gaze is in a different class of behaviour to participating in a murderous orgy.

The police, it is said, have a duty to investigate complaints, and obviously this is a sensitive area and a difficult time. Even so, this sort of nonsense surely shouldn't take too long to dismiss. Instead Proctor has had the allegations hanging over him for months, allegations that he personally murdered two children, and connived at the killing of a third. He has twice been interviewed at length over the claims.

It's not easy to feel sorry for Harvey Proctor, but for once in his life he deserves sympathy.

Postscript: I posted this just as Newsnight started, which included an interview with Harvey Proctor. There is perhaps one thing that should be added. He was asked by Evan Davis why he thought his name had been mentioned in the allegations, and he replied that perhaps it was because he was homosexual and had once pleaded guilty to indecency charges, albeit for offences that are no longer offences.

Well, yes, but there is the nature of the offences as well. He admitted paying teenage prostitutes, less than half his age, so that he could beat them. If I were concocting a story of sadistic pederasts in 1980s Westminster, his name might well come to my mind.

It's still nonsense, of course. Even more so. If he had access to twelve-year-olds who he could rape and murder to his heart's content, why was he still playing Trivial Pursuit with nineteen-year-olds and spanking them when they got the answers wrong? That's a different psychology entirely.

But it's worth bearing the facts in mind when he protests that the police are pursuing a 'homosexual witch hunt'. Because that's a daft claim as well.

He won't harsh your buzz: a portrait of Tom Watson

PLEASE NOTE: A fuller and much better version of this piece can be found here on the Lion & Unicorn site where I now do most of my posting.

It's hard to ignore Tom Watson, the current front-runner to become deputy leader of the Labour Party. He's no shrinking violet.

Born in 1967 - midway between the two Miliband brothers - he shared with other New Labour MPs an early commitment to a political career, progressing to Westminster in 2001 from the National Union of Students, via a stint as political officer to the Amalgamated Engineering and Electrical Union (AEEU, now part of Unite). Despite the orthodox credentials on his c.v., however, he didn't look as smooth and sleek as most of his contemporaries. And he wasn't averse to employing much more overtly class-conscious rhetoric.

During Blair's first term he had the wit to see - earlier than many others - that a sharp decline in voter turnout needed addressing. Together with Mark Tami, another official at the AEEU who was also elected in 2001, he wrote a Fabian Society pamphlet calling for the introduction of compulsory voting. It was hardly an original proposal, but noteworthy because there was something about the tone that didn't fit with the bland vocabulary of New Labour.

'When the British electorate speaks, we only hear upper and middle class accents,' said Watson. 'Compulsory voting would challenge the elite and give real power to working people.' This, it's worth remembering, was at a time when the Labour Party had 418 MPs.

There was also a note of slightly aggressive sneering as Watson and Tami dismissed the idea that, were the policy to be introduced, there might be protests: 'Some retired colonel from Hampshire would be bound to make a stand against what he saw as the intrusion of the state,' they mocked, 'and no doubt the BBC would film him wearing all his medals whilst he ripped up his polling card.'

Watson was elected to represent West Bromwich East as part of Tony Blair's second landslide victory and began immediately to crop up in news stories, ready to give an opinion on attention-grabbing, if easy, issues.

In 2001, for example, it was reported that Gary Glitter - recently released from jail, following his conviction for possession of child pornography - had recorded a new album. Watson thundered into action, 'It is disgraceful that this convicted paedophile should be allowed to peddle his wares,' he told the media. 'Obviously, young children are the biggest buyers of pop music and they are bound to come into contact with this new recording.' He wanted David Blunkett, the home secretary, to ban the record, and also called for the website of Glitter's official fan club to be closed down.

This, of course, was arrant nonsense. Glitter had served his time, and the idea of preventing him from resuming his life was an insult to justice. Anyway, a man of Watson's age should have known better than to claim that Glitter's thirty-year-old music was now aimed at 'young children'. But it got him in the papers and it established him as a rent-a-quote politician.

He kept himself busy in those early parliamentary years commenting on a wide range of such stories: demanding that Margaret Thatcher's statue shouldn't be placed in the Commons lobby, that foxhunting should be banned, and that Prince Charles should buy British cars. He also set up one of the first blogs by an MP, and was highly praised for it, though if the following quote from his website (reported in the Herald in 2003) is accurate, the acclaim may have been misplaced:

Teens! The BBC politics for kids/teens site is, like, totally whacked! Ditto for the parliament education site, which even has a section for younger yoof. Fanta-stick! So, cut it with the bling bling and do something for the community, man. Join in and take action with any of the groovy sites we've listed, or just drop Tom a line for a quiet rap by the electronic e-mail. He won't harsh your buzz or diss you down the line.

Tom Watson was then thirty-six years old.*

Meanwhile he was keeping his political nose clean as an ultra-loyal MP, on the Brownite side of the party. (Gordon Brown's camp did tend to attract the heavier-set male MP.) He showed no sign of dissent, and most importantly he was dutiful in backing Tony Blair's decision to invade Iraq. 'Voting against the government harms it and harms the party,' he declared. Having done absolutely nothing at all to upset the whips, he was brought into government in 2004 as a junior defence minister.

In September 2006, however, he finally broke from his position of loyal support and abruptly resigned from his government job, writing to Blair to explain why: 'It is with the greatest sadness that I have to say that I no longer believe that your remaining in office is in the interest of either the party or the country.'

It was apparently an attempt to force Blair himself to resign, so that Brown could inherit the office of prime minister. And it worked. Blair responded by announcing that he would step down the following May.

Watson was rewarded by being brought back into government under Brown's premiership, but he resigned again in 2009, in the midst of the expenses scandal, from which he emerged with no great moral credit.

More recently he has made a name for himself by attacking Rupert Murdoch's news empire over phone hacking and by alleging the existence of 'a powerful paedophile network linked to Parliament and Number 10'. Worthy campaigns, no doubt, but happily they're also sufficiently high-profile to ensure that he's still courted by the media (except, obviously, for those outlets owned by Murdoch).

* Added note: When I tweeted a link to this post, Tom Watson tweeted back: 'did you scroll down the page of the "teens" section?' Yes, I did scroll down to the bit where it says that this was 'designed as a parody of how some politicians "connect" to young people.' I'm not sure, however, that he scrolled down my post to the bit where it says that these portraits 'are drawn entirely from their media coverage'. This is about the public perceptions of politicians. Which is why the quote is attributed to the Herald not to his site directly.

This is the first of a series of posts in which - unless I lose all will to live - I shall be looking at each of the candidates in the current Labour Party elections for leader and deputy leader, with portraits drawn entirely from their media coverage.

Till Death Us Do Part - a clarification

In a post yesterday I quoted a rant by Rita in a 1974 episode of Till Death Us Do Part that linked together the names of Edward Heath, Cyril Smith and Jimmy Savile. The ethics of that posting have been challenged by someone whose opinions I respect, so I thought I'd better try to explain myself.

Firstly, I don't believe the recent allegations of child abuse by Heath. They don't seem to me to be plausible at all. Like everyone else, I have heard over the years many rumours of Heath being actively homosexual - even, from one right-wing extremist that he regularly went cottaging - and I don't believe those either. More relevantly, I never heard stories about him having an interest in under-age sex. (Whereas such stories were common about both Smith and Savile.)

But I do believe that Johnny Speight, who created Till Death, knew what he was doing when he wrote that rant, putting those names together. He was an old-fashioned socialist who loathed the Conservative prime minister and was (I think) deliberately alluding to rumours he had heard with the intention of subtly smearing Heath. And as someone who writes about cultural and political history, I find this fascinating.

I didn't discuss this in my book Crisis? What Crisis?, where I used only the first half of the quote. And the reason I didn't discuss it was that two of the three men were then still alive and I would never have got it past my publisher's lawyer.

I did, however, post the quote on a previous blog last September, when the stories about Smith entered the public domain. And I did so again yesterday because the allegations against Heath have been front-page news for several days. This story is also now in the public domain and, given the wrong behaviour of the police and the extensive reporting, I don't think that a quote from a 1970s comedy show on an obscure blog is going to add to the misery of Heath's surviving relatives.

But it is fascinating that those connections were included in what was still one of the biggest sitcoms in the country, and certainly the only one that regularly featured very explicit comment on current politics. This was particularly the case in that fifth series at the beginning of 1974, the episodes of which Speight rewrote right up to the last minute, to ensure they were as fresh as possible, at a time when the political situation was changing rapidly.

Speight, of course, is long since dead and - as far as I know - never talked about this speech. But it feels deliberate, and I think it's worth noting.

There remains, though, another question: what were the rumours that Speight was alluding to?

This was written, it should be remembered, at a time when male homosexuality was still illegal in Scotland and Northern Ireland, and when the age of consent for homosexual acts between men was still twenty-one in England and Wales. Brought before the courts, a thirty-year-old man having sex with an eighteen-year-old boy was quite likely to be dealt with as - if not more - harshly as if he had had sex with a fourteen-year-old girl. This, of course, is no longer the case.

I've written elsewhere about how sex with minors was viewed in the 1970s. Not just legally but culturally, there are some major differences between then and now. Amongst them is the fact that male homosexuality and paedophilia used to be seen as inextricably entwined; this perception was articulated in public and in popular culture in a way that would be entirely unacceptable today.

It is possible that some of this confusion is present in Speight's writing. It is equally possible that what he was mocking was hypocrisy in public figures. (Savile, though not a political figure, was at the time associated with moral campaigners such as Lord Longford and Mary Whitehouse.)

I should add that although I don't think the stories of Heath being a paedophile are going to hold water, I do believe that the bigger story has a long, long way to run yet. There were undoubtedly paedophiles in powerful positions (though not necessarily household names) and there were undoubtedly some who chose to look the other way. This was not confined to Westminster. In the same way, the pupils at many a school would know which teacher to avoid, yet somehow no one in authority did anything about it.

That habit of concealment is now looked upon as having been disgraceful. And if an example of such a covering-up had been exposed forcefully enough at the time it would also have been censured. But it wasn't exposed. Because that's just how things were. As a society (though obviously this does not apply to those involved), we simply didn't consider it to be that big a deal.

Now it is considered the biggest deal of all, and consequently this story is going to be increasingly important over the next few years. I suspect there will be many explosions to come. Perhaps literally, because I think it's such an emotive subject that it could provoke violent expressions of anger. I can envisage it becoming the primary focus for the growing mood of anti-elitism.

Which is why I've written as much as I have on the subject. (There's another piece here.) And when I come across things like the Till Death quote, I record them. But maybe I should do so with a little more commentary.

Sir Edward, Sir Cyril and Sir Jimmy

In a January 1974 episode of the sitcom Till Death Us Do Part, Alf Garnett's daughter Rita (played by Una Stubbs) ranted about the TV appearances of prime minister of the time, Edward Heath, before launching into other public figures:

Heath makes me sick every time I see him on there with his great porky face wobbling with fat. And that other one, that other fatty - Cyril Smith MP. Have you seen him? You think they'd make themselves look decent before they go on telly, wouldn't you? You'd think they'd go to one of those health farms or something, wouldn't you?

Did you see it with Jimmy Savile the other day? Did you see them? And they were eating lamb chops, with grease running down their faces.

Given the allegations of the last couple of years, it's an odd coincidence, isn't it, that writer Johnny Speight should have chosen Sir Edward Heath, Sir Cyril Smith and Sir Jimmy Savile to be the targets of her rage?

Grooming in Rotherham

It's now clear that the authorities in Rotherham were told about the large-scale sexual abuse of children in 2003 and in 2006 by men of Pakistani origin, and yet chose to do nothing.

Attempting to understand the inactivity, the South Yorkshire police commissioner, Alan Billings, says: 'The only sense I can make of it is that at that time, police were prioritising other things ... I don't think anyone understood what grooming was.'

This is, at best, arrant nonsense and it really shouldn't be allowed to stand. The concept of grooming was understood well before this period, even if the word was not. Here's Anne Bannister from Manchester, an expert in the field, talking to Andy Beckett in the Independent on Sunday in 1996:

'Paedophiles rarely pick off children at random ... Instead abusers identify likely victims and draw them closer by "grooming", offering gifts, favours and friendly company over what may be weeks or even months.'

Whatever the reason for the complacency of the authorities in Rotherham and elsewhere, it certainly wasn't ignorance of how abusers operate.