by Ian Brady
The likelihood that the BBC and ITV, Britain’s two main television channels, both pillars of the establishment, would commission such a film was slim. Instead, Channel 4, then as now the most radical of public broadcasters in the UK, was approached. A meeting was set up with the station’s head of news and current affairs in mid-August to pitch the show and hand over a copy of The Gates of Janus manuscript.
Events quickly began to overtake us. A trade paper broke news of the book’s publication. The Times of London and the Daily Express immediately began to sniff around for a story. At that point, writer Colin Wilson wrote an article for the Daily Mail naively trumpeting his role in encouraging Brady to write the book. Wilson, apparently determined not to be upstaged, driven by a perverse need to be seen as Brady’s number one fan and friend, came across as little more than consort, supplicant and apologist for the monster. His only achievement was to stoke moral outrage and open the floodgates for tabloid ire.
All they cared about was the money. The notion that Brady might somehow be profiting from his crimes, capitalising on his reputation. As if he didn’t already profit every time they made him front-page news. As if the media weren’t compensated handsomely every time they gave him the oxygen of publicity. Both sides happy to maintain this Faustian pact to feed the beast.
Still no one but the TV executives had seen or had access to the book itself but, in light of Wilson’s intervention, Channel 4 got cold feet, claiming they were “not totally convinced that the public interest justification was strong enough” to commit. Channel 5, a trashier version of Channel 4, for whom ethics never seemed to be much of an issue, described the project as an “ethical minefield” when they too were offered the show.
There was nothing so radical in the pitch that justified lily-livered excuses such as these, save the prospect that British television audiences, after decades of prurient scare-mongering about the Moors Murderers that pandered to lynch-mob mentalities, might finally be exposed to some considered reporting about Brady and his crimes.
With all avenues for broadcast seemingly exhausted, the text that immediately follows this one was commissioned by The Guardian newspaper as a cover story for their daily G2 supplement on 10 September 2001. And then… a curse from God on the capitalist infidels on Wall Street ensured that the seedy bleating of an aging serial killer with a kill count of less than half a dozen little ones felt like yesterday’s news compared to the thousands taken out by Jihadi mass murderers in passenger planes jury-rigged as improvised bombs.
The story on Brady’s The Gates of Janus was filed and sat in limbo, unpublished, then spiked five weeks later because, post 9-11, the editor assigned to the piece decided they were only interested in stories that felt “jolly” to counter the paper’s blanket coverage of “warwarwar every day”—further insensate evasions to mitigate inaction.
The real reason the piece was spiked, the film unable to find a backer, I believe then and still feel now, was that, by undermining the nature of Brady’s infamy, the very ‘ethics’ the media relied upon for its own “public interest justification” was called into question. And so the publication of The Gates of Janus passed by, invoking the usual brief, predictable flurry of moral outrage, and zero serious commentary. Brady’s reputation as the child killer par excellence remained unsullied; the monster who most embodied the dark heart of postwar British society was returned to his lair, out of the public eye.
In the fourteen years from then till now, the game has changed in not-so-subtle ways. Colin Wilson is no more. Brady lived on, despite spending the years since the initial publication of this book on hunger strike in the secure unit at high-security psychiatric hospital Ashworth, being force-fed three times daily by intubation; a prize goose in captivity being fattened into foie gras. Knowing that parole or pardon were out of reach, Brady, the smug, decadent lifer, was given license to indulge himself in other ways, invoking the pity of others by repeatedly claiming that all he wants to do is die.
As his waning days play out, Brady finds himself outmoded and outclassed, a figure who has become all but irrelevant. With the passing of Winnie Johnson in 2012, whose twelve-year-old son Keith Bennett still lay somewhere out there in the moors, the bluster and hyperbole, the coy teasing of information, all of which had kept Brady’s name in the press for close to five decades, had ceased to become effective. Brady had no more cards left to play; his lot, to literally rot in jail. And maybe, just maybe, this book, Brady’s grand statement of intent, was the beginning of his undoing.