Sadly we already have got an understanding of how rotten much of our system is. The Jeremy Thorpe case gives a greater understanding of how the system worked then with coverups and all the rest
"But if political land mines lay all over Whitehall for my investigative TV team to avoid, there were even more lying hidden in the corridors of the BBC — the beyond reproach ‘queen of broadcasting’ and ‘fountain of truth’. So what if the Daily Express or Daily Mirror had reported the Thorpe scandal, who would care? Such newspapers were considered to be ‘gutter press’ and with no influence.
But if the BBC, with its power and influence, ran a one-hour documentary ... to the Establishment, that would have been unacceptable.
I had been on the story for less than two weeks when I got a phone call from Jo Grimond, one of Thorpe’s predecessors as Liberal leader. ‘What you are doing is outrageous!’ he barked down the line. ‘Unless you stop at once, I’ll have you dismissed within hours by the [BBC’s] Director General, who I happen to know extremely well.’
We then received a torrent of threatening calls from another Liberal MP called Cyril Smith — who, ironically, since his death has been exposed as a predatory paedophile and a serial abuser of young boys, whose activities were covered up years later by the Establishment.
Nevertheless, we remained ‘protected’ from their wrath by an invisible shield within the BBC. I now think I know why.
When Thorpe’s ex-lover Norman Scott (pictured) made a formal criminal complaint about the Liberal MP’s relationship with him, the leading officer didn’t bother to open an investigation
I can’t prove it, but after a lifetime with the BBC — an organisation for which I have undying affection and whose initials remain stamped through my backbone like Blackpool rock — and after 40 years of making numerous films about intelligence and writing a book about the CIA, I do now, sadly, believe I and my team were being carefully manipulated by the state broadcaster."
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Slowly, we discovered the extent of the Whitehall conspiracy to cover up Thorpe’s behaviour. We learnt that the FBI had warned their Special Branch counterparts in Britain about Thorpe’s predilection for rent boys in Times Square during visits to New York.
As a result, Devon police were asked to make discreet inquiries — and the then Chief Constable, Sir Ranulph Bacon, made damn sure the results remained secret.
As the police/Special Branch file on Thorpe grew, it ‘disappeared’ from the registry in Scotland Yard and was placed where no one could see it — in the safe of the Assistant Commissioner (Crime).
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I am the opposite of a conspiracy theorist, but at this point I do get conspiratorial.
Sir Ian Trethowan was in charge of the BBC at the time and have a very close relationship with the Security Services
Particularly, there was the profoundly questionable choice of judge to hear the case at the Old Bailey. Not all judges are allocated trials on a simple roster basis. Sometimes, the Lord Chancellor (as the post was back then), who was head of the judicial system and a very powerful political appointment, had an oh-so discreet hand in these matters.
Sometimes, the ‘right’ judge was hand-picked for a sensitive trial … the kind of judge who shared without question the Establishment consensus. The result? The judge in question Sir Joseph Cantley’s summing up in the Thorpe case was a judicial farce. He virtually ordered the jury to find Thorpe not guilty.
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Compared with the Seventies, the BBC has matured and Britain today is a freer, more open, less class-ridden and secret society. Yet there are still justified concerns that when it can get away with it, the Establishment will cover up for its own.
Take the slow boiling scandal involving paedophilia rings and Westminster notables, and, this week, the row over the cover up of the CIA’s torture interrogation techniques — some of which were learned from Britain’s brutal behaviour in Northern Ireland — which were well known to Westminster governments of both stripes at the time."
www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2872344/From-Thorpe-paedophile-MPs-torture-ruling-elite-try-cover-sins-bids-constrain-media-insidious.html
There is more in the full article.