In Plain Sight: The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile

by Dan Davies

  Having assumed the role of unofficial court jester to the House of Windsor, he drew guffaws from the Queen Mother and Princess Diana when he greeted them at the 1984 Royal Variety Performance dressed as a theatre doorman. On another occasion he theatrically laid down a coat, Walter Raleigh-style, for the Duchess of Kent when she visited a hospice in York. The stunt backfired when her limo ran over the item of clothing. It was the duchess who later presented him with an honorary doctorate of law at Leeds University.

  In July 1985, the special relationship he enjoyed with Prince Charles and his wife was thrown into relief by his success in persuading Princess Diana to make an appearance on a two-hour Drugwatch television marathon as part of the ‘Just Say No’ campaign. ‘I put it to them that this anti-drugs campaign is a tremendous thing and I was sure the Princess would want to get involved with it,’ he said after being spotted leaving the royal residence. ‘I was keen that the Prince and Princess should be associated with the programme. For some reason even the more bizarre elements of the teenage world – the punks and the drug addicts – respect them 100 per cent.’20

  Savile’s influence on Prince Charles was such that during a short tour of the north-east in early 1986, he talked the heir to the throne into changing his schedule in order to drop in on the Harton and Westoe Colliery Welfare Club in South Shields for a game of dominoes with the locals. ‘I know the club because I used to stay with old uncles and aunties in the South Shields area,’ said Savile. ‘I am absolutely delighted that he has taken up my suggestion.’21

  *

  And yet even as his influence continued to grow and expand into new areas, there were hints at what lay beneath. Viewed with the benefit of hindsight, they resemble a series of red flags planted across the landscape of his life.

  On the day that Jim’ll Fix It celebrated a decade as one of Britain’s best-loved television shows, the Sun ran an interview with the man who had become legendary for making children’s dreams come true. The headline above the piece read: ‘Kids? I Don’t Actually Like Them.’22

  It is noteworthy, given how he had told Alison Bellamy about the threats from the father of a Leeds schoolgirl he allowed into his penthouse, that the interview should begin with Jimmy Savile talking about how he would not let children through the door. ‘Never, ever,’ he asserted. ‘I’d feel very uncomfortable … They may idolise me but they’re not coming into my gaff. A lot of them also say, “Fix it for me to ride in your car.” Now I’ll go along with that so long as they have their mum or their dad with them. Otherwise, no way. I’m a realist, I’ve seen the trouble other people have got themselves into through no fault of their own. I’m not going the same way. You just can’t take the risk. The ordinary person might. But if Jimmy Savile is involved, it’s headlines.’

  Viewed in the light of what we now know, it’s tempting to venture that the incident with the father of the Leeds schoolgirl was still fresh in his mind. This was also the time he put his name to the Stranger Danger book.

  ‘I’ve got nothing to hide,’ he reiterated. ‘I don’t read smut and I don’t like it. But the older I get the more advisable it is to have a policy. I mean, people look at you and say: “What’s under that stone?” Most people believe something is there, I’m saying they would all be disappointed.’

  On collecting his honorary doctorate, Savile addressed a group of final year law students at Leeds University, and again offered an oblique reference to what might be hidden beneath the stone. He spoke on the subject of success, and it is clear that his narrow escape was still playing on his mind. ‘There are two ways of winning,’ he began. ‘One is to win by getting to the top rungs of whatever you choose, but the other is not to lose. Let me explain. You can be quite clever at what you do but if, say, you’re tempted early on to act outside the law and you get caught by this Big Brother society of ours with computer records storing our slip-ups for ever, one little incident could mean disaster for years.’ He claimed that money was ‘the oil that stops life rubbing up against you. It protects you.’23

  Jimmy Savile had little to fear from computer records, it seems. During the 1980s, a young girl is understood to have reported Jimmy Savile for sexually assaulting her in his motor caravan in a BBC car park. She made the allegation to officers at Hammersmith and Fulham police station. An officer from Scotland Yard’s Juvenile Bureau was subsequently detailed to look into the matter but no evidence was found that would support a prosecution. The Metropolitan Police insist ‘no trace of a police file has been found despite extensive efforts’.24 The investigating officer is now dead.

  In 1986, a 19-year-old woman entered a police station in Southport and made a complaint about historic sexual abuse by Jimmy Savile and others. She told officers of Merseyside Police that a family friend, who worked as a cameraman at the BBC and had abused her at his home, was responsible for introducing her to Jimmy Savile at BBC Television headquarters in west London. She was nine years old at the time.

  ‘I can remember him taking me to see Savile in a room with a table, a mirror, a wardrobe and a couple of chairs,’ said Alice (not her real name). ‘The cameraman called him Uncle Jim. Savile sat in this high-backed chair and he asked me to sit on his knee while he signed my luminous pink autograph book. I was wearing a pink dress with my hair in pigtails.’ She claimed he sat her ‘right back on his body’ before molesting her.

  ‘The cameraman was in the room at the time but he didn’t do anything,’ she maintained. ‘He took me to see Savile another two or three times and then left the room. I can remember he was bony and he stank.’ Over the next two years, Alice said she was taken to the BBC on a weekly basis and sexually assaulted by more than 30 men.

  She also says the abuse has wrecked her life, leading to mental health problems, suicide attempts and her five children being taken into care. Merseyside Police, for its part, insists the report was dealt with ‘appropriately’. Again, nothing was done.

  55. OFF THE HOOK

  In late 1989, Jimmy Savile welcomed journalists into his office at Broadmoor Hospital. He was able to look back with pride on how he had put a cap on soaring building costs. ‘What we needed was a strong hand to take the decisions no one wanted to take, someone who didn’t understand everyone else’s rules, and that was me,’ he explained. He’d even managed to get another of his own men on to the hospital’s new management board, a body he described as ‘a highly intelligent reference library’.

  The management boards had been established as another element of Clifford Graham’s new blueprint. ‘It’s a team of eight experts,’ Savile explained. It included a GP, a forensic psychiatrist, a local architect and, in his words, ‘a multi-millionaire owner of a security company’.1 The latter is how Savile always described Luke Lucas, although Lucas maintains he was ‘not a member of Broadmoor Hospital Management’.

  *

  While the prime minister still struggled to get Jimmy Savile’s name on the shortlist submitted by the Honours Committee for the Queen’s approval, there is little doubt that once she succeeded it would be accepted without a second thought. His relationship with the royals, and particularly Prince Charles and Princess Diana, became deeper and more intimate during the time he was seconded by the government to fix the mess at Broadmoor.

  In 1987, Jimmy Savile had persuaded Charles to attend a ceremony for carers in London. A year later, he sat in the Prince of Wales’s private office making calls to television producers inviting them to a cocktail evening hosted by the prince at Kensington Palace as a thanks for their contribution to a recent charity telethon. In November that year, Jimmy Savile was a guest at Charles’s 40th birthday party.

  ‘He played the fool to our big-eared Prince’s Lear,’ recounted one St James’s Palace aide in the days before the funeral in Leeds. ‘He could speak the truth to power with impunity. His own version of the truth, of course, but from all I could see it was usually pretty good sense. And because he wasn’t guilty of having a posh accent, an Oxbridge degree or a suit
, his words were received as from the oracle itself.’2

  Cracks had started to appear in the royal marriage. Charles had become increasingly snappy with his wife while Diana’s unhappiness and sense of isolation manifested itself in an eating disorder. When Sarah Ferguson’s romance blossomed with Prince Andrew, Diana was repeatedly told that she should be ‘more like Fergie’.

  In May 1989, Jimmy Savile made an unexpected appearance at Prince Charles’s offices. Sarah Goodall, who had joined the staff a year earlier, recalls him licking up the arm of one of the Lady Clerks. When Goodall later asked another member of staff what Savile was doing there, she was told he was ‘working with [Princess Diana] on a project for Stoke Mandeville’. She claims her jaw hit the floor when it was explained to her that he was ‘also trying to patch things up between the Boss and the Bossette. He arranged for them to meet in Dyfed in Wales so they could comfort flood victims together in public. Their Royal Highnesses weren’t speaking at the time, so to bring them together was quite a feat.’3

  In a recorded telephone conversation the following New Year’s Eve, Princess Diana poured her heart out to a friend, James Gilbey, about the state of her relationship with her husband and his family. She also made a startling admission about the role Jimmy Savile now played in their lives.

  When the conversation turned to her sister-in-law, Diana revealed: ‘Jimmy Savile phoned me up yesterday, and he said. “I’m just ringing up, my girl, to tell you that His Nibs has asked me to come and help out the redhead, and I’m just letting you know, so that you don’t find out through her or him; and I hope it’s alright by you.”’ By late 1989, Sarah Ferguson had begun attracting rather too many negative headlines.

  This brief exchange disclosed a side of Jimmy Savile not normally seen: deferential, keen to please. It also seems to confirm what Roger Ordish said about the change that came over him when in the company of social superiors.

  Diana explained to Gilbey that she had replied: ‘Jimmy, you do what you like.’

  When Gilbey asked what Savile had meant, Diana replied: ‘Sort her out. He said, “you can’t change a lame duck, but I’ve got to talk to her, ’cause that’s the boss’s orders, and I’ve got to carry them out. But I want you to know that you’re my number one girl”.’ Diana confirmed that by ‘His Nibs’ Savile meant Prince Charles. ‘Does he get on well with him?’ asked Gilbey. ‘Sort of mentor,’ replied Diana.

  I questioned Jimmy Savile about this conversation, and his relationships with Prince Charles, Princess Diana, Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson during our days together in Leeds in 2008. ‘I was helping [Sarah Ferguson] not get publicity, rather than to get publicity,’ he admitted. ‘To cool things down. It was one of those; it was all part of my odd ways of going on. The thing about me is I get things done. They tippled that I can get things done, and that I work “deep cover” … People don’t realise I’m deep cover until it’s too late.’

  In 1990, as the divisions deepened within the royal household, Jimmy Savile was asked to attempt his latest and most audacious rescue bid. Dickie Arbiter, a press spokesman for the Queen, had been employed by Prince Charles since 1988 to handle his media relations. ‘Savile was brought in by an aide as a sort of “Jim’ll Fix It” to fix the state of the marriage, but of course it didn’t work,’ said Arbiter. ‘His role was informal, ad hoc. He would just roll in and roll out again.’4

  Arbiter’s opinion was Savile ‘was a pretty ghastly man’.

  But it was not only marriage guidance that Jimmy Savile was sought out for. He also advised Prince Charles on key appointments to his staff. When his private secretary Sir John Riddell decided to return to the City, Charles asked Savile to meet with one of the candidates suggested as his successor. After consultation with Savile and Richard Aylard, Major-General Sir Christopher Airy was appointed private secretary and treasurer to the Prince and Princess of Wales.

  Aylard, a man Charles’s authorised biographer Jonathan Dimbleby described as ‘having become his most trusted lieutenant’,5 expressed doubts about Airy. And yet he was still appointed. Jimmy Savile’s opinion clearly carried considerable weight.

  During our time together on the QE2, Savile revealed that he regularly played jokes on Princess Diana. Of the Duke of Edinburgh, all he would offer was, ‘He thinks I’m very odd, as does Prince Charles.’ Janet Cope confirmed to me that Prince Charles used to phone Savile regularly at Stoke Mandeville.

  All three sent telegrams of congratulation when Jimmy Savile’s name finally made it onto the Queen’s birthday honours list in the late summer of 1990, as did Prince Andrew. The Duchess of York sent a homemade card while Angus Ogilvy sent his warmest wishes in a handwritten letter. It was the last list that Margaret Thatcher made recommendations for before she was forced to resign. And it was her letter that informed Jimmy Savile that they had succeeded in getting him the knighthood they both desired.

  Savile claimed he was lying in bed in his London flat when the envelope dropped through the door. He said that he was so excited that he signed the acceptance form, jumped in a taxi and delivered it in person to Downing Street. His feelings of exhilaration, anticipation and relief continued to build until the news could be announced some five weeks later.

  Roger Ordish said he knew in advance, and claimed it was the closest he ever got to seeing the real Jimmy Savile. ‘I was very pleased,’ he recalled. ‘We were walking up the street back to the Portland Place flat and he said, “I shouldn’t be telling you this, but I’ve got a knighthood. You’re not to say anything.” I was very touched to be trusted. I didn’t even tell my wife.’

  After being shown the letter from Thatcher and the telegrams from the various royals, Lynn Barber, the respected broadsheet journalist, asked Jimmy Savile why he thought it had taken so long. He replied, ‘I would imagine I unsettled the establishment because the establishment would say, “Yes, Jimmy’s a good chap but a bit strange …” And I think maybe in the past I suffered from the vulgarity of success. Because if you’re successful in what you do you can become a pain in the neck to a lot of people, especially if you’re doing it in a volunteer manner, right?’6

  It was an uncannily accurate assessment of the discussions that had taken place over a number of years between the prime minister’s office and the Honours Committee.

  But what he said next, in response to Barber’s question about the tabloid rumour mill, is one of the most illuminating things that ever passed his lips. ‘I had a lively couple of years with the tabloids sniffing about, asking round the corner shops – everything – thinking there must be something the authorities knew that they didn’t. Whereas in actual fact I’ve got to be the most boring geezer in the world because I ain’t got no past, no nothing. And so, if nothing else, it was a ginormous relief when I got the knighthood, because it got me off the hook.’

  It was an extraordinary comment. He could have declared that it was a huge honour and stated how humbled he felt. But instead, he talked of the Queen giving him ‘this tremendous responsibility’ and about the overwhelming sense of relief that came with it.

  To her credit, Barber went on to press Savile about the rumours that he liked ‘little girls’. She reported he responded with a flurry of patter. Then, when he’d got his bearings, he reverted to the line he had used time and time again: that teenagers only flocked around him because he got to meet their idols.

  When she then asked him about sex, he likened it to going to the bathroom, adding, ‘I’ve never been one to explain to people what I do when I go the bathroom and I’m not a kiss-and-tell punter. All I can say is that I’ve never got anybody into any trouble; I’ve never knowingly upset anybody’.

  He reiterated that there was no room in his life for love: ‘I don’t have girlfriends because it’s not fair, the same as I don’t have plants because I’d never be back to water them, and I don’t have cats and dogs, and I don’t have kids because I’d never be there to see them.’ It was an elucidation that had become another brick in the w
all.

  Barber’s was the first of a series of major profiles in the lead-up to his investiture. Shortly afterwards, he was interviewed at Stoke Mandeville where he was photographed in his spartan living quarters. He again talked about why he had never married: ‘I have such a marvellous lifestyle, I have knock-out relationships here and I can bugger off when I want, which is not the stuff relationships are made of.’ Janet Rowe, his secretary at the hospital, told the journalist, ‘You’ll never find out what the true Jimmy Savile is like because he’s so complex. It’s very difficult to get him to open up.’7

  The music magazine Q tried, but again he stonewalled. Only this time he let slip that his well-practised ripostes to questions about relationships, marriage and the dark rumours that now swirled about him were in fact a tactic. ‘As far as skeletons are concerned, I must be the most boring punter in the world because I haven’t got any. I’m totally boring,’ he said for the umpteenth time. ‘It knackers everybody. There are no skeletons and I’ve got knighted so that proves it, doesn’t it?’8

  In late October, he was interviewed at the flat he’d been given at Broadmoor. He talked about the work being done at the hospital and the new, softer image it was trying to project, underlining again that its patients were mad rather than bad. ‘A true psychopath really enjoys what he’s doing,’ he said. ‘We don’t have anyone like that here.’

  If Jimmy Savile had learned anything at Broadmoor he might have grasped the black irony underscoring this statement. For delivering it was a man who exhibited so many of the behavioural traits on the psychopathy checklist Robert Hare devised to identify those who committed crimes: the slippery charm; the mask worn to conceal his true self from others; the low cunning and willingness to manipulate; the absence of normal human emotions; the lack of empathy; the sexual promiscuity; the inability to admit mistakes; the fear of commitment; the ability to evade capture; and, most importantly, the repeated attacks on the vulnerable. Of course, Jimmy Savile would not have been able to see this, due to the grandiose self-image that made him incapable of understanding how others might perceive him.