How does a shy 11 year old girl even begin to recover from having the fingers of a national celebrity shoved firmly into her vagina while the other members of her church's congregation continue to worship, oblivious to the assault upon her, only a few metres away? And how are you supposed to remove the hands of the same celebrity from your private parts as you are lying injured and immobilised on a hospital trolley? These were not the least of the many questions raised by the utterly disturbing but compelling documentary "Jimmy Savile - A British Horror Story" aired over three hours last week by Netflix.
Savile was knighted in 1990 for his prodigious and widely admired philanthropy, especially but not exclusively on behalf of Stoke Mandeville, the NHS hospital for severe spinal injuries. He was also, as the program showed, a monster hiding in plain sight, and it was difficult to avoid the conclusion that the length of time in which swathes of the establishment chose to remain blind to his criminal enormities amounted to complicity. With a rat-like face reminiscent of the child-catcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and with that extraordinary wispy blond barnet that would not have looked out of place on a page boy at the court of King John, Savile was no common-or-garden sociopath. The thesis of the programme was that Savile ( a member of Mensa ) was extraordinarily skilful in disguising his wickedness, not least because he preyed on those who lacked a powerful voice and whom he sensed would not be believed had they otherwise come forward. His intuition seemed to be correct and had he been a spy passing nuclear secrets to the Russians, it is doubtful that he would ever have been found out. But behind all the blokeish bonhomie, the crowd pleasing capers of Jim'll Fix It, the stunts for charity and the weird and eccentric appearances on TOTP, Savile was a cold blooded, voracious and predatory paedophile. One of the most appalling features of the various interview clips with the increasingly shrivelled pederast was how self-controlled, coldly impersonal and so utterly lacking in genuine empathy he appeared to be. Even more extraordinary were the number of times that Savile himself hinted at what he was up to ("My case comes up next Thursday"), yet this was all just treated as part of his schtick. As his fame and confidence grew, Savile treated ordinary folk and their daughters as mere instruments to feed his celebrity and depraved sexual appetites.
But it was also made abundantly clear that many of his contemporaries in the media, the police and the official class knew a thing or three before he died in 2011. Some of the testimony (Selina Scott & Ian Hislop) seemed both self serving and self-deceiving but others (Lynn Barber & Andrew Neil) were publicly prepared to be bolder in trying to get at the truth. The clip of Savile questioned by Neil was edge-of-the-seat stuff. But the spectre of Sir George Carman QC, barrister of choice to the rottenest apples in the UK establishment, was always hovering in the background, a writ for defamation or libel in his hand. Nonetheless, the extraordinary shot of Savile aggressively molesting a shocked looking teen on TOTP in front of a nationwide audience should have been enough of itself for sceptics to stand their ground.
More extraordinary still was the benediction that Savile received from Number 10 Downing Street and the Royal family. The earnest letters of the Prince of Wales seeking his guidance were toe-curlingly embarrassing in their plucking intensity while Margaret Thatcher tried not once but four times to get the ghastly deviant a knighthood, finally succeeding with her resignation Honours List in 1990. Yet here was Sir Robin Butler, Cabinet Secretary to three Prime Ministers silkily murmuring that not everyone had been fooled at the time. But when the innuendo about Savile became deafening "it was decided", Sir Robin regretfully sighed, not to proceed against him. By that time, Savile was just too firmly embedded in the establishment for it to be bothered with the revelations of silly little working class girls.
Aiming at a US audience, Netflix was perhaps a little too discriminating in its targets for censure. Naturally, the Royal connection provided the cat-nip and there was even footage of a none-too-pleased looking pontiff, grabbed by Savile in a bear hug while on a Papal visit to the UK in the early 'eighties. Savile's warped understanding of his nominal Roman Catholic faith was given plenty of theatrical attention, although it seemed a bit of a stretch to imply that his global co-religionists were somehow all accomplices. There was also lots of footage of other "celebs" (including Scott) fawning on Savile and a thoroughly creepy section of him sharing complicit smiles with that other living nightmare of the vulnerable child, Gary Glitter. However, different institutions like Savile's long - term employer the BBC seemed to get away scot-free. Perhaps the average US subscriber would have been just too bored by exposure of the Beeb's lengthy indulgence of the weaselly pervert or of its disgraceful decision to suppress the bombshell revelations unearthed by the journalist Meirion Jones and its own Newsnight team in 2011.
So what on earth has all this got to do with the NHS, other than the connection between Savile and Stoke Mandeville Hospital ? The way Netflix told it, Savile was undoubtedly a force for good when it came to passing around the bucket to raise cash for the decrepit facilities (he initially got involved when the roof on one of the units fell in on the patients below). But it was rather more coy about apportioning blame as to how Savile was able to use his charity work and compliant medical connections to gain access to patients at both Stoke Mandeville and other hospitals including Leeds Royal Infirmary, there to take advantage of their incapacity for his sexual gratification. Nonetheless, the limited testimony that was provided still beggared belief. As was the determination to turn an un-seeing eye.
Not even the NHS could remain indefinitely blind to the facts of a celebrity systematically molesting and raping patients on its own premises, and more than a decade after the police had begun their own leisurely investigations, the government appointed Kate Lampard CBE to produce a report in 2015. As an exercise in the marking of one's own homework, "Lessons Learnt" took some beating. Lampard was an NHS insider to her fingertips and her report was full of those dead phrases about "assurance", "quality oversight", "board engagement" and "pathways for improvement" in which accountability is fully dissolved and responsibility widely dispersed. The only people who were fingered were, apparently, the patients. Nobody was disciplined, although three doctors were later convicted in separate incidents for similar acts of criminal depravity.
Scroll forward to 2022 and the Ockenden Report into the Shrewsbury & Telford NHS Trust shows that Lampards's narrowly bureaucratic recommendations for improvement in both the culture and operation of the NHS in 2015 remained just that. A former midwife, Donna Ockenden was asked to look into the abnormally high incidence of infant death and life-changing injury to both mothers and children in the care of the Trust between 2000 and 2019. Seeking to understand why over 200 babies and 9 mothers had needlessly died, Ockenden unearthed a culture riddled with management incompetence, professional in-fighting (between midwives and obstetricians), buck passing, warped "targets" for caesarean sections and other clinical outcomes, and official lies. Ockenden made 15 recommendations which can be snappily condensed into one ("more resources"), although she later retracted her observation that the misconduct identified at the S&T Trust is almost certainly more widespread. Yet not the least amazing feature of her report was that similar failings were identified at the Morecombe Bay Trust in 2015, at about the same time as Kate Lampard was sucking her pencil in institutional judgement of Jimmy Savile. So many reports, so much money spent, so little progress.
Naturally, the government has said that people will be "held to account", a promise that may be treated with a raspberry. Several of the "leaders" of the S&T Trust over the relevant period have gone on to bigger or better things within the NHS or have leveraged their former public sector connections for a private-sector gain. One has been convicted for fraud. But no matter: the Care Quality Commission gave the Trust a "good" rating in 2018.
When do sins of omission become sins of commission? And at what point does a professional become useless to a degree that brushes criminality? Jimmy Savile's career shared many of the features now increasingly associated with the NHS: the credulous admiration of the public, the propensity to lie, the comfort of powerful friends-in-the-know, professional conceit, the lack of accountability and wilful criminal mis-conduct. But there has (yet) been no imputation that Savile actually killed people.
It seems hard to believe now, but as Ockenden was furrowing her brows, the government saw fit to award the NHS the George Cross. How much must Her Majesty be looking forward to receiving the "leadership" representatives of the "heroic" NHS to stand beside holders such as Chris Finnegan GC and Johnson Beharry VC in her jubilee year. But as Andrew Neil observed, the public "made" Jimmy Savile just as much as the public has made "Our NHS".
So at least that's clear: it's all our fault.
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