Soyons tous caricaturistes: let us all be cartoonists

Today’s massacre in Paris has sent shockwaves around the world. Eight journalists, a visiting economist, a maintenance worker and two policemen were killed simply for doing their jobs.

For the journalists of Charlie Hebdo, that job was poking fun at whatever they considered needed it.

They sailed closed to the wind of taste on more than one occasion – and on more than one subject – but offending taste is not a crime and never should be.

There had been threats and an arson attack on the magazine previously. And all apparently because some people don’t like you to question their beliefs – particularly not when there’s a big god geezer involved somewhere.

Already, one or two commentators have suggested that the journalists brought it on themselves.

In other words, that they shouldn’t poke fun at certain things. Well, probably not religion in general and certainly not Islam, which has a minority of followers who get very, very offended if they feel that their particular version of a spiritual comfort blanket has been insulted.

Some have suggested that you can critique religious belief and attitudes in a way that is rational and calm and that Charlie Hebdo didn’t do that.

Indeed it didn’t. But that is to forget that satire is a long-standing part of European culture as a whole – possibly even more so in the UK.

And if satire is a valid form of literature/art/debate, then no subject should be exempt from its reach.

A very simple truth remains: no matter how savage a cartoonist is in ink, it’s ink – not blood.

Our thoughts should be with the loved ones of those who were murdered in Paris today, including the two policemen in the street outside the Charlie Hebdo offices, and with those who were critically injured.

To suggest those journalists were to blame is to utterly miss the point: nothing should be sacred.

There should never, ever be a right to not be offended.

Yes, any and all have the right to believe what they wish: but they have no right to force their beliefs on anyone else and they have no right to demand that everyone else adhere to their particular interpretation of whatever cult they happen to link themselves to.

And let us ensure that the terrorists do not win: in other words, let us never be cowed into refusing to moderate our criticisms through fear, because that would mean that the terrorists would have triumphed.

So let us all be cartoonists.


* Edited on 8 January to clarify the positions of those killed.

Tabloids prove – yet again – that they won't learn

Here’s a thing: what will be the tipping point that means that the UK press faces regulation – however much it doesn’t want it?

The mainstream media has, thus far, managed to squirm out of any form of independent regulation, following the Leveson Inquiry.

And that bit about “independent” is important: no matter what some papers claimed, there was no plan for what the press publish to be subject to the machinations of politicians.

To remind ourselves: Leveson followed revelations about widespread phone-hacking – which, it is increasingly clear, did not just happen at the Rupert Murdoch-owned News of the World, although there was an industrial amount of hacking there. The Mirror group is now in the spotlight too.

In an interesting little side note, it seems that four members of staff on the Mail on Sunday were told by the police in 2006 that their phones had been hacked by the NotW, but bosses at the Mail group decided to keep it secret – and they didn’t bother to mention it in evidence to Leveson either.

Mail on Sunday editor at the time, Peter Wright, has been a member of the Press Complaints Commission (PCC) since 2008, taking over the position previously held by Mail editor in chief, Paul Dacre, from 1999-2008.

During that time, the PCC issued two reports on hacking, in essence backing up the version of events from News International that it hadn’t happened often and that it was all just the work of a “rogue reporter”.

Which is all rather odd.

Somewhat unsurprisingly, though, Wright and Dacre have subsequently succumbed to amnesia over the entire business of the hacking of their members of staff’s phones.

Mind you, amnesia, ignorance or straightforward incompetence seem to be the defence de rigueur of senior newspaper folk when it comes to such matters.

After all, her admitted total lack of knowledge of anything that went on in Rebekah Brooks’s newsrooms was accepted as a defence by the court in the recent hacking trial, while News International godfather, Murdoch himself, has been known to be remarkably vague when being questioned over the affair.

It says something for the confidence many of these people have in their power over government that the revelations have not noticeably improved the behavior of the tabloid media in particular.

Not that it’s the tabloids alone: Murdoch’s Times – which used to be the paper of record – has plummeted so far since he bought it that it’s current idea of political ‘debate’ is to call the leader of the opposition “weird”.

Such an approach, by nobody’s definition, can be remotely positive for the public discourse.

But for the sake of this article, let’s stick with the tabloids.

It’s not so long ago that several papers revealed themselves entirely happy to splash pictures on their front pages of the moment that Mick Jagger was told that his partner had taken her own life.

Public interest, anyone?

In the last few days, the odious Richard Littlejohn,whose bilious ignorance was just the most well-known example of the ‘mostering’of Lucy Meadows, who also took her own life, has again used his column in the Daily Mail to illustrate his ignorance of and attitude toward trans issues, with comments about Kellie Maloney – formerly known as boxing promoter Frank – looking as though she is in “drag”.

But a glance at this morning’s tabloids reveals a general approach that blithely ignores basic humanity, together with any idea of journalistic ethics (yes, they do exist).

The subject is the death of Hollywood star Robin Williams, who died by suicide.

The front pages alone seem to be competing to see who can publish the most details.

In the rush for sales, editors have chosen to deliberately ignore the guidelines on reporting suicide issued by the Samaritans.

These call, among other things, for great care to be exercised on details about how a person ended their life, precisely because readers who are themselves in a vulnerable situation can be influenced to copy a sensationally-reported suicide.

But sensation boost sales and sales matter more than human beings when it comes to the tabloids.

Point six of the National Union of Journalists’ Code of Conduct says that a journalist “does nothing to intrude into anybody’s private life, grief or distress unless justified by overriding consideration of the public interest”.

That’s the biggie, isn’t it: what is ‘the public interest’?

What was in the public interest that justified seeing Jagger’s reaction to the death of a loved one?

What was in the public interest that justifies the additional pain being inflicted on Williams’s family, and the potential danger to other vulnerable people caused by the nature of the reporting?

Here’s a clue: there is none.

The apologists can whine all they like that the public interest is what the public is interested in, but this is nonsense.

Let’s look at an example of ‘the public interest’.

Some years ago, during John Major’s time as Prime Minister, with a government set on promoting ‘family values’, a junior minister called Tim Yeo stood up at the Conservative Party annual conference and made a speech lambasting single mothers as the biggest problem of the day.

A couple of months later, it was revealed (in the News of the World) that he had been having an affair himself, and was the father of a child to a single woman. He resigned.

Here was a member of a government that was promoting one thing to the public, and condemning those who didn’t behave as it wanted, who included members who were themselves behaving in the same way.

That is why it was in the public interest to publish a story revealing that Yeo had been having an affair – not because of the affair itself, but because of the double standards by a member of the government.

And yes, the people that buy tabloids – particularly when they buy promises of lurid, sensationalist copy inside – are complicit in this pimping of other people’s private lives.

And as long as there is no regulation of the industry, it is a situation that seems likely to continue.

So, as I asked at the top of this: what will be the tipping point? What will it take before tabloids are forced to clean up their act?

After all, the hacking of a murdered schoolgirl’s phone quite clearly wasn’t enough.

MediaGuidelines for Reporting Suicides from the Samaritans [PDF]

The National Union of Journalists’ Code of Conduct

Matisse, Collioure and sloppy journalism

Matisse's Luxe, Calme et Volupté, from 1904

Matisse is currently flavor of the month with the broadsheet media and more than one publication has taken the opportunity of the cut-outs exhibition at the Tate Modern to generate other easy copy related to the artist.

Thus a few days ago, the Independent decided to unveil a ‘5 ways to follow Matisse’ if you cannot get to London for the current show.

It is a brief list of travel suggestions for anyone wanting to set off on Matisse pilgrimages – but it turns out to have more than a few flaws.

The section on Nice is not incorrect – yet fails to mention that the Chapelle du Rosaire de Vence, which Matisse designed as a way of thanking a nun who had nursed him and is generally regarded as a masterpiece, is just outside Nice itself.

In other words, it’s a pretty basic omission if you’re set on cobbling together such a piece.

It happens that there are also a Musée Renoir and a Musée Marc Chagall in the vicinity too, making it a real haven for art lovers.

The Other Half and one of Marc-André 2 Figueres's frames

If you were heading down to that part of the world by rail or road and with art on your mind, Aix-en-Provence is hardly out of your way and is home to Cézanne’s studio, while Arles allows you to tread in van Gogh’s footsteps.

But my favourite part of the ‘article’ was an entry about Collioure:

“This exquisite fishing village in French Catalonia was the inspiration for the Fauvist movement, spearheaded by Matisse. The “wild beasts” were seduced by the brilliant play of light on the ochre buildings and blue Mediterranean. You won’t see Matisse’s paintings, but you can follow his trail marked by picture frames on the spots where he was inspired to paint Luxe, Calme et Volupté.”

I am neither an expert on Matisse nor an expert on Collioure, but oh dear: one paragraph and two howling inaccuracies.

First, those empty frames in Collioure were created and placed for a project by Catalan artist Marc-André 2 Fugueres, which ties in with his Erotic Theory of the Collioure Bell Tower.

This slender volume can be found in French, Catalan and English and is, if rather bonkers, none-the-less interesting, as I explained briefly way back in 2009.

Roofs of Collioure, 1905. There's no frame at this spot

It and the frames, however, have nothing to do with Matisse or the Fauves bar their being in Collioure and Collioure now being famous for Matisse and the Fauves.

Second, it’s wrong to suggest that Matisse painted Luxe, Calme et Volupté in Collioure or as a result of a visit there.

It was painted as a result of a visit to St Tropez in 1904 – the year before he first found his way south of Perpignan, where a relative of his wife lived, to this little spot of heaven on the Roussillon coast.

Now in the grand scheme of things, such errors are minor.

But it’s hard to believe that such sloppiness is unique and that it doesn’t illustrate a more general attitude toward the demands of 24/7, globalised news.

That’s even more the case as increasingly, proprietors and editors are turning ‘journalism’ into something that involves trawling Twitter for whatever some famous person or other said about such and such, or comment pieces that are intended purely as click bait to boost advertising revenue.

Matisse created plenty of wonderful works, but the one suggested by that snapshot of journalism in 2014 from the Indy is not a pretty picture at all.

Ve hav vays of making you afraid

A German. Looking all militaristic. Invading London.

Just in case you’d missed it, last weekend saw the Champions’ League final take place at Wembley, between Borrussia Dortmund and Bayern Munich.

A first – two German teams facing each other in the final.

So what better opportunity to write about … well, ze Germans?

Over at the (Lunnon!) Evening Standard, Anne McElvoy took the opportunity to excel herself in her article on this difficult subject.

“Ich bin ein Londoner: the Germans are coming – and a lot of them are already here” proclaimed the headline (the internet has a lot to answer for in terms of the apparently dying art of the headline).

“They’re invading us on Saturday”, read the standfirst, just in case you were in any doubt as to the tone.

“To put it bluntly,” said McElvoy, “today’s London attracts a lot of people whose forebears were once part of a much less charming offensive.”

“Today’s London”? The first rule of journalism should be to have a clue what you’re writing about.

In the case of the dreaded Krauts in our capital, there is a considerably longer history than she seems to imagine.

In Dalston, just up the road from where I live, stands the German Hospital, which opened its doors to local German people in 1863. Many of its patients worked in local manufacturing.

The German Hospital, Dalston.

The German Chapel was established in 1809 in a house near Mansion House, for local German Catholics. In 1862, the Methodist Zion Chapel in Whitechapel was taken on for this expanding congregation, and a mission developed alongside it.

That’s without mentioning the likes of old Charlie Marx, who is still with us, beneath his iconic Highgate grave.

And there were many, many more. Indeed, internment camps were built in both world wars to house many of the Germans who lived in the UK.

So it’s disingenuous at best to imply that Germans are only newly arrived in London – in a non-warlike manner.

But even taking McElvoy at face value, let’s see where she went with this line of commentary: “A current prominent member of the Germano-Londoner pack is Isabelle (Bella) Ribbentrop, head of corporate communication at Pictet and Cie, the private Swiss bank, who is married to a descendant of Hitler’s foreign minister.”

Wow. Just wow. I just bet she got hitched so she could brag about the history of hubby’s family, don’t you?

This is clutching at straws for the sake of being able to mention – y’know – the little Austrian with the funny moustache.

And never mind ‘sins of the fathers’ – we’re now into ‘sins of the spouse’s fathers’. And all this after McElvoy used the word “forebears” – which isn’t usually taken to mean ‘and those by marriage as well’.

But fret ye not – the best was still to come.

McElvoy, a self-described “lifelong Germanophile” explained: “English private education is one of the big draws – Germans have become the largest non-Asian group in Britain’s independent schools, not least because of the school uniforms.”

Sauerkraut, invading the kitchen.

So given that there is no comparable culture of school uniform wearing on the Continent, we now discover that well-to-do modern Hun are coming over here (nicking our jobs) and sending their kinder to schools that are chosen precisely because they wear uniforms.

Now why, Anne dear, would that be? Are you suggesting that they’re all really still closet Nazis/militarists? Because it’s difficult to see what else you could possibly be suggesting.

Actually, what McElvoy managed to illustrate is that things have progressed markedly. Nowadays, the things that were once said openly have to be couched in more subtle terms and hidden, indeed, beneath claims of being a Germanophile oneself.

Personally, my only fear about this latest ‘invasion’ was what on earth our visitors would make of the excuse for ‘beer’ that is on sale in so many London hostelries.

In the event, there were apparently only 13 football-related arrests across the entire city. The FA reported that nine arrests were for ticket touting, so it was a remarkably peaceful invasion.

Borussia Dortmund arrived, according to the Guardian, with a poster saying: ‘You were hoping for a final between two English teams. Or at least for a stadium full of hot Spanish chicks. Instead, you got the Krauts. Have fun.’

Gratuitous picture of the Reichstag.

And people still claim that Germans have no sense of humour?

Anyway, an exciting match was won by Bayern Munich – the Manchester City connection through ex-Blues defender Jerome Boateng was duly noted – and everything passed off okay.

So presumably we can all come out from behind our sofas now.

Not that the fußball has been the only reason to consider matters German in recent days.

Were it not clear that McElvoy had to work hard to disguise (at least a little) the rather obvious anti-German sentiments behind her piece, at almost exactly the same time, the annual Country Ratings Poll for the BBC World Service revealed that Germany was out in front.

Or, top hund, as one might put it.

And even the New Statesman had a piece from a correspondent saying that she found it no surprise, having herself loved the country since her teens – in part, as an act of rebellion against the anti-German rhetoric of her parents (an experience I am familiar with).

Perhaps we’re finally growing up after all?

This isn’t just journalism – this is 'Daily Mail' journalism

Paul Dacre in defensive mode at Leveson.

It’s beginning to appear as though the story about Jimmy Savile has, as our cousins across the Pond might say, gone nuclear.

Revelation follows revelation. The numbers of those making allegations rise almost inexorably.

It is worth noting, at this juncture, that the response from some people, questioning why they had not come forward before, as though this means that their allegations are automatically false, does not hold up.

It is quite normal in cases of abuse for the victim/s not to be able to say anything until the abuser has died – in other words, when the psychological grip is suddenly broken.

But back to Savile. Allegations about his time at the BBC, about his visits to NHS hospitals and about his appointment, in 1988, as the head of a taskforce overseeing the high-security Broadmoor Hospital, after the health secretary had dismissed the hospital’s management board.

It has seen some quite extraordinary coverage in elements of the conventional media.

And social media continues to see journalists themselves wringing their hands one minute and, the next, insisting that, while there is plenty of anecdotal evidence that publications knew about Savile – and knew years ago – they couldn’t have done anything.

The whinging is reflected below.

'We had no resources.'

Well, except when you wanted to hire private detectives and employ the increasing trend for chequebook journalism, including making payments to police.

'Okay, so we had resources – but we didn’t have any witnesses.'

Yes. Well that's the sort of thing that real journalists go out and find. And the (regulated) ITV does not appear to have had such a problem in making its documentary about the deceased DJ and TV presenter, does it?

And as it happens, there were witnesses. According to this, in 1994, the Sunday Mirror had "credible and convincing" evidence from two women who claimed that they had been abused, but the paper's legal team warned against publication. At least the paper's then editor, Paul Connew, spread the word with some impact.

'There’d only be an inquiry if someone can say that Savile had a horse that he let the PM ride.'

Because, in case you haven’t realised it already, all those poor, poor journalists who have (along with police and other figures) been arrested as part of Operation Elevedon never did anything wrong (even if and when a jury decides otherwise), and corruption and criminal activities such as phone hacking aren’t really crimes when done by journalists in pursuit of a story, and …

You get the gist of the martyred indignation, one hopes.

So what sort of worthy stories do these put-upon parts of the fourth estate produce with the resources that they do have and do choose to use?

Oh yes. World-changing issues such as how Max Mosely likes a spot of consensual S&M. A story that the News of the World then had to invent lies about in order to present a spurious cover of public interest – as opposed to it simply publishing something to titillate the public.

Sex sells. And to some in our trade, anything goes: there is no privacy if you are in the public spotlight. You are fair game for a profit-making story about your private life even when there is no evidence of a crime or even a note of hypocrisy.

If you dare to suggest that such an approach is wrong, then you're a snob and an elitist.

Instead, such people – and, more to the point – the publishers and editors who are the ones who choose to follow such routes – decide to patronise people and dumb down the public discourse by feeding readers a diet of crass and salacious gossip and ‘scandal’, and anything that will send them into an orgy of knee jerkery, which sometimes goes as far as liberating an actual mob.

The Paulsgrove riots are a perfect illustration of exactly this. And it is not snobbery and it is not elitism to say so.

And whipping up hysteria or peddling the details of people's private lives isn’t ‘proper’ journalism either. It’s a sham.

The reality is that, just as with people in other walks of life, people on newspapers knew about Savile. And for whatever reason, editors and publishers chose not to follow up the stories.

Or, if the one case that has been mentioned is correct, when one title did, it was then dared by Savile himself to publish – and, he told them, in so doing, be responsible for all the monies he raised for Stoke Manderville drying up.

It is a simple fact that the culture in the UK has changed almost out of recognition in terms of child abuse and other forms of abuse and exploitation.

Well into the 1980s, the issues was simply brushed under the carpet – by all sections of society.

A friend, who grew up in London’s East End, once told me how, if there were any rumours of ‘kiddy fiddling’ in the community, a group of local men would go around to the accused’s house, give them a seeing to and ensure they would leave the area and never return.

Knowing about this was almost a rite of passage into manhood.

In the meantime, the problem was simply shifted somewhere else – much as happened with the church, when priests were known to be abusing children.

That that is no longer the case; that we take child abuse seriously and that we listen to children now, is cause for – well, if not celebration, then at least a feeling that things have changed for the better.

But it is bad history to attempt to impose the attitudes of today onto the past – even when, as here, that past is within the living memories of many.

To illustrate this better: were you to study the history of the Colosseum in Rome, you would need to put aside your own horror at what went on there and attempt to understand it in terms of the attitudes of ancient Rome at that time; to understand how it was considered to honour the gods, for instance.

That’s not about ‘excusing’ or ‘condoning’: it is about reading history properly.

Of course, when history is concertinaed, as it is here; when culture has changed so markedly in such a very short time, it is particularly difficult to employ such perspective.

The media could help. Good journalism could help.

Instead, we see a delight in jumping onto the blame bandwagon.

And in the case of some, it is an excuse to promote an agenda that has absolutely nothing to do with the protection of children or any possible justice for the alleged victims.

In a quite extraordinary rant in Thursday’s paper, Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre decided to use the Savile case to lay into two of his pet hates: the BBC and the Leveson inquiry into standards in the press.

Suffice it to say that Dacre would like Leveson to broaden the inquiry to look into the Savile affair (having previously said the remit was already too broad).

But let’s examine the issue a little further.

Dacre, as mentioned before, is hardly a paragon of virtue. He might enjoy exposing sex ‘cheats’, but judged by nothing more than his own standards, he is one himself, having been revealed to have had an affair.

His editorial meetings are infamously known as ‘the vagina monologues’ because of the language he uses. He has apparently turned something called ‘double cunting’ into an art form.

Bullying, perchance?

Martin Clarke is the Mail Online’s editor. But Dacre is not only the editor of the Daily Mail itself, he is also the editor-in-chief of the Mail group as a whole.

One could be forgiven for imagining that such a powerful man would, therefore, be able to exercise some control over all aspects of the group’s product.

Mail Online, however, sits so far from the moral posturing of Dacre that it’s really quite hard to grasp.

Let’s leave aside, for the sake of this discussion, the utterly irresponsible cult of cancer scare stories that the group feeds to its readership.

Let’s pass over the ignominious approach to women; to the promotion by the group as a whole – and the website in particular – of a culture of self-loathing, through a variety of means, from the constant photographs and derogatory comments on the weight, shape and clothing of women in the public eye, and even if, in middle age, they have cellulite, to the faddy diets that appear regularly in its pages.

Let’s concentrate, instead, on its obsession with under age girls.

Loath though I am to give the Mail any extra revenue through hits, if you visit its online site and, in the search box, type ‘all grown up’, it will produce at least 10 pages of results for this one phrase.

From the first two pages of search results:

“Classy Chloe: Teen actress Moretz, 14, looks all grown up as she steals the the [sic] show at Hugo premiere” gushed a header for Mike Larkin’s piece on 22 November 2011.

“All grown up! Chloe Moretz looks very ladylike and older than her 14 years as she attends Hugo screening” ran a further headline on 7 December 2011, in case you hadn't quite got the point the first time around.

“Pop star ‘boyfriend’ and a spicy new rock girl image: Dionne Bromfield is all grown up”, said the headline to a piece by Martin Howden on 17 August this year.

The story itself trilled: “Dionne Bromfield may only be 16-years-old, but she’s letting us know she’s not a little girl anymore.

“The goddaughter of Amy Winehouse wore a daring outfit …”

Gist got? Well, at least she’s legal. Just.

“From geek to chic: Modern Family’s little Ariel Winter is all grown up at Critic’s Circle Awards in Beverley Hills”, said the headline for a story by “Daily Mail Reporter” on 21 June 2011.

“She’s beloved as the brainy middle child of the Dunphy Family in ABC’s hit series Modern Family, but Ariel Winter was all grown up – and anything but geeky – at the Critics’ Choice Award in Beverly Hills today.

“The 13-year-old actress …”

To be fair, the Mail does not limit this obsession to girls.

“All grown up! Prince Jackson, 15, stands almost as tall as his bodyguard as he steps out in Los Angeles”, ran a headline for a story on 5 July 2012 about one of Michael Jackson’s children.

“Daily Mail Reporter” wrote that, since Jackson’s death in 2009, “his son, Prince, has seemingly grown overnight into a strapping young man”.

The day after Dacre’s broadside against the “cesspit” at the BBC and how Leveson should Do Something, came this:

“Growing up too fast? Paris Jackson steals the show with a very grown up look on the red carpet.”

Joel Cooper had written: “Looking much older than her 14-years, Paris Jackson stole the show when she arrived at a red carpet event on Thursday night in Beverly Hills”.

Again in the interests of absolute fairness, some of these ‘all grown up’ stories involve celebrities who are now in their thirties. And some of these stories are written by female journalists.

But ‘all grown up’, eh? No hint of Lolita in any of these, is there? Nothing of the Humbert Humbert, if lacking the consolation of Nabokov’s prose.

I am far, far from being a prude. In essence, I am a libertarian on matters sexual. Assuming consent and adulthood, then it is and should be nobody else’s business.

But there is something skin-crawlingly nasty about this Mail obsession – and even more so when considered in the light of Dacre and his rants about ‘morality’.

In that same editorial, he wrote: “The Mail utterly condemns phone hacking. But in truth much of it was practised to obtain celebrity tittle-tattle. Yes, utterly deplorable, but a footling matter, we would suggest, compared to the molestation and rape of 13-year-old girls.”

Or to something akin to the pimping of such girls for a drooling readership, perhaps?

And yes, readers and consumers of such media have a responsibility too. 

Dacre’s Mail decrys the sexualisation of young girls. Yet he fails to use his position of authority in the Mail group of newspapers to do anything to stop this same group doing precisely that.

When appearing before Lord Leveson, Mail Online editor Martin Clarke told the hearing that he reports, editorially, to editor-in-chief Dacre, and commercially, to Associated Newspapers’ managing editor, Kevin Beatty.

So unless he lied or the group's editorial chain of command this is meaningless, it is within Dacre’s capacity to change the editorial bent of the paper’s online edition.

Clarke, incidentally, also described the Daily Mail is an “ethical, decent” newspaper, run by good people. (Clarke’s full witness statement to Leveson is here. All Dacre’s witness statements and submissions can be found here).

But back to Savile.

Some of what is being said about how the news media could not do anything is particularly absurd, though, given that Savile’s own autobiography, published in 1974 and presumably written by him or ghosted from he said, includes the following:

“A high ranking lady police officer came in one night and showed me the picture of an attractive girl who had run away from a remand home. ‘Ah.’ says I all serious, ‘if she comes in I’ll bring her back tomorrow but I’ll keep her all night first as my reward.’ The law lady, new to the area, was nonplussed. Back at the station she asked ‘Is he serious?’

“It is God’s truth that the absconder came in that night. Taking her into the office I said, ‘Run now if you want but you can’t run for the rest of your life.’ She listened to the alternative and agreed that I hand her over if she could stay at the dance, come home with me, and that I would promise to see her when they let her out.

“At 11.30 the next morning she was willingly presented to an astounded lady of the law. The officer was dissuaded from bringing charges against me by her colleagues, for it was well known that were I to go I would probably take half the station with me.” (p56-7)

There are other revealing excerpts too. But it hardly requires much of an imagination to comprehend what Savile himself said or set down on paper.

To take it at face value is to see that the police are implicated. And it appears that nobody batted an eyelid. Nobody read it, was shocked and raised the matter with, say, the police or any other authorities – or if they did, nobody did anything.

Will Dacre also be demanding an inquiry into the publisher of the autobiography (if still extant)? What about the book’s editor, if still alive?

What about any journalist who read and reviewed it? Did the Mail itself review the book?

Eighteen years ago, a senior journalist at the Mail, who had previously been at the Telegraph, told me about Savile. It seems unlikely that nobody else at either of those titles didn’t know too.

In those days, I had no work resources to pursue the story – I didn’t even have basic expenses.

Those newspapers – and others – did.

Former Daily Express editor Brian Hitchen now claims he has known – for 45 years. But, of course, the libel laws and a cult of penning only uncritical celebrity stories stopped him doing anything.

There are many reasons that they may have chosen to do nothing: some have been touched on above.

Whatever the reasoning, the media knew – and it chose not to tackle the issue. It chose not to employ proper journalism to get to the bottom of the allegations and rumours. It chose to turn its back on witnesses.

In the last few days, I have tweeted to @MailOnline, pointing out that the paper knew – and chose to do nothing. Strangely, there has still been no response.

I haven’t done the same to the Telegraph, because there is not the hypocrisy element involved that is clearly part of what is happening at the Mail now.

Our culture, as I noted above, has changed hugely. It would be crass and pointless to go around blaming everyone for behaviour and attitudes that, in days of yore, were considered culturally acceptable – or at least not beyond the pale.

Yet it is the Mail that squeals the loudest – while at the same time showing a continued flagrant disregard for anything other than making a profit out of, amongst many other things, the sexualising of children.

Dacre should take heed of the proverb about people in glass houses before launching into tirades against the morals and ethics of others.