Sex Crimes of the Future Past

Well, well, well, what a bad couple of week it has been for David Cameron, (as the BBC's Nick Robinson didn't say, not that the fact that was a Young Conservative when he was a student in any way biases his political reporting).  First of all a former Downing Street  aide was in court for allegedly possessing child porn images, then his former communications director Andy Coulson went down for eighteen months after being found guilty in the phone hacking trial, before allegations emerged that there had been an official cover-up by the Thatcher government of child sex allegations against senior political figures.  Oh, and it emerged that former Tory Home Secretary Leon Britten - on whose watch the child sex allegations dossier had gone missing - had been questioned by police over an alleged rape which had supposedly taken place in 1967.  But don't worry, his accuser was an adult at the time of the alleged offence.  So that's OK then - Britten isn't an alleged peado, just an alleged common or garden rapist.  All of which, alongside the Rolf Harris conviction and more lurid revelations about Jimmy Savile, leaves us all wondering if there is any prominent person in the UK who hasn't been involved in some kind of sex crime over the past forty years.

But it's all grist to the mill for the media which, in the great British press tradition of having their cake and eating it too, simultaneously profess both outrage at the deprivations of the various celebrity sex criminals whilst also cataloguing both their actual crimes and speculating on what else they might have done in lurid detail and with lip-smacking relish.  The Holy Grail for the tabloids, of course, is a story which can link together two or more of these modern-day sex monsters.  Hence the photograph of Rolf Harris and Jimmy Savile together in the same shot being plastered all over their front pages last week.  It's sort of a paedophile equivalent to Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman.  Obviously, what they'd really like to run would be the sex fiend version of House of Frankenstein, bringing together not just Harris and Savile, but also Stuart Hall, Gary Glitter and Cyril Smith.  Surely, somewhere, there must be a story involving all of them in some kind of Satanic sex ritual, (in the wake of all these recent revelations, it must surely be time for the press to revive the 'Satanic sex abuse' stories).

But if the tabloids find themselves short of inspiration for further celebrity sex crime stories, I'm prepared to offer a few suggestions.  How about the possibility of Rolf Harris sharing a cell with Andy Coulson (not a sex offender, but a convicted snooper on other people's private lives)?  Could this raise the possibility of a new Rolf Harris painting emerging in a few months time, depicting Coulson being taken roughly from behind by their other cell mate, a huge bald and tattooed convicted armed robber called Toby?  With regard to the crimes of Jimmy Savile, it's getting harder and harder to come up with anything more outlandish than some of the allegations already levelled at him by the press - with the police apparently intent upon pinning every unsolved sex attack since 1962 on the late DJ, I'm fully expecting him to be named as the man on the grassy knoll in Dealey Plaza in 1963 any day now.  However, I'll give it a try: using a time machine, (built for him by the late Jeremy Beadle), Savile travelled back to Victorian Whitechapel and became Jack the Ripper.  I'm sure some enterprising tabloid hack can uncover witness descriptions from the 1880s which describe the Ripper as smoking a cigar, wearing gold jewellery and saying 'Now then, now then' as he approached his victims.  In fact, we could go further and claim that Jimmy Savile used his time machine to become every notorious sex killer in history.  Just remember when you read all this stuff in the Daily Mail next week, you heard it here first!