There was no secret: Jimmy Savile
March 15, 2015
Review of In Plain Sight by Dan Davies
IN PLAIN SIGHT by Dan Davies is a shocking but compelling account of the long criminal career of Jimmy Savile. As Savile’s 84-year old body is found in his squalid Leeds flat, its fingers crossed, the natural response is to think that death was too good for him. Even in his frail final years he was still ducking and diving, bobbing and weaving, lying and dissembling and confabulating in a bid to evade the talons of justice, but it was startling just how little he actually had to do at this point. Though his defences were hardly impenetrable and though the evidence was far from insubstantial, he managed to survive every half-hearted probe and interrogation with barely a scratch. Was it because the people in charge couldn’t bring themselves to believe that his crimes could be possible? Were they afraid what else it might uncover?
In Plain Sight is thorough, and maintains a balanced tone throughout, but I found myself feeling disappointed that there wasn’t anything more that could be said about the psychological ruins that stood behind Savile’s all-encompassing reptilian cunning. One feels that there has got to be more than just a psychopathic compulsion behind Savile’s six decades of abuse.
Savile used to deflect inquiries about his personal life by saying that “the secret is that there is no secret”, and maybe that is the most disturbing thing about him. He hardly went to great lengths to conceal his activities, apart from coopting anyone who might be in a position to put a stop to them. Even Running Dog, laughably unconnected, had heard rumours of his behaviour as early as 1988.
Perhaps there genuinely was no secret: there was simply no inner life at all. There were no demons to dodge and no traumas to assuage, and this seemed to give him even more brainpower to devote to abusing children. Even his religious beliefs were calculated, in a crude Pascal’s Wager sort of way, to maximise his own self-interests.
His life was spent in tacky caravans groping girls and procuring shags and blowjobs with grubby fivers. The air he breathed was permeated with the stench of spunk and cigars. This was the world of uneducated delinquents, stale testosterone and the snarling, nihilistic alpha maledom that tends to prevail in prisons. Savile’s world was that of the borstal and the closing-time bar fight.
The more important question is how the monstrous Savile could have insinuated himself into the heart of the British establishment, using the force of his personality alone, especially when one considers how thoroughly obnoxious his personality actually was, even on screen.
Savile was without scruple or compunction, and one also has to wonder why hundreds of young girls flocked to him in the first place. He had the charisma of a snake. He had power and wealth and a preposterous degree of self-confidence, and he was utterly dedicated to himself and nothing else. His charitable acts were palpably self-serving, not merely to balance his evil deeds in the eyes of God (he remained a devout Catholic), but to grant him more access to vulnerable kids. We now know all this. The important question is how the hell he got away with it.
His career of criminality was littered with incidents of responsible adults turning the other cheek, letting things lie, choosing the safer option, giving him the benefit of the doubt, and pretending that Savile’s predatory creepiness was merely an eccentricity. Everyone knew but choose not to do anything about it, or were scared of his savage power, or were somehow made complicit in it.
