Dick’s Desperate Dirt Digging

After the story of Jimmy Savile’s past behaviour has been paraded before the ranks of hacks and pundits has come the street sweeper that is Richard Littlejohn. In a rambling and characteristically tedious rant today, he lays the blame for it all at the doors of the BBC, Leveson, the supposedly draconian libel laws, and not anywhere near Himself Personally Now. No, sirree.

Conspiracy, Guv? Issa bleedin' big word, innit?!?

Dick starts as he means to go on – by lying. One hates to over-use the L-word, but one also has to call a spade a bloody shovel. “Scotland Yard is cranking up an investigation into the Jimmy Savile child abuse scandal” asserts Dick. The reality? The Met has stated “it is not an investigation at this stage”. Then Dick follows up with another porkie, saying the Met has “run out of journalists to arrest”.

So he missed Alex Marunchak getting nicked earlier this week, which is strange, given the Littlejohn appetite for playing the victim over any of the apparent wrongdoing his pals have been indulging in over the years. But he is certain that the hated Beeb is in the dock: “For four decades, the BBC conspired in a cynical, calculated cover-up ... Cosa Nostra code of omerta”.

Conspiracy, Dicky boy, is not something that pertains to organisations. A conspiracy takes place between individuals, a mere factette which, as is usual with Littlejohn’s level of courage – that would be zero – means he manages not to name any of them. But, he goes on, “Newsnight was prevented from telling the victims’ stories”. Ah, more of that “guilt by assertion and added nudge-nudgery”.

And, having rambled on about Savile now being dead (nowt gets past our Dick), he then asserts that, had he been alive, he would have been a star witness at Leveson. Why so? Savile wasn’t a hack, pundit or editor, and he certainly wasn’t a victim of press intrusion. It’s precisely because Dick and his pals kept off the case that nothing came out until after he’d been dead a whole year.

Then Dick gets to the point – it’s the libel laws that stopped the press getting Savile. He would have sued. Er, hello Dicky boy? That didn’t stop your legendarily foul mouthed editor from going after Irving Scholar, Alan Sugar, Liz Hurley, Nicole Kidman, Jude Law, Diana Rigg, Rowan Atkinson, Michael Caine, Sharon Stone, Elton John, Noel Edmonds, Hugh Grant and Jemima Khan, did it?

The Mail libelled them all, and they all sued. It didn’t stop the mud being slung, and in many cases sticking. They could just as easily have fingered Savile. They did not. What Richard Littlejohn cannot get his head round is that his own paper – the best resourced in the country – kept quiet and didn’t bother, and yes, for four decades. If anyone is part of the conspiracy, it’s Paul Dacre – his own editor.

Along, of course, with his roster of pundits. That would be you, Dicky boy.