Harvey Proctor: Nick 'Nick'

Those of us who have been criticising the ever more lurid accusations of child abuse against a cavalcade of politicians (mostly Tory and usually dead) have become used to being described as “defenders of paedophiles” on the wilder fringes of the internet, where the idea of sex with children exerts a peculiar fascination.

So I wonder what this thriving branch of the conspiracy-theory business will make of the article in today’s edition of The Sunday Times by Mark Williams-Thomas [Savile was a fair cop, this is a witcvh hunt], which denounces the way some people have “determined to be at the forefront of trying to set out that a significant number of well-organised paedophile rings existed involving politicians past and present” and lamenting that “these individuals are not evidence-focused, preferring to pass off rumour as fact”.

For Williams-Thomas is the man whose 2012 ITV film The Other Side of Jimmy Savile was the spur to belated criminal investigations of the sexual activities of the late BBC presenter; and in his earlier career as a police officer he was involved in a number of successful cases against men who had abused children for sexual gratification...

A former rent boy, known to us only as “Nick”, [has] claimed Proctor was one of a number of Tory bigwigs, army generals, spy chiefs (the entire so-called Establishment, in effect) who had “raped and tortured” him and other children as far back as 1975. 

Proctor took the extraordinary step of reading out the police disclosure document. It contains the claim that, in the presence of “Nick”, he had murdered one child by strangulation, having stabbed him with a penknife “over a period of 40 minutes”. It also alleges Proctor was prevented from taking his penknife to “Nick’s” genitals only by the intervention of “the other male present”. This, according to “Nick”, was Ted Heath...

The law as it stands grants anonymity to those who make charges of sexual abuse, and there are good reasons for this. But here’s the thing: who is being abused now? Due process is the victim. And that puts all of us at risk. 

Dominic Lawson, The Sunday Times.

There was also a good piece on this orgy of cruelty and stupidity in the Telegraph this week, Harvey Proctor's accusers are making sure he will never get a fair trial. 

And in the Independent, Harvey Proctor and a worrying case of trial by lynch mob.

And LBC interview with Iain Dale.