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"Some people believe that support for the war comes out of the propaganda itself. In a way, this is true, of course. But why do people believe it? The formulas work because people can use them for their own ends. The public are the victims of propaganda but, at the same time, it’s made-to-order just for them." Shura Burtin asks why Russians support the war against Ukraine.

Sean Kippen reviews This is Not Normal: The Collapse of Liberal Britain by William Davies.

"By marginalising the empowering role of institutions in Savile’s crimes, both the Netflix documentary and official inquiries ultimately preserve the reputations of those institutions, and absolve key individuals of responsibility. To date, few have been brought to justice for enabling, covering up or failing properly to investigate what he did." Chris Greer and Eugene McLaughlin on the response to Jimmy Savile's crimes.

Claire Fitzpatrick says too many women in prison today were the girls in care of yesterday. "Beyond the gaze of the community, their experiences are easily ignored. Yet the stubborn over-representation of those with care experience in custody must be addressed by dramatically improving the care and support that individuals receive at earlier points in their lives."

"The defeat of the Ringways marked the first time that the planners had been publicly defeated. It showed that great plans for recasting urban space were not some unanswerable edict from on high: they were political proposals that could be successfully fought against." Michael Dnes and Calum Heath discover the London urban motorways that never were.

When it comes to writing, argues Derek Thompson, simple is smart.

Leyton Buzzards: Saturday Night (Beneath the Plastic Palm Trees)

The BBC's repeat of Top of the Pops from 1982 - or at least of those episodes that have not been Yewtreed - is one of the highlights of the week.

The show recently featured the forgettable Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White by Modern Romance.

But there was something notable about it, because Modern Romance evolved out of the far more interesting Leyton Buzzards  - a great band name for a start.

I was convinced that Saturday Night (Beneath the Plastic Palm Trees) had been a bit, but in fact it reached only no, 53 when it was released in 1979. It just shows how closely you follow the charts when you are a teenager.

Other teenage memories are evoked by the great couplet in Saturday Night:

I was cool drinking rum and black
And then felt sick on the journey back.

This is a reminder of the strange things we sometimes consumed before drinks aimed at teenagers came in early in the 1980s. Which was rather late for me.

Dame Janet Smith on Jimmy Savile and the BBC

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If the subject matter of Dame Janet Smith's report into Jimmy Savile and the BBC were not so serious, he conclusions would be funny.

Exaro, which has a leaked draft copy of her report, tells us:

In this second package of pieces, Exaro today reveals how Smith's report:

• reveals that Savile carried out far more sexual assaults on BBC premises than previously realised; 

• says that the BBC continued to use Savile to present Jim'll Fix It, a BBC1 programme aimed at children, despite "danger signals" about him; 

• exposes a failure by BBC bosses to notice even public warning signs about Savile's dark side; 

• recounts the damning private views of Savile from several well-known BBC colleagues; 

• shows how a BBC programme by Louis Theroux in 2000 exposed Savile as "deeply unattractive" and even raised the issue of his paedophilia. 

We also publish the key extracts from the Smith report's chapters of perceptions of Savile in the BBC, his sexual activities linked to the broadcaster, awareness within Jim'll Fix It of Savile's predatory behaviour, and the public warning signs that went unheeded.

And what does Dame Janet conclude?

Over to the Guardian:

In her final afterword, Smith insists no senior staff could have been made aware of Savile’s misconduct. 

“There is no evidence that any report of physical sexual misconduct or inappropriate behaviour ever reached the ears or the desk of a senior producer or an executive producer let alone a head of department or other senior executive.”

Many will find that inpossible to believe. But if this is true, it reinforces something I blogged about in October 2012.

Large organsations are too complex and too centralised for the people at the top of the hierarchy to have any idea what is really going on.

And it all those highly paid managers at the BBC have no idea what is going, how much would they be missed?

Do not, incidentally, fall for the argument that Savile was a long time ago and things have changed since then.

Nick Cohen reminds us of what happened to the people who exposed finally Savile on Panorama:

Liz MacKean: Resigned. ‘When the Savile scandal broke,’ she told me, ‘the BBC tried to smear my reputation. They said they had banned the film because Meirion and I had produced shoddy journalism. I stayed to fight them, but I knew they would make me leave in the end. Managers would look through me as if I wasn’t there. I went because I knew I was never going to appear on screen again.’ 

Meirion Jones: Took redundancy after his job on Newsnight mysteriously vanished. ‘People said they won’t sack you after Savile but they will make your life hell,’ he told Press Gazette. ‘Everyone involved on the right side of the Savile argument has been forced out of the BBC.’ 

Panorama: After its admirably rigorous documentary on the BBC’s failings, which did so much to restore the BBC’s reputation, BBC managers shifted Tom Giles, the editor of Panorama, out of news. Peter Horrocks, an executive who insisted throughout the scandal that the BBC must behave ethically, resigned to ‘find new challenges’. Clive Edwards, who as commissioning editor for current affairs oversaw the Panorama documentary, was demoted. 

As for Peter Rippon and all the other managers who parroted the corporate line, well, naturally, not one of them has suffered.

The Clash: Janie Jones

 Last week, when I chose Rooftop Singing by New World, I quoted a site that said:

The pop group New World were tried at the Old Bailey for trying to fix the outcome of the show on which they appeared.

It seems there was rather more to it than that.

In 2012, as news of Jimmy Savile's crimes gripped the nation, Andrew O'Hagan published an extraordinary article on the BBC and child abuse in the London Review of Books.

At one point he said:

Until now, no one thought to examine Children’s Hour and the world around it, much less the payola scandal involving radio DJs in the first flush of Savile’s fame. Janie Jones, a singer, appeared at Bow Street Magistrates’ Court in 1973 on 26 charges, which included controlling prostitutes and offering them as bribes ‘to BBC men as inducement to play records’. 

The men in the case were often referred to as Mr Z or Mr Y, or ‘unnamed broadcasters’. The court heard how Mr Y, ‘a television producer’, might have made a 14-year-old girl pregnant and could therefore be blackmailed. Mr X later answered questions about a cheque for £100 he gave to one of the girls but said he didn’t know she was a prostitute. ‘I thought she was much too young to be involved in anything like that,’ he said in court. 

Others remanded on bail included Jack Dabbs, a former producer of the radio programme Worldwide Family Favourites, Len Tucker, a theatrical agent, and several record promoters. 

At the time of the trial arrest warrants were out for members of the New World pop group who had won TV’s Opportunity Knocks ten times. 

The big trial that followed is now forgotten. According to the Times, ‘a shop assistant, aged 18, referred to as Miss G, said at the Central Criminal Court yesterday that Miss Jones said she could get work in modelling and television commercials, but she must play her cards right.’ ‘Playing her cards’ meant going to bed with producers and showbusiness people.

O'Hagan seems to be right when he says this trial has been forgotten. It is surprisingly hard to find out about it or how New World fitted into the more serious charges. My impression is that the band members were not tried and acquitted if they were tried.

To know for sure, you would have to read the memoirs of New World's lead singer John (Fuzzy) Lee

The Needle has published the report of the BBC investigation that took place after the affair. It is so redacted as to be comic.

But there is one undoubted outcome of the affair.

The first track on The Clash's first LP was about Janie Jones and mentioned payola. And it's a lot better than New World.

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Never mind the increase in tuition fees: more students than ever from poor backgrounds are going to university. Or are they? Peter Horrocks says think again.

Duncan Campbell tells the story of a life spent unmasking Britain's eavesdroppers.

Andy Boddington reports a breakthrough in the battle for affordable housing in Shropshire and other rural areas.

Africa has half as many lions as 20 years ago, but don't blame trophy hunting say Lochran Traill and Norman Owen-Smith.

"When the lights are dipped, Macgowan actually seems to be Savile. God knows how, but he even captures the bulging eyes, the indulgent slouch, the sense of flipped switches that Savile constantly conveyed. One moment boasting and bullying, the next retreating into a passive-aggressive haze of cigar smoke." Guy Mankowski reviews An Audience With Jimmy Savile.

Lemon Wedge revisits the great Ealing drama It Always Rains on Sunday. "This is the East End at the nadir of post-war austerity; everything’s on the ration and everyone's on the make. 'A dose of salts or a good hiding' is the answer to any domestic difficulty."

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Why did the pollsters get it so wrong at the general election? A special extended edition of the Polling Matters podcast tries to find out.

"It is a strategy that ignores the potential that is in 100% of today’s labor force, 98% of next year’s, and a huge number of people who will be around for the next half-century." Ricardo Hausmann questions the orthodoxy that education is the key to economic growth.

David Hencke says cutting councillors in Newcastle upon Tyne is a dangerous move to dilute democracy.

 The Labour leadership election of 1976 was contested by Tony Benn, Jim Callaghan, Anthony Crosland, Michael Foot, Denis Healey and Roy Jenkins. Alwyn W. Turner looks back.

Elizabeth Day talks to Alistair McGowan about his experience of portraying Jimmy Savile in a new play.

Rebecca Mead on the appeal of Middlemarch.

The BBC, Jimmy Savile and other child abusers

View image | gettyimages.com

In his Observer column today Nick Cohen writes about the scandal of the BBC's sacking of Meirion Jones and Liz MacKean, the two journalists who made the Panorama programme about Newsnight's abandonment of its investigation into Jimmy Savile.

Not only that, writes Cohen:

BBC managers have shifted Tom Giles, the editor of Panorama, out of news. Peter Horrocks, an executive who insisted throughout the scandal that the BBC must behave ethically, announced last September that he was resigning to “find new challenges”. 

Clive Edwards, who as commissioning editor for current affairs oversaw the Panorama documentary, was demoted. The television trade press reported recently that his future is “not yet clear” (which doesn’t sound as if he has much of a future at all).

I doubt the BBC is worse than any other great hierarchy, but Cohen's conclusion is right:

The power of hierarchies is hard to break. But if you want to fight fraud in the City or the rape of children, it has to be broken. A start can be made by insisting that everyone from John Humphrys in the morning to Evan Davis at night tells the truth about the purge of the BBC’s truth tellers.

And the BBC does have previous.

In an extraordinary London Review of Books article from 2012 Andrew O'Hagan looked at the corporation's long entanglement with the subject.

Take the case of Derek McCulloch, 'Uncle Mac', the man in charge of Children’s Hour, and the voice of Larry the Lamb in Toytown.

O'Hagan writes:

In his book Strange Places, Questionable People, published in 1998, John Simpson, the BBC’s world affairs editor, writes about his early days there. In 1967, he was given the task of preparing the obituary of a famous children’s presenter. He calls him "Uncle Dick". In 1998, and still today, Simpson felt he shouldn't name McCulloch directly: but it is now clear that Uncle Dick is Uncle Mac. 

In preparing the obituary, Simpson rang ‘Auntie Gladys’, who had worked with him, to get a few quotes. 'Week after week,’ Auntie Gladys told him, ‘children from all over the country would win competitions to visit the BBC and meet Uncle Dick. He would welcome them, show them round, give them lunch, then take them to the gents and interfere with them. If their parents complained, she said, the director-general’s office would write and say the nation wouldn't understand such an accusation against a much loved figure.' ... 

When Simpson reported her remarks to his boss, the man rounded on him and told him he was an ‘ignorant, destructive young idiot’. The boss then rewrote Simpson’s copy; McCulloch, the obituary now said, ‘had a wonderful way with children’. The Corporation turned a blind eye to what was being said about McCulloch just as it later would with Savile and some of the others. 

Yet people knew. The Times obituary of McCulloch was written by the poet Geoffrey Dearmer. ‘Children of all ages were always comfortable in his unseen company,’ Dearmer wrote. ‘There was something of Larry the Lamb in him, and Larry could get away with murder.’

To end on a slightly lighter note, O'Hagan mentions meeting Dan Davies, Jimmy Savile's biographer:

He always said the story was seedy and strange and that when the book was published he would call it 'Apocalypse Now Then'.

What prevented the press from exposing Jimmy Savile's crimes

Former Sunday Mirror editor Paul Connew explains on The Drum:

It was a disastrous combination of Britain’s draconian libel laws (generally so beloved of celebrities with unsavoury secrets and lawyers well aware of ‘star-struck’ juries), victims intimidated by Savile's celebrity status and powerful connections plus police indifferent to (or themselves intimidated by) allegations against the rich and powerful ... that conspired to protect Savile and other VIP abusers.

Abuse inquiry into former Leicestershire home for sick children

Last summer there was an investigation into an allegation that Jimmy Savile had abused a child at Roecliffe Manor, a convalescent home at Woodhouse Eaves in Leicestershire.

That investigation could not substantiate the allegation, but suggested that sexual abuse probably had taken place there.

Now comes news that a police investigation into the home, which closed in 1969, has been launched.

There is a danger, I suppose, that Savile will become a sort of folk devil, supposed to have turned up at homes and hospitals all over the country and abused people. As today's news suggests, there was plenty of abuse where he was not involved.

But it should be remembered that turning up at homes and hospitals is one of the things that the BBC paid him to do in a programme called Savile's Travels.

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Iain Brodie-Brown says the Liberal Democrats should rethink their post-election strategy: be prepared to enter a confidence-and-supply arrangement and abandon the pledge to deal first with the largest party.

"One of the less obvious side shows to the defection of Douglas Carswell MP from the Tories to UKIP has been the report that he may be taking his data with him – detailed data about his constituents, it appears, and according to the Daily Mail people at UKIP are ‘purring’ at the prospect of getting hold of the data." Paul Bernal looks at the legal and moral questions raised when MPs change party and seek to take their data with them.

"I met a woman once with an exhausting history of mental difficulties who was married to a headteacher. Her husband had charge of her medication and she told me she couldn't help noticing that, when they had any kind of argument, he increased her dose." David Boyle on health professionals who threaten patients.

Facebook’s Report Abuse button has become a tool of global oppression, says Russell Brandom on The Verge.

Miles Goslett in the Oldie points out that the BBC is still concealing the truth about who knew what and when about Jimmy Savile.

Alan White from Buzzfeed looks at the unlikely rise, fall and rise of Viz.

New light on Peter Righton

Tom Bateman's story on the BBC News site: Paedophile Peter Righton advised Home Office on policy gives me a reason for writing about a figure who is more sinister than anyone likely to be charged under Operation Yewtree - even Jimmy Savile.

Like Savile, he seems to have enjoyed licence to visit every institution and speak to every child in the country.

There was also an item about Righton on this morning's Today programme - it starts at around 1:35:00. It featured Ian Pace, whose blog is required reading for anyone interested in the revived concern over historic child abuse.

I don't know how much new information Tom Bateman has come across, but the frustrating thing about this affair is that Righton's crimes and influence were known about 20 years ago. If you have a strong stomach you can watch a documentary about him from June 1994.

And Spotlight on Abuse - another valuable site - has the text of a report on Righton that was written the year before that.

As it says:

This document below was written by the retired child protection expert who was the source of Tom Watson’s October 2012 PMQ about “a powerful political paedophile ring”. 

It was written during the 1993 investigation into Peter Righton, a child care expert who was part of a network of paedophiles that had infiltrated children’s homes and schools across the UK. Sir William Utting, acting on behalf of the Department of Health, requested a report on the Righton case from the Director of Hereford & Worcester Social Services Department. 

The report should have found its way to the Secretary of State for Health, Virginia Bottomley. 

The document reproduced here: ‘A Personal Viewpoint’, gives recommendations for what should have happened to expose the national paedophile network that Righton was part of. 

Instead, the investigation was shut down, Righton died a free man, and most of his fellow abusers were never exposed and brought to justice.

No one seems quite sure what the new inquiry on child abuse is for, but one thing it could usefully investigate is who saw this report on Righton and why they did not act on it.

The BBC, Jimmy Savile and Cliff Richard

In view of the BBC's enthusiasm for live broadcasting the police search of Cliff Richard's flat, it is worth reminding ourselves of how they reacted when allegations were made against someone closer to home.

Here is the statement it originally thought was an adequate response to the case of Jimmy Savile:

The BBC has conducted extensive searches of its files to establish whether there is any record of misconduct or allegations of misconduct by Sir Jimmy Savile during his time at the BBC. No such evidence has been found. 

Whilst the BBC condemns any behaviour of the type alleged in the strongest terms, in the absence of evidence of any kind found at the BBC that corroborates the allegations that have been made, it is simply not possible for the corporation to take any further action.

Jimmy Savile at Woodhouse Eaves

One of the many institutions that have been linked with Jimmy Savile is the former Roecliffe Manor Children’s Convalescent Home at Woodhouse Eaves in Leicestershire.

An investigation into these allegations was mounted by the University Hospitals of Leicester NHS Trust:

We employed the services of an independent external investigator, Sue Walters, to look into claims dating back to the late 1950’s/early 1960’s. During that investigation, Ms Walters identified that it was not us, but local charity ARC Leicester who are the legacy organisation, so we collaborated with them throughout the remainder of the investigation. We have thoroughly investigated all of the evidence we were given, and the final report was recently submitted to the Department of Health. 

The investigation has concluded that sexual abuse of children residing at Roecliffe Manor is likely to have taken place, although the extent of such abuse is unknown. Despite this finding, it has not been possible to corroborate evidence to conclude that Jimmy Savile was responsible for carrying out any sexual abuse on children at Roecliffe Manor, or that he ever visited Roecliffe Manor. We have passed all of our relevant investigation materials over to Leicestershire Police.

You can download Sue Waters' full report from that page.

Today there have even been suggestions that Savile was involved with the death of a child at Roecliffe Manor - the fullest account seems to be that in the Daily Mail.

After visiting Woodhouse Eaves last month I quoted a Charnwood Borough Council document that says Woodhouse Eaves once contained "a remarkable number of recovery and convalescent homes".

Roecliffe Manor was one of them and until recently was, like the Zachary Merton Convalescence Home, derelict. You can find pictures of it in a state of decay on urbexforums.com.

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George Potter explains, on Liberal Democrat Voice, why he has signed the LibDems4Change petition - and sets off a long comments thread.

Evidence into Practice is wary of schools' new enthusiasm for modifying children's character.

"Today we must act to prevent an ugly America. For once the battle is lost, once our natural splendor is destroyed, it can never be recaptured. And once man can no longer walk with beauty or wonder at nature his spirit will wither and his sustenance be wasted." John de Graaf passes on the wisdom of Lyndon Johnson for Grist.

For Real Whitby, Tim Hicks explains how Jimmy Savile was able to manipulate the Surrey Police investigation and on how disappearing intelligence reports helped him to evade detection.

Press Gazette shares the views of the BBC given anonymously by some of its employees: "Management is mainly by email. Some managers have very little understanding what their staff do day day and the contribution they make to the output. The audience is supposed to be at the heart everything we do, I see very little evidence of that."

"'But Baroness,' so many of my friends have said, 'you must be devastated. You yourself are fabulously wealthy, so you cannot have wanted the Captain for his money—you must have truly loved him.' It’s true. But so, I am sure, does his new fiancée, his children’s nanny. Her wardrobe is made of curtains. She’s definitely not a gold digger or anything." Melinda Taub tells Baroness Schraeder's side of The Sound of Music on Timothy McSweeney's Internet Tendency.

John Hemming on preventing child abuse scandals

An interview from last night's Channel 4 News.

Margaret Thatcher and Jimmy Savile

An interesting story from this morning's Independent:

Senior Whitehall mandarins repeatedly warned former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher against knighting Jimmy Savile because of long-standing concerns over his private life. 

Previously unseen Cabinet Office papers reveal that suspicions about the DJ’s “strange and complex” personality were known at the highest level for decades. 

Lady Thatcher – who invited the presenter to Chequers – made four attempts to appoint Savile to the knighthood before eventually succeeding in the final year of office in 1990.

This supports the impression that Mrs Thatcher was never very good at spotting a wrong 'un.

Like many people, I had heard rumours about Jimmy Savile in the last years of his life. But the idea that 'everyone knew' about him back in the 1970s is, as Simon Titley pointed out on Liberator's blog, contradicted by the fact that the government and British Rail were happy to use him in major advertising campaigns.

Craig Murray on Haute de la Garenne

Craig Murray wrote on his blog last year:

I receive, constantly, emails from people wishing me to take up various cases on my blog and furnishing information. 95% of the time I do not publish because I am not able to investigate fully (there is just one of me) and I do not know the source: the exclusives on this blog come mostly from my access to well-placed sources I have known for years through my past diplomatic career, and trust. 

A notable proportion of the cases brought to me by those I do not know involve alleged paedophile rings. I was sent information about Haut de la Garenne for years, which named a string of senior people alleged to take advantage of organised paedophilia in the care home. Among the judges, politicians and aristocracy, there was indeed the name of Jimmy Savile. 

I have to admit it was not just that I could not prove any of it, I was actively sceptical about what seemed a random list of names of the famous. We now know for certain that Savile visited the place several times. The whole Haut De La Garenne investigation always seemed to obscure more than it revealed; I do hope it is now re-opened, and taken away from the local Jersey police.

It is also worth watching the video included in this post...

Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary behaves better than the BBC over Savile

Sir Peter Fahy's report for Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary on how much police knew about Savile before he was exposed as a sex offender in 2012 was published at midnight.

But embargoes copies were sent out to journalists before that, allowing them to write stories for this morning's papers. Some even tweeted the findings in the small hours of this morning.

That, you might think, is pretty remarkable. It is what you do with any report likely to be of wide interest.

But it is certainly not what the BBC did when it published the Pollard Review into its own decision to drop a Newsnight investigation of Savile's crimes.

As Niall Paterson complained on the Sky News site at the time:

The Savile scandal has been a low point, perhaps its lowest ever, but it is not, despite what some BBC critics will say, representative of the whole. 

Which is why the Beeb's handling of the release of the Pollard Review evidence has been so utterly, utterly infuriating. 

First, they chose to dump it on their website this morning, rather than giving it to everyone under what's known as an embargo. 

An embargo means that journalists get sight of a document but promise not to use the information, either in print or on TV, before a certain date or time. 

It allows reporters to spend time digesting and analysing the data, before putting pen to paper - or head in front of the camera. 

Frankly, the BBC would be the first to complain if a public inquiry released its findings without using an embargo, or at the very least a "lock-in" - where journalists are "locked" in a room with the report for a few hours. 

Second, rather than releasing the evidence in plain text or searchable PDF as is usual, they scanned thousands of A4 sheets of paper and uploaded it to their website. 

This perhaps sounds like a petty complaint, but it makes a reporter's life so much more difficult to search for key phrases, to cross reference quotes or details. 

You essentially have to read the entire document - which, when it's more than 3,000 pages, is easier said than done. 

The more cynical person would say this a tactic most commonly used when an organisation wants to make a journalist's life as difficult as possible, or where they hope a few damaging facts get lost in an overwhelming wave of information. 

Third, they released the information on a Friday. 

If you were to ask any member of the BBC's political unit on which weekday a government department would most likely release a critical report in an attempt to bury the bad news, I'm sure you can guess what they'd say. 

MPs have usually left London, as have many other commentators. Newsrooms tend to be moving on to their weekend cover, more than likely utilising fewer staff. And news output on a Saturday, particularly on terrestrial TV, is much less substantial than during the week. 

And fourth, not a single member of BBC staff, including Tim Davie the acting director-general, has been made available for interview.

You can still read all the documents from the Pollard Review on the BBC site. But it is hard not to recall the corporation's original reaction when the Savile story broke:

Whilst the BBC condemns any behaviour of the type alleged in the strongest terms, in the absence of evidence of any kind found at the BBC that corroborates the allegations that have been made, it is simply not possible for the corporation to take any further action.

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The Liberal Democrats have not responded adequately to the allegations against Chris Rennard, argues Stephen Tall on Liberal Democrat Voice.

While Niall Paterson on Sky News is not impressed by the obstructive way the BBC has set about releasing the findings of the Pollard Review: "The fact is, media organisations tend to be pretty media-savvy. When you see the BBC behaving like this, it's difficult to argue anything other than that they knew exactly what they were doing."

Joint Public Issues Team says the Liberal Democrats should show their true colours on the Energy Bill

Gavin Kelly, on the New Statesman site, asks if we have seen the end of pledge-card politics. Let's hope we have.

English PEN marks the first anniversary of Pussy Riot's demonstration in the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow.

"The Crane Corridor is a 5km-long linear corridor of open space around the River Crane, extending from the east of Heathrow Airport, though Hounslow Heath to Twickenham within the Greater London area. As a Site of Metropolitan Importance, a unique assemblage of dry and wet habitats (i.e. woodland, scrubland, reedbed, meadow and ponds) borders it on both sides, however it is predominantly a wooded corridor." Creative about the Environment on an important wildlife oasis in London.

BBC Inside Out South West on Jersey child abuse

The Jersey blogger Voice for Children has posted a video of this week's BBC South West documentary about the investigation into child abuse on Jersey. He describes it as a fair account of the affair, given the limited time the makers had available.

He also has a comment on the programme from Lenny Harper, Jersey's former Deputy Chief Officer of Police, who is interviewed in it. Another interviewee, the less than impressive Home Affairs Minister, Senator Ian Le Marquand, did not take up the opportunity to comment.

The sound quality of this recording suggests it was made in someone's front room. But you can watch the original programme on the BBC iPlayer for a few more days - even if the person who wrote the blurb for it was more interested in guillemots.