by Dan Davies
Keri had given the team a potential lead on the identity of the Duncroft girl who encountered Gary Glitter in Jimmy Savile’s changing room in 1974, and Hannah Livingston, who had by now established that the programme was Clunk Click, continued to follow up. By 17 November, Liz MacKean had emailed Jones and Livingston to say that she had heard from six ex-Duncroft girls but was still no nearer to being able to confirm whether there had been a police investigation and if so, whether letters existed explaining why it had been dropped.
Jones contacted Mark Williams-Thomas to give him an update on the police angle, confirming that most of the women spoken to believed they had been interviewed by the police around 2009, before receiving a letter that confirmed the Crown Prosecution Service had declined to proceed on the grounds that the individual was too old and infirm. Jimmy Savile’s name was not said to have appeared on the letters.
If the Savile investigation was to be broadcast it would have had wider implications for the corporation, particularly for BBC Television which George Entwistle ran as director of Vision.
On 21 November, Rippon had a meeting with his line manager Stephen Mitchell in which they discussed the implications of the investigation for the Christmas Jim’ll Fix It tribute programme. Mitchell told Rippon it was not an issue and that he should ‘follow the evidence’1 on his story.
Following this conversation, the Jimmy Savile report was taken off the Newsnight Managed Risk Programmes List at Mitchell’s behest, although he could later provide no adequate reason for his decision.
One plausible reason is that Mitchell believed Peter Rippon had grasped the meaning of his oblique language regarding the ‘Vision issues’.2 It was the same term Liz Gibbons, who was responsible for the Managed Risk Programmes List for Newsnight, had used in a contemporaneous email. Contrary to what the Pollard inquiry concluded, ‘Vision issues’ could have conceivably meant the potential awkwardness of the clash with tributes to Jimmy Savile that had already been scheduled.
Later that day, Rippon also met in his office with Helen Boaden, the BBC’s director of news. She described it at the inquiry as a ‘very short conversation’3 in which she was told about the Savile investigation and the allegations involving sexual abuse of underage girls. What Rippon failed to tell Boaden was that there were allegations of abuse on BBC premises.
In this meeting, Rippon is recorded as asking Boaden whether the story was a potential problem in terms of embarrassment for the BBC, to which Boaden replied it was not. She told him to be ‘guided by the evidence’4 and that taste was not an issue. The main thing Rippon recalls of the conversation is ‘[Boaden] talking about … the funeral and the “climate in which he would be making his judgement”. He agreed with her assessment that the story needed to reach a “reasonable threshold of certainty.”’5
Curiously, given what she said about this being a ‘a five- to ten-minute conversation,’6 the discussion with Peter Rippon led Helen Boaden to miss the prestigious Reuters Memorial Lecture at Oxford. When asked when the meeting took place with Rippon, she replied it was the 21st and ‘the reason I remember it is that looking through the diary I know I was meant to go to Oxford to do a lecture or attend a lecture, and the meeting overran so I literally didn’t have enough time to get on the train and get there’.7
The lecture she missed was given by Baroness O’Neill who, ironically, spoke on the subject of press freedom. It was followed by a high-powered panel discussion chaired by Lord Patten, Chairman of the BBC Trust.
Two days later, Boaden met up with her deputy Stephen Mitchell, who told her that she ought to tell George Entwistle, director of Vision, about the Savile investigation as he might need to change the Christmas schedules.
On 24 November, Hannah Livingston made a breakthrough in finding the relevant episode of Clunk Click featuring Gary Glitter. The episode in question closes with Jimmy Savile inviting the glam rocker onto the beanbags where the teenagers are sitting. As he’s invited to sit between two girls, Glitter remarks, ‘I get two?’
‘You get two,’ replies Savile, who mock sighs: ‘I should be giving girls away.’ He then walks further down the line and sits between two other girls.
MacKean says, ‘It’s as plain as day: the tight gripping of the girls [on the beanbags], the embracing. And you see the discomfort of the girls.’
A day later, the investigating team received another major boost when Mark Williams-Thomas told Meirion Jones that a very well-placed contact had confirmed off the record that Surrey Police had investigated Jimmy Savile. This was proof that the police had taken the allegations seriously, as well as underlining the credibility of the accounts of the ex-Duncroft girls.
Rippon’s response was his most enthusiastic to date: ‘Excellent,’ he wrote, before advising that planning should now commence for a transmission date. A Rolls-Royce convertible, like Savile’s, was hired to film reconstructions around Duncroft and the film was scheduled to be broadcast on Thursday, 8 December.
Liz MacKean had by now set up a filmed, on the record interview with Rochelle Shepherd, who was at Duncroft in the late 1970s, after Keri had left. Meirion Jones was to do the interview. ‘[Shepherd] did not present herself as a victim,’ says MacKean, ‘but she saw the groping, the tongues down the throat. She corroborated and added to the general picture. [We now had] these other vital quotes and testimonies from other victims and witnesses, and when you put it all together with the footage of Clunk Click and the fact we did get confirmation of a police investigation, we had a really cracking story.’
What’s more, the team had also received an account that related to abuse at Stoke Mandeville, the hospital Jimmy Savile had worked at as a volunteer before leading the fund-raising drive to rebuild the National Spinal Injuries Centre, which opened in 1983.
‘We’d heard a rumour about Broadmoor [another hospital Savile was closely associated with] but we hadn’t gone anywhere with it,’ says MacKean. ‘And we knew, because of the photograph in the Sun [in 2008], that he was at Haut de la Garenne [the Jersey children’s home at the centre of an abuse scandal]. So we were thinking, “Hang on, if we know this now about Duncroft … we are building up a picture and there could be a lot more [victims] out there”.’ Meirion Jones predicted that there might be as many as one hundred. It was an estimate that turned out to be conservative in the extreme.
*
On 27 November, less than three weeks after Jimmy Savile’s funeral had taken place amid rapturous national coverage, Meirion Jones began drafting a preliminary script that would be read as the ‘cue’ for the report. This is what he wrote:
‘When Jimmy Savile died in October, Prince Charles led the tributes to a national treasure. But there was a darker side to the star of Jim’ll Fix It. Newsnight has learnt that he was investigated by police for sexual assaults on minors but the Crown Prosecution Service decided in 2009? [the question mark is included because they were still waiting for confirmation from the police and the CPS] that he was too old and infirm to face trial. Now some of the girls who say they were assaulted by him in the 1970s when they were 13, 14 and 15 have talked to Newsnight. They say Savile was an evil man who should rot in hell and that his charity work gave him cover to get young girls. They even claim some of his abuse took place after BBC recordings and involved other celebrity paedophiles who appeared on Savile’s shows such as Gary Glitter. Liz MacKean investigates …’8
MacKean was also working on a first draft of the script proper, and parallel discussions were taking place about what Mark Williams-Thomas could add as an expert in child sex abuse cases. A copy of the first draft was sent to Peter Rippon, Liz Gibbons, who was responsible for booking editing suites at the BBC, and Roger Law, a BBC lawyer. On the same day, the Impact Team began gathering information in order to prepare versions of the story that could be rolled out across the BBC network. ‘It is safe to assume there will be a huge amount of interest in the story, I would expect all domestic outlets to want versions,’ said a member of the team in
an email to Rippon.9
Liz Gibbons’s reluctance to have anything to do with the story was again underlined when she emailed Rippon to confirm that he would be the executive producer on the report.10
At lunchtime on 29 November, Rippon emailed Stephen Mitchell, who was in Belfast, with a positive-sounding update on the state of the Newsnight report on Jimmy Savile. Seven victims of sexual assault from Duncroft Approved School had been spoken to, Surrey Police had carried out an extensive investigation, which was recent even though the offences took place in the 1970s, and the women were credible. He added that Sky were also chasing the story so it would be prudent not to ‘sit on it’.11 It is a telling detail, given that Sky’s interest made it more likely that the story would come out one way or the other.
Mitchell replied 18 minutes later, enquiring as to whether the headmistress of the school had been spoken to, and whether the girls had approached any of the staff. Rippon answered the questions and sent some cut and pasted sections from the script. That evening, Rippon emailed Mitchell again stating that he would send a script after speaking to Meirion Jones, who was due to interview Rochelle Shepherd the next day. A telephone conversation is then understood to have taken place between Rippon and Mitchell though neither could recall details for Pollard.
Suddenly, on the morning of 30 November, the course of the investigation shifted decisively. MacKean’s background fears about the ‘alternative reality’ within the BBC over the tribute show that had aired and the Jim’ll Fix It special planned for Christmas suddenly emerged front and centre when she received an email from Meirion Jones. It was forwarding a message from Rippon in which he stated he now wanted to establish that the Crown Prosecution Service had decided not to press charges because Jimmy Savile was too old and infirm. To Jones, MacKean and Livingston, this represented a ‘journalistic bar’ that had never previously existed. Rippon’s attitude to the story had changed overnight.
In his later statement to the Pollard inquiry, Rippon set out his thinking at the time: ‘The extent to which we had to rely on the testimony from [Keri] was stark. She was the only victim in vision we had and would be the face of our allegations and I remained concerned about how well her testimony would stand up to the scrutiny it would get.12
‘I was also concerned with the way we collected the additional evidence from other victims and witnesses. The women were to remain anonymous. The interviews had all been done on the telephone. Some of them were done by a junior researcher who was with us on work experience who I had never worked with. I was also concerned that the evidence could be potentially undermined because some of the women had already discussed the claims amongst themselves via a social networking site. In my personal experience, the strongest testimony from victims of alleged child sexual abuse has to be collected individually, face to face, on neutral territory, with trained interviewers used to not asking leading questions. This was a long way from what we had done.
‘For these reasons I emailed Meirion on 30th November saying I wanted to pursue the CPS angle on the story to its end before finally deciding on publishing.’
Rippon had previously expressed doubts about the women’s credibility and his desire for the CPS angle to be explored, but his sudden volte-face came as a total shock to the report team. The non-appearance of the letter from the police had suddenly become a major problem. I asked Liz MacKean whether she now thinks the letter ever existed.
‘I don’t know but I have to question whether it did,’ she says. ‘I really wanted to find that letter because clearly it would have been signed, sealed and delivered in terms of persuading Newsnight. I believed it did exist, although not necessarily as people were describing it to us. We were led on a complete goose chase [by one former Duncroft girl]. She was the one account that we had the greatest disagreements about.’
This particular woman assured MacKean she had emailed the letter for her to see. On another occasion, MacKean offered to drive to the woman’s house to collect it in person. When the letter didn’t materialise, she began to suspect that the woman was enjoying rather too much the power she had in the whole investigation.
Looking back, Meirion Jones agrees: ‘When you actually got down to people who said they actually had a letter from the police it was only one person. From what we know of the procedure, they would have got letters but the letters wouldn’t have said anything like [Jimmy Savile was too old and infirm]. I think, very likely, that whoever was dealing with them, the police officer or whoever, would ring them up and soften it by saying, “It’s not that you’re a bad witness but he’s very old and he’ll probably be dead by the time we got him to trial”, softening chit-chat so they don’t feel that they’ve just been trampled on.’
MacKean remains in no doubt, however, that the police letter and the CPS line were mere side issues. ‘It didn’t make any difference. The really important thing was that people like [Keri] and others we’d spoken to had never been to the police. So the police letter was only a very narrow context, it wasn’t the single thing that made or broke the story because Meirion and I had more than the police. So whether the CPS dropped [the case] because he was too old and infirm, which they were never going to admit and what was being claimed, or whether it was dropped through lack of evidence, which is the usual thing, we still had more than the police.’
She says they knew the tide was running hard against them when Rippon announced his overnight change of mind. ‘We knew he wasn’t getting much support on the programme and we knew there was this view among some senior people, like Liz Gibbons, who thought it was in bad taste. We knew it didn’t take much to raise the white flag.’13 Indeed, when Jones and MacKean confronted him on the day of his turnaround, Rippon is reported to have given the surrender sign and said that he ‘was not willing to go to the wall on this one’.
Jones told his editor that if the story was pulled and word got out, the BBC would be accused of a cover-up to protect the Christmas tribute shows and the BBC’s reputation. MacKean says she felt Rippon was unwilling to challenge his bosses if they had concerns about the Savile report.
On the morning of 1 December, Jones sent himself what he calls his ‘Red Flag email’, setting out in detail his thoughts on why the story should run and the serious consequences to the BBC if it did not. He felt the journalistic bar suddenly put in place by Rippon was illogical and unnecessary. MacKean urged him to send it to Helen Boaden, partly because she knew Rippon had spoken to her. Jones demurred.
Later that day, Jones received an email from Rippon enquiring again about the letter from the police: ‘I think we should stop working on other elements until we know for sure what we are likely to get from them because we don’t really have a strong enough story without it.’ Rippon added that he’d cancel the editing suite that had been booked for the report.
Jones went into Rippon’s office and reiterated he was putting an artificial bar on the report and that if the CPS had dropped the case, they were hardly likely to risk embarrassment by saying anything other than it being through lack of evidence. He listed the confirmation the police had taken the allegations seriously enough to investigate and pass a file to the CPS as being hugely significant, as was the fact that they had more evidence than the police because Keri had never been spoken to. He finished by saying it was a story that would make the front pages of every national newspaper and they would be accused of a cover-up if any of the victims went to the press, which he thought very likely.
The artificial bar of the CPS line and the police letter, if indeed it ever existed, is what MacKean describes as Peter Rippon’s ‘fig leaf’. ‘I just thought, “This is wrong,” she says. ‘It’s as simple as that. We had more than the CPS, we bypassed them, and we had more than the police had. We had wider testimonies.’
Despite ongoing conversations and protestations of the strength of what they had, MacKean says she was by this stage resigned to the fact the story would never see the light of day. ‘It was the definition of futile,�
�� she recalls. ‘There was no way we could go back to it after the tributes [had run]. How could the BBC then go back and say, “We could have revealed this”? Plus the victims knew and we thought it was only a matter of time before they told other journalists.’
On Friday, 2 December, while Meirion Jones was filming reconstructions for the Savile report with a rented Rolls-Royce at Duncroft, a group of senior BBC executives, among them Peter Rippon, Stephen Mitchell, Helen Boaden and George Entwistle, sat down for lunch at an event to honour Women in Film and Television.
The director general, Mark Thompson, was soon to leave the BBC, and Boaden and Entwistle were the favourites for the top job. The testimonies given to the Pollard Review by Boaden, Mitchell and Entwistle are conflicting on whether at that point it was considered likely the report would go to air.14 But at some point during the lunch, and some nine days after being advised to do so by Stephen Mitchell, Helen Boaden mentioned Newsnight’s investigation into Jimmy Savile to George Entwistle, and referred to how it might impact on his Christmas schedules. She told Pollard this was the first opportunity she had had to speak to Entwistle, having been away on holiday and then missed him ‘at least twice’15 when she called by his office.
Mr Entwistle’s account to Pollard was that he could not even recall asking Boaden what the Newsnight investigation was about.16
The bitter irony of them being at an event to celebrate women while the women of Duncroft remained unheard, is not lost on MacKean. ‘A 10- or 12-second conversation is a disgrace. These people had big careers. For one of them it was about to get a lot bigger with the Director General contest.’