text:
Tag: FGM
I am not going to concern myself so much with media reports regarding the excesses of the 'services' on this blog any longer because the excesses are such that, as the NHS and other 'services' disintegrate to such an extent that it can no longer be concealed, paedophiles' friends are popping up in the media from all directions screaming loudly that all that is needed is for them to be given many more millions of pounds and then everything will be OK.
The sociologist Loic Wacquant argued some years ago that because neoliberal capitalism had left politicians powerless, all that they could offer was 'solutions' in terms of crime and punishment and that was why so many were banging on about the necessity to build more prisons and get tough on crime and the causes of crime. Loic Wacquant lives in the US so he might not waste his time following what UK politicians are doing, but their latest offering is legislation to imprison anyone – for up to two years – who takes 'up-skirt photos'. I'm unimpressed with this gesture because there is already legislation in place to cover this behaviour. If I can be prosecuted for staring at a social worker in Safeways, one who's colleagues are running a paedophile gang at that and then also prosecuted for telling the secretary of another facilitator of the same paedophile gang that he is a fat idiot, I can only presume that the up-skirt peeping toms have not been prosecuted for reasons other than a lack of legislation. Furthermore, Dafydd illegally imprisoned people in a dungeon and like the up-skirt photographers he was never prosecuted. But as with demanding that Somalis are prosecuted for FGM – even in the absence of evidence – demanding tough sentences for up-skirt photographers is rather easier than tackling organised crime in the welfare services.
One thought occurs to me MPs – to take an up-skirt shot, the photographer would have to be in the vicinity of the woman's feet/ankles. A solution would be for the targeted woman to kick them in the chops, very very hard. Easier, quicker, cheaper and one would not have to take one's chances with an endemically corrupt criminal justice system. Something tells me that Dafydd could have spent 24 hours a day taking up-skirt shots and there would have been no action taken against him. After all, Dafydd's mate at Bart's, Prof Linford Rees, photographed female patients in the bath and showed the photos to students in his lectures (see post 'A Galaxy Of Talent').
Instead I am using this post to name a few more of those who's Big Ideas contributed towards a gang of paedophiles remaining untouchable for many years.
My post 'I Know Nuzzing…' detailed those managing Gwynedd Social Services whilst the paedophile gang operated in the Council's children's homes. For much of that time the Chief Executive of Gwynedd County Council was Ioan Bowen Rees, who has featured in a number of previous blog posts. I have mentioned that despite the havoc in Gwynedd County Council during his years of leadership, Bowen Rees was an intelligent erudite man, an Oxford graduate who was considered one of Europe's leading experts on local democracy.
This might explain why, when Bowen Rees was Chief Exec of Gwynedd County Council, Dr Dafydd Alun Jones was described in the media as 'Europe's leading forensic psychiatrist' and the social workers who ran the paedophile gang were constantly telling people that the 'services' were the best in Europe. Us service users used to shriek with laughter when we read such descriptions of the people who were trying to shag us, who were threatening us, assaulting us, lying about us in court and leaving some of our friends so desperate that they killed themselves. The extraordinary thing is that Bowen Rees really was considered an expert in local gov't at a European level. So we can only wonder why a paedophile gang expanded its operations in Gwynedd County Council when Bowen Rees was Chief Exec and why a paedophile gang expanded its operations in Dyfed when Ioan Bowen Rees was County Secretary of Dyfed County Council prior to relocating to Gwynedd.
Dafydd and the paedophiles were linked with a pan-European paedophile gang. Gwynedd social workers tripped over themselves to become involved with projects that sociologists in Bangor University were running with sociologists and social workers in Europe. The Gwynedd social workers knew bugger all about the academic work involved, but they were there at every workshop, at every buffet and stressed to the visiting European academics that the services in Gwynedd were, of course, leading the way.
Two Bangor lecturers who were particularly keen to climb aboard the European projects bandwagon were John Borland and Aled Griffiths. Borland had retired by the time that I began work as a sociologist at Bangor, but I was interested to discover that Borland had set up a company to supply 'service users' who would provide the legally required 'feedback' on the 'services' in north Wales. I had never met one 'service user' who had heard of John Borland, yet alone worked for his business. Borland's wife was Sandra Betts, an expert on Wimmin in Wales who was rarely seen in the University and who's own work was substantially done by unpaid female PhD students. Aled Griffiths aka the Buffet Slayer is married to Joanna Griffiths, who until her retirement was Director of Conwy Social Services. Joanna was Director when Conwy failed to respond to complaints that residents in Prestwood Homes were being appallingly abused (see post 'A Convenient Arrangement With The Private Sector'). Aled's sister is Gwenan Carrington, who was Director of Gwynedd Social Services after Dafydd's mistress Lucille Hughes 'retired' from that role when the Waterhouse Report was published. Aled Griffiths's brother Huw was a highly incompetent solicitor who was one of those who sat in Bangor Magistrates Court watching Dafydd and the paedophiles fit up their victims. In fact Huw watched Dafydd and the paedophiles fit me up, that's how I knew him, years before I encountered the joys of the Buffet Slayer.
A very cosy arrangement for everyone involved. This bunch were colleagues of Professor Mark Williams and some of them appear on his 'Mindfulness' publications (see post 'The Biggest Expert Of The Lot'). Mark Williams has now taken his pyramid selling Mindfulness scam to China and Hong Kong.
Ioan Bowen Rees, being very keen on Europe and their systems of local democracy, some of which Ioan maintained were far superior to that found in the UK, spent a lot of time in Europe. I have mentioned previously that Max Beloff, the father of Cherie Booth's friend and colleague Michael Beloff, rated one of Bowen Rees's books so highly that he maintained that it was 'essential reading for public servants'. Bowen Rees doubled up as an adviser to Plaid MPs Gwynfor Evans and Dafydd Wigley, both of whom knew that organised child sexual abuse bloomed wherever Ioan was to be found but who said nothing (see posts 'It Wasn't On Our Radar' and 'The Banality Of Evil').
There is however someone else who was a mate of and intellectual traveller with Ioan Bowen Rees whom I have not yet mentioned – Professor Leopold Kohr. Kohr grew up in Oberndorf near Salzburg and it remained his ideal of community. He held a doctorate in law from the University of Innsbruck, Austria and one in political science from the University of Vienna. Kohr also studied at the LSE.
Kohr became a freelance correspondent during the Spanish Civil War where he was impressed by the self-contained governments of Catalonia and Aragon, as well as by the small Spanish anarchist city-states of Alcoy and Caspe. He became a close friend of George Orwell and shared offices with Ernest Hemingway and Andre Malraux.
Kohr fled Austria in 1938 after it was annexed by Nazi Germany and emigrated to the US, later becoming an American citizen.
Kohr taught economics and political philosophy at Ruthers University in New Jersey, 1943-55. From 1955-73, he was Professor of Economics and Public Administration in the University of Puerto Rico in San Juan, except for a period in 1965-66 when he was Professor of Economics at the University of the Americas in Mexico City; during these years Kohr developed his concepts of village renewal and 'lent his advice to local city planning initiatives.' He also advised the independence movement of the of Anguilla.
After many rejections by American and British publishers, Kohr's first book, 'The Breakdown of Nations', was published in 1957 in Britain after a chance meeting with anarchist Sir Herbert Read.
Kohr moved from Puerto Rico to Wales, where he taught political philosophy at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth from 1968-77. So Kohr was there when Carlo spent a brief period at Aber learning Welsh. Kohr worked in the Department of Extra-mural Studies at Aber and was senior tutor, 1973-77.
The project of Welsh independence, founded on the ideal of 'cymdeithas' (community) was dear to Kohr and he became a mentor to Plaid and a close friend of its then leader, Gwynfor Evans.
Yma O Hyd! Sing-a-long-a Dafydd Iwan and a gang of molesters with intellectual aspirations. Which provided a very useful carapace.
After retiring from teaching, Kohr divided his time between Gloucester and Hellbrunn, near Salzburg. He was planning to return to his hometown of Oberndorf to live when he died in 1994.
Kohr described himself as a 'philosophical anarchist'. He protested the 'cult of bigness' and economic growth and promoted the concept of human scale and small community life. Kohr's vision called for a dissolution of centralized political and economic structures in favour of local control, which was pretty much Ioan Bowen Rees's 'vision' for Wales. Ioan's cup brimmed over when the National Assembly for Wales was established – he was an adviser to the Welsh Office civil servants and to Ron 'it was a moment of madness/I was looking for badgers' Davies (see post 'Cottaging At Castle Gate') regarding devolution.
It is not a coincidence that the Welsh Assembly is stuffed full of weak, third-rate AMs who in their previous lives concealed a paedophile gang.
This was the Pretty Straight Kind Of Guy who did his best to ensure that Ron Davies would be Wales's First Minister, until that male prostitute Boogie got in the way:
According to Clarissa Dickson Wright, when Blair was at Oxford he was widely suspected of being gay and was known as Miranda.
Miranda:
I've only ever met one person called Miranda and that was a young patient at Springfield Hospital in 1991. She was relentlessly pursued by a predatory male patient and was actually quite frightened of him. The staff watched this man shout 'Miranda, I'm coming after you' and she fled on a regular basis, yet they did nothing.
Kohr was an important inspiration to the Green, bioregional, Forth World, decentralist and anarchist movements. He contributed often to John Papworth's `Journal for the Fourth World', 'Resurgence'. One of Kohr's students was economist E.F. Schumacher, whose book 'Small Is Beautiful' took its title from one of Kohr's core principles.
In 1983, a student with a sense of humour at Aston University was faced with a finals paper in which one of the questions was 'Small is beautiful. Discuss.' This student did indeed discuss Small Is Beautiful. He wrote a whole essay arguing why he preferred to have sex with women with small boobs. When faced with his essay, the exam board weren't sure what to do, so a meeting was held and it was agreed that for that essay they would simply give him a pass mark. The rest of his work was of a high standard and he emerged with a 2:1.
The VC of Aston University at the time was Sir Freddie Crawford, aka 'Mrs Thatcher's favourite Vice-Chancellor'. At least the student who liked small boobs sat his own exams. There was a problem at Aston at the time – it was discovered that several members of Middle Eastern Royal families had registered for engineering degrees and had sent their servants along to attend the lectures and sit the exams for them. The degrees were issued in the names of their employers, who found themselves in possession of engineering degrees whilst knowing nuzzing. I was told that Ruhi Behi, a former psych nurse from the North Wales Hospital Denbigh, used the services of someone else to acquire his degree in psychology from UCNW in the 1980s. Behi subsequently became Head of the School of Healthcare Sciences at Bangor University. Behi bagged his degree when paedophiles' friend Eric Sunderland was Principal/VC and was appointed Head of Healthcare Sciences when paedophiles' friend Roy Evans was VC.
Leopold Kohr's ideas inspired Kirkpatrick's books 'Human Scale' (1980) and 'Dwellers in the Land: The Bioregional Vision' (1985). Sale arranged the first American publication of 'The Breakdown of Nations' in 1978 and wrote the foreword.
Ioan Bowen Rees also co-authored with Hugh MacDiarmid and Owen Dudley Edwards.
Hugh MacDiarmid was the pen name of Christopher Murray Grieve, a Scottish poet, journalist, essayist and political figure. He is best known for his works written in 'synthetic Scots', a 'literary version of the Scots language that MacDiarmid himself developed'. So he invented his own language. He probably awarded himself a prize for it as well a la the Learned Society of Wales. However, Grieve's earliest work was written in English and from the early 1930s onwards much of the poetry published under MacDiarmid's name was also written in an English.
MacDiarmid was born in the Scottish border town of Langholme, Dumfriesshire. He was educated at Langholm Academy before becoming a teacher for a brief time at Broughton Higher Grade School in Edinburgh. MacDiarmid lived in London, Liverpool and Thakeham in West Sussex. He lived on Whalesay in Shetland, 1933-42 and in Glasgow, 1942-49. MacDiarmid worked as a journalist for a number of local Scottish papers. He spent time living in Ebbw Vale and contributed to the socialist newspaper 'The Merthyr Pioneer', run by Labour Party founder Keir Hardie, before joining the RAMC on the outbreak of WWI. MacDiarmid served in Salonica, Greece and France before developing cerebral malaria and subsequently returning to Scotland in 1918.
Somebody seems to have been having fun with MacDiarmid's wiki entry regarding the first few decades of his life, because the dates provided in that entry do not always correlate with MacDiarmid's activities at the time.
After the war MacDiarmid continued to work as a journalist, living in Montrose, Scotland – which boasts a place called Charleton Road no less – where he became Editor and reporter of the 'Montrose Review', as well as a justice of the peace and a member of the county council. In 1923 his first book, 'Annals of the Five Senses', was published at his own expense, followed by 'Sangschaw' in 1925 and 'Penny Wheep' and 'A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle' in 1926.
On the Shetland island of Whalsay in 1933 with his son Michael and second wife, Valda Trevlyn, MacDiarmid wrote essays and poetry despite being cut off from mainland cultural developments for much of the 1930s. He died at his cottage near Biggar in 1978 at the age of 86.
Norman Lamont – who was a member of the Cambridge Mafia which produced so many of the big beasts of Thatcher's Gov't – held Ministerial positions under Thatch and was Chancellor of the Exchequer under John Major, was born in Shetland; his father was the Island's Top Doctor. Lamont was Chancellor on Black Wednesday.
This man was Norman's special adviser at the time:
MacDiarmid was a supporter of both communism and Scottish nationalism. He was a founding member of the National Party of Scotland, (forerunner of the SNP) and stood as a candidate for the SNP in 1945 and 1950 and for the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1964. So MacDiarmid will have known those other members of the Communist Party of Great Britain who used to spend the summer at Croesor in Merionydd in the 1960s – who knew about Dafydd and the paedophile gang (see post 'The Village').
MacDiarmid was a 'controversial figure' during his lifetime. He was expelled from both the SNP and the Communist Party but then the CP let him back in again many years later. MacDiarmid was a member of a secret Scottish Nationalist society Clann Albain.
Between 1931-43, MacDiarmid was kept under surveillance by the security services and when Orwell compiled a list of suspected communist sympathisers, he included MacDiarmid's name on it. Not that it will have done MacDiarmid any harm. After all, MI5 provided Dafydd et al with full protection, it was only the service users who bothered to find out what Dafydd was up to by ringing him up, using the public phone box in the village where Ioan Bowen Rees lived. Ioan didn't suffer as a result, he was never in the queue for that phone box, Ioan the Common Man will have had several land lines and at least one mobile down in his Plas some distance away from the village centre.
In 2010 letters written in the early 1940s by MacDiarmid were discovered, showing that he believed that a Nazi invasion of Britain would benefit Scotland. Marc Horne in the 'Daily Telegraph' commented: 'MacDiarmid flirted with fascism in his early thirties, when he believed it was a doctrine of the left. In two articles written in 1923, 'Plea for a Scottish Fascism' and 'Programme for a Scottish Fascism', he appeared to support Mussolini's regime. By the 1930s however, following Mussolini's lurch to the right, his position had changed and he castigated Neville Chamberlain over his appeasement of Hitler's expansionism.' Deirdre Grieve, MacDiarmid's daughter-in-law and literary executor, noted: 'I think he entertained almost every ideal it was possible to entertain at one point or another.'
MacDiarmid's son Michael Trevlyn became Vice-Chairman of the SNP.
MacDiarmid was considered controversial in his lifetime but is now considered one of the principal forces behind the Scottish Renaissance and has had a lasting impact on Scottish culture and politics. He was accused of plagiarism by supporters of the Welsh poet Glyn Jones but responded with 'the greater the plagiarism, the greater the work of art'. Perhaps Charles Saatchi would like to pay someone a great deal of money for MacDiarmid's plagiarised poetry or indeed the poetry that he wrote in the language which he made up himself and display it in the Saatchi gallery in Chelsea.
In 'Who's Who' MacDiarmid listed Anglophobia as one of his interests. It's a good job that the Englisher Thatcher's mate the Englisher Sir Peter Morrison had a sexual interest in young boys though, because MacDiarmid's mate Ioan Bowen Rees and Dafydd would have been out of business without that and perhaps in prison as well.
Ioan's co-author Owen Dudley Edwards is an Irish historian and former Reader in Commonwealth and American History at the University of Edinburgh. He is the son of Professor Robert Dudley Edwards and brother to the Irish writer, Ruth Dudley Edwards. He is the General Editor of the Oxford Sherlock Holmes series and is a recognised expert on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. There was plenty about his co-author Ioan that he could investigate. Dudley Edwards was also an authority on P.G. Wodehouse.
Wodehouse's first published novel:
It was about the drug squad in North Wales planting illegal substances on the paedophiles' victims. Although Dafydd pronounces it 'mari-jew-ana'.
The following year – 1903 – Wodehouse published this:
Which is worrying when one remembers what was happening to kids in the 'residential schools' and children's homes scattered across Gwynedd when Ioan Bowen Rees was presiding over his own little bit of local democracy.
Owen Dudley Edwards attended Belvedere College, Dublin, University College, Dublin and John Hopkins University in Baltimore.
In 1966 Dudley Edwards married Barbara Balbirnie Lee. They have three children. Dudley Edwards is a practising Catholic and actively involved in the church.
I am reading Jeremy Paxman's book 'Friends In High Places: Who Runs Britain?' at the moment. It was published in 1990 and I wished that I'd read it when it was first published, because it names everyone who was propping up the corrupt regime of which the London medical establishment was an integral part. I've named many of them on this blog, but it would have been helpful to know that they were the powers behind the criminality of which I was on the receiving end at the time. Paxo's done a very good job – I still have more chapters to read, but so far I've come across a few people who had escaped me.
I have mentioned Alan Walters previously, Thatch's economic adviser who's presence concerned a great many people. It is believed that it was Nigel Lawson who managed to elbow Walters out of the way. Lawson certainly did everyone a favour there. I read up about Walters before I discovered the key role that Leicester University had played in concealing organised sexual abuse in Leicestershire, so it took Paxo's book to clobber me with the info that Walters was a Leicester University graduate. Leicester University has played a role in the education or careers of a number of people like Walters who were hailed as gurus by PMs concealing abuse and trafficking. Many of these people very obviously did not have much to offer and their influence on PMs was inexplicable. For example, the man who invented the Third Way for Blair and who explained it all in a short pamphlet which one could read over breakfast:
Paxo writes about the Institute of Economic Affairs (see post 'The International Language Of Screaming'). He mentions David Green, who was Head of the IEA's Health Policy Group. In 1988, Green argued that inequality of health services is desirable. Green would have been delighted with Bethesda in the 1980s and 90s, it was littered with destitute 'service users' who were being targeted by Dafydd to sell sex to dreadful old politicians and others and the empty shells of those who had already been used in this way and had returned to north Wales, completely drained, traumatised, fragile and refused all 'services'. Furthermore their tales of sex with the rich and famous were so extraordinary that no-one believed them.
BBC News Wales is reporting that the Rolling Stones are coming to Wales. Will they be looking up a few old acquaintances in Bethesda?
If they do, I don't suppose that we'll hear anything about it.
David Green writes for 'The Sunday Times', 'The Times', the 'Daily Mail', the 'Sunday Telegraph' and the 'Daily Telegraph'. Green has taken part in broadcast programmes such as 'Newsnight', the 'Moral Maze' and the 'Today' programme. He has made occasional contributions to the Guardian's 'Comment is Free' site and he has contributed pieces to 'Daily Telegraph' news blogs.
NB: Perhaps Claire Fox, a regular on the 'Moral Maze', could explain why despite her self-styled neocon say-the-unthinkable re the welfare state stance, she has never breathed a word about Dafydd and the paedophile gang. Because Claire certainly knows about them. Claire grew up in Flint, north Wales when Dafydd and the paedophiles were busy. She attended St Richard Gwyn Catholic High School in Flint, went to Warwick University and worked as a mental health social worker, 1981-87. Claire completed a PGCE at Thames Poly in 1992.
Why so silent Claire? I read 'Living Marxism' for years when you and your mates from the Revolutionary Communist Party were publishing it – I even had copies of it in my house when the paedophile gang used to send the police around to arrest me after they had perjured themselves. Then Brown and I followed 'Spiked Online' when you reinvented yourselves as neocons in 2000. One of your lot asked Brown if we'd like to write for you after you read one of our books. Brown said no thanks because we noticed that there were certain things that none of you dared write about. Such as what had happened to us during the 1980s, 90s and was still happening at the very time that we were asked if we wanted to write for 'Spiked'…
What we had Claire were a bunch of twats from the security services bothering us, whilst you built your reputation as Ms Fearless.
Claire's fellow panellist on the 'Moral Maze' Matthew Taylor – Blair's former policy adviser – knows about Dafydd and the paedophiles as well. Matthew's dad Laurie is mates with Prof Dick Hobbs who was a friend of the criminologist Jane Morgan, widow of Lord K.O. Morgan. Jane and Lord Ken were at the scene of the crimes as it were (see post 'A Bit More Paleontology').
David Green was an undergraduate at the University of Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, 1970-73 and remained there for his PhD. He was a Labour Councillor in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, 1976-81. So Green knew about the paedophile gang in the north east with links to Dafydd and he knew that the Councils in the north east were sending great numbers of children in care to children's homes in north Wales and continued to do so even after complaints of serious abuse were made.
Green worked as a Research Fellow at the Australian National University in Canberra, 1981-83. He worked at the IEA from 1984 and was Director of its Health and Welfare Unit, 1986-2000.
Green funded the think tank Civitas in 2000 and is also its Chief Executive.
Any more bright ideas to keep a bunch of sex traffickers in business then David?
Green's book, 'Community Without Politics' (London, IEA, 1997) was awarded the Sir Anthony Fisher Memorial Prize in 1997. In 2004 Green was voted one of Britain's top 100 British intellectuals by readers of 'Prospect' magazine and in 2009 he was included on the Evening Standard's list of the 1,000 most influential Londoners. Green's 1993 book 'Reinventing Civil Society' has been translated into Chinese and Russian and probably that language that Ioan Bowen Rees's mate MacDiarmid made up as he went along whilst he was plagiarising poetry.
If anyone knows whether Green is one of the literary figures who takes part in the events organised by the paedophiles' friends who run the charidee Wellbeing of Women, do let me know (see post 'Wimmin's Wellbeing – The Fortnum And Mason Connection'). He's probably been on the guest list for an event at Compton Verney as well.
Health inequalities in action for you David:
A leading forensic psychiatrist at an old boys' public school reunion:
A service user with a 'severe and dangerous personality disorder' who complained about the serious crimes of a colleague of the man above:
Paxo's book informed me that Keith Joseph's outfit which Joseph founded in 1974, the Centre for Policy Studies, was funded with money from Nigel Vinson. My post 'Include Me Out' detailed a debate in the House which involved a number of politicians defending the appalling suicide rate among the victims of Dafydd et al in Risley Remand Centre. It was mentioned in the record in Hansard that one of those contributing to the debate would be giving a talk to the Centre for Policy Studies.
So who is the man who bank-rolled the 'intellectuals' behind a paedophile gang? Nigel – now Lord – Vinson is the son of Ronald Vinson, a farmer. Vinson was educated at Pangbourne. After school he served in the Queen's Royal Regiment.
In 1952 Vinson began a small plastics company in Guildford (Plastic Coatings Ltd), which in 1969 was floated on the Stock Exchange, with over 1,000 employees. The business won the Queen's Award for Industry in 1971. Vinson was Deputy Chairman of the CBI's Smaller Firms Council, 1979-84 and President of the Industrial Participation Association, 1979-89. Vinson was Director of the Sugar Board, 1968-75, Director of the British Airports Authority, 1973-80 and a Director of Barclays Bank, 1982-87. He worked for the Centre for Policy Studies, 1974-80. Vinson was Deputy Chairman of Electra Investment Trust 1990-98. From 1976-78 Vinson was an honorary Director of the Queen's Silver Jubilee Appeal. In the light of how close the Royal Family are to Dafydd's mates, I really am very glad that I've never been the sort to buy Royal mugs or plates with pictures on of yet another couple who have just had a fairy tale wedding.
I have recently discovered that before she came to that sticky end in a tunnel, the heart surgeon with whom Diana was having a fling, Hasnet Khan, later worked at Harefield Hospital with Sir Magdi Yacoub, where I am fairly sure that major research fraud was carried out (see post 'I Don't Believe It!'). Before Hasnet Khan worked at Harefield, Diana had been allowed into his previous place of work to watch heart surgery. People started complaining that it was a security risk. It was also completely unethical but no-one mentioned that.
Vinson was a Member of the Northumbrian National Parks and Countryside Committee, 1977-87 and a member of the Foundation for Science and Technology, 1991-96. Since 2003, he has been a Trustee of Civitas. Vinson is life Vice President of the IEA, where he was Chairman of Trustees 1989-95.
Vinson was also a member of the Design Council, 1973-80 and the unsalaried Chairman of the Rural Development Commission 1980-90. He was founder donor of the Martin Mere Wildfowl Reserve in 1972 and gave a village green to Holbourn, Northumberland, in 2006. Presumably in exchange for domain over the villagers in order to force them into human slavery.
In Feb 1985, Vinson was given a peerage.
We'll drink to that!
Vinson was a council member of St George's House, Windsor Castle, 1990-96. He has been married to Yvonne Collin since 1972; they have three daughters.
Lord Vinson of Health Inequalities is a regular attender at Lords debates, and spoke in the 2007 and 2014 sessions in support of nuclear power. Here's an explosion for him.
In 2012, Lord Vinson threatened to defect to UKIP unless the Conservatives took a more 'Better Out' approach to Europe. He obviously didn't understand the potential markets in Europe, unlike Dafydd and the Gwynedd social workers.
In June 2013 Vinson spoke and voted in the Lords against the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill. Keep it all as illegal as possible Nigel, it enables Dafydd to keep the prices high and blackmail the victims.
Paxo's book also names Professor Brian Griffiths, who ran the Downing Street Policy Unit for Thatch. Griffiths was educated at Dynevor School, Swansea and at the LSE. So Griffiths will have been part of the Heseltine-Lord Brian Flowers-Swansea contingent. The Labour Party Swansea Mafia – Rhodri Morgan, Edwina Hart et al – will have known him as well, but his mates were bigger than theirs and the one thing that none of them were going to do was blow the whistle on the fact that his big mates were running a paedophile ring in west and north Wales, because a Windbag in Islwyn was hoping to become PM on the basis of the votes of the staff of the public services who were colluding with it all.
Brian Griffiths was Dean of the City University Business School, but in 1986 he resigned his Chair to become Thatch's Chief Policy Adviser.
Griffiths was given a peerage in 1991. The year that Peter Morrison was knighted and a number of other paedophiles' friends picked up honours for no good reason. The year that the careers of me as well as of my friend who wanted to make a documentary about the mental health services in north Wales were destroyed.
Brian Griffiths was Chairman of the Centre for Policy Studies, 1991-01. He served on the Board of Directors of the Conservative Christian Fellowship, 2000-02. Griffiths was a member of the European Union Sub-Committee F (Social Affairs, Education and Home Affairs), 1999-03 and the Religious Offences Committee from 2002-03. I expect that Griffiths also Chaired which ever Committee decreed that swearing was an offence so serious that Dafydd was compelled to report me to the police when I said 'bugger'; Bluglass agreed that me calling Dafydd a wanker was one of the many signs that I was Dangerous, had a Homicidal Capacity and that I would 'end in a ward for the criminally insane'. Bluglass has a very sweary daughter called Amanda, who as far as I am aware, has never been consigned to a ward for the criminally insane. But then her father is not in prison, despite colluding with a serious offender. I wonder why not?
Griffiths is a Vice-President of the Nature in Art Trust. He serves as Vice-Chairman of Goldman Sachs International. He said that he was 'not ashamed' of the bank's compensation plans and that the issue of banking compensation should not be thought about solely from a short-term perspective. Griffiths defended the bank's bonuses and said that the general public should 'tolerate the inequality as a way to achieve greater prosperity for all'.
I wish I'd known that when Dafydd and the paedophiles had hounded me out of my job and then tried to set fire to my house while I was living in poverty in Ioan Bowen Rees's local democracy, it would have explained everything. I could have also reminded the staff of St George's of it when they all turned green upon finding out that the foul research assistant Mandy Leigh's brother Charles – who worked as a banker – received more than their annual salaries for his Christmas bonus. It's why they all thought that they were so badly paid. Mandy thought that she was badly paid as well, even though St George's had done a fiddle with her PhD funders to ensure that she was paid more than her colleagues. As Mandy breezily explained to me one day, she was 'a rich bitch funded by Wellcome'. I'd like to have known how that happened – Mandy was thrown off of one degree course for reasons which were never explained, so there wasn't exactly an outstanding academic record there. Perhaps she simply explained on her application that she would be having sex in the lab during working hours with Top Doctors and would be hurling racist abuse at overseas staff?
Brian Griffiths also stated that 'we should not … be ashamed of offering compensation in an internationally competitive market which ensures the bank businesses here and employs British people'. Such as Charles Leigh, obviously.
Paxo's book mentioned a very influential figure in academia with connections to Dafydd et al – Dame Kathleen Mary Kenyon. Kenyon was a leading British archeologist of Neolithic culture in the Fertile Crescent. She is best known for her excavations of Jericho in 1952-58 and is considered to have been one of the most influential archaeologists of the 20th century. Kenyon was Principal of St Hugh's College, Oxford, 1962-73.
Kathleen Kenyon was born in London, England, the eldest daughter of Sir Frederic Kenyon, Biblical scholar and later Director of the British Museum. Her grandfather was the lawyer and Fellow of All Souls College, John Robert Kenyon and her great-great-grandfather was the politician and lawyer Lloyd Kenyon, 1st Baron Kenyon.
It was the 4th and 5th Baron Kenyons who were Presidents of UCNW (Bangor University). Lloyd Tyrell-Kenyon, the 5th Baron, was President whilst UCNW was run by Dafydd and the paedophiles and it was the 5th Baron Kenyon's son Thomas Tyrell-Kenyon who was sexually abusing at least one boy in care in Wrexham. Thomas was caught red-handed in 1978 and made a complaint of theft against the boy. The boy was sent to a detention centre and Thomas faced no charges. Thomas died of an HIV related condition in 1993. See previous posts for the details of the many public roles of the 5th Baron Kenyon – he was involved with national museums and art galleries as well as with public life in north Wales – and for details of the occasion on which Thomas was caught in action.
Kathleen grew up in Bloomsbury, London in a house attached to the British Museum, with her mother, Amy Kenyon and sister Nora Kenyon. Known for 'being hard-headed and stubborn', Kathleen 'grew up as a tomboy, fishing, climbing trees and playing a variety of sports'. As did I, but I didn't collude with a sodding paedophile gang, which it seems that Kathleen did.
Kathleen's father 'encouraged wide reading and independent study'. In later years Kenyon would remark that her father's position at the British Museum was particularly helpful with regard to her education. You don't say! Kathleen 'was an excellent student, winning awards at school and particularly excelling in history. She studied first at St Paul's Girls' School where she was Head Girl, before winning an Exhibition to read History at Somerville College, Oxford.While at Oxford, Kathleen became the first female President of the Oxford University Archaeological Society'. Oh put her on the 'Woman's Hour' Power List, she's broken a glass ceiling.
Somerville College, Oxford, was Thatch's college. Although Kathleen was a bit older than Thatch, I'm sure that maximum use was, in subsequent years, made of the alumni network to the benefit of everyone but the victims of Dafydd and the gang.
A career in archaeology was first suggested to Kathleen by Margery Fry, librarian at Somerville. I wonder if Margery had noticed who Kathleen's dad was. After graduation, Kenyon's first field experience was as a photographer for the pioneering excavations at Great Zimbabwe in 1929. Returning to England, Kenyon joined the archaeologists Sir Mortimer Wheeler and his wife Tessa on their excavation of the Romano-British settlement of Verulamium (St Albans). Kenyon worked there each summer between 1930 and 1935 Mortimer Wheeler entrusted her with the direction of the excavation of the Roman Theatre.
Mortimer Wheeler was the Keeper of Archaeology and then Director of the National Museum of Wales and the London Museum, Director-General of the Archeological Survey of India and the founder and Honorary Director of the Institute of Archaeology in London.
When Mortimer Wheeler was appointed as the Keeper of Archaeology at the National Museum of Wales, the job also entailed becoming a lecturer in archaeology at the University College of South Wales and Monmouthshire (later Cardiff University). He moved to Cardiff with his family in 1920. The museum was in disarray; prior to the war, construction had begun on a new purpose-built building to house the collections. This had ceased during the conflict and the edifice was left abandoned during Cardiff's post-war economic slump. Wheeler recognised that Wales was very divided regionally, with many Welsh people having little loyalty to Cardiff; thus, he made a point of touring the country, lecturing to local societies about archaeology. According to the later archaeologist Lydia C. Carr, the Wheelers' work for the cause of the National Museum was part of a wider 'cultural-nationalist movement' linked to growing Welsh nationalism during this period. Plaid Cymru, was founded in 1925 by Saunders Lewis and others. Lewis was a lecturer at Swansea University – he taught Rhodri Morgan's parents. When Dafydd was a young Plaid activist he hung out with Saunders Lewis.
In 1924-25 Wheeler excavated the Roman fort – Y Caer – near Brecon and also Isca Augusta at Caerleon. Intent on attracting press attention to both raise public awareness of archaeology and attract new sources of funding, Wheeler contacted the press and organised a sponsorship of the excavation by the 'Daily Mail'. In doing so, he emphasised the folkloric and legendary associations that the Caerleon site had with King Arthur. In 1925, Oxford University Press published Wheeler's first book for a general audience, 'Prehistoric and Roman Wales'; he later expressed the opinion that it was not a good book.
Whilst Director of the National Museum of Wales – a position he obtained in 1924 substantially via influential friends – Wheeler succeeded in obtaining funding from the Treasury to build up the National Museum and link it with regional museums throughout Wales. A new building was completed and King George V opened it in 1927.
The 5th Baron Kenyon was President of the National Museum of Wales, 1952-57.
Upon the retirement of the Keeper of the London Museum, Wheeler was invited to fill the vacancy, which he did. He had been considering a return to London for some time and eagerly agreed, taking on the post, which was based at Lancaster House in the St James's area in July 1926. In Wales, many felt that Wheeler had simply taken the directorship of the National Museum to advance his own career prospects and that he had abandoned Wales when a better offer came along.
In 1934 Kathleen Kenyon assisted Mortimer and his wife Tess in the foundation of the Institute of Archaeology of University College London. UCL often seems to be at the scene of the crime. The first premises that Mortimer Wheeler secured for the Institute of Archaeology was St John's Lodge in Regent's Park, the Portakabin below:
St John's Lodge had been left empty since its use as a hospital during WWI. The building was owned by the Crown and was controlled by the First Commissioner of Works, William Ormsby-Gore, who was very sympathetic to archaeology and leased the building to the Institute at a low rent. William Ormsby-Gore was the 4th Baron Harlech and the father of David, the 5th Baron Harlech. Lord David Harlech was the British Ambassador to the US when J.F. Kennedy was President. David Ormsby-Gore and his descendants have a penchant for dying in unpleasant ways, often when young. The family show every sign of having been under attack by the paedophile gang and their associates (see post '95 Glorious Years!').
Mortimer Wheeler continued with an incredibly high profile career, leading famous excavations, such as that of Maiden Castle in Dorset. He served in WWII, led extensive digs in Asia, held key roles in UNESCO and in the British Academy and in the 1950s broadcast for BBC TV.
Wheeler married three times. Tessa died in 1936 – their only child, Michael Mortimer Wheeler, became a barrister. Following Tessa's death, in 1939 Wheeler married Mavis de Vere Cole, widow of the prankster Horace de Vere Cole. Cole's diaries revealed that Wheeler physically hit her when she annoyed him. In 1945 Mortimer Wheeler married Margaret 'Kim' Collingridge. They became estranged in 1956, but Collingridge's Catholicism prevented divorce. Wheeler was well known for his promiscuity and for favouring young women for one night stands, many of whom were his students. He was known for having casual sex in public places. Archaeologist Gabriel Moshenska informed a 'Daily Mail' reporter that Wheeler had developed a reputation as 'a bit of a groper and a sex pest and an incredible bully as well'.
The Dafydd of archaeology.
From 1936-39 Kathleen Kenyon carried out important excavations at the Jewry Wall in the city of Leicester. These were published in the 'Illustrated London News' in 1937 with pioneering reconstruction drawings by the artist Alan Sorrell whom Kathleen had just happened 'to notice sketching her dig'.
Alan Sorrell was Senior Assistant Instructor of Drawing at the Royal College of Art, 1931–39 and 1946–48. According to Kathleen's wiki entry, Sorrell was passing the time of day hanging around her dig in Leicester. According to Sorrell's wiki entry 'He began his archaeological reconstruction drawings after a chance meeting in 1936 with Kathleen Kenyon on a dig of a Roman site in Leicester, who asked him to produce illustrations for her article for 'The Illustrated London News'. More commissions then followed at Maiden Castle, in collaboration with Mortimer Wheeler and at Roman Caerwent and Carleon, in collaboration with Cyril Fox and V. E. Nash-Williams of the National Museum of Wales.'
Alan Sorrell was best known for his archaeological sketches, so clearly the arrangement between him and Kenyon in Leicester was fruitful for everyone.
I haven't looked up who owned or edited the 'Illustrated London News', but it would not be that much of a surprise to find out that they were a mate of Kathleen's dad or someone senior in UCL or Leicester University.
In WWII Alan Sorrell worked for the intelligence services. Here is his 1945 work 'FIDO In Operation'.
And here is Fido himself:
Alan Sorrell
Here's Fido's trainer supervising a dig in 1977 – so it was probably one on the turf of the paedophiles' friends at Chester:
During the Second World War, Kathleen Kenyon served as Divisional Commander of the Red Cross in Hammersmith, London and later as Acting Director and Secretary of the Institute of Archaeology of the University of London.
Kathleen Kenyon retired in 1973 to Erbistock near Wrexham. She never married, perhaps having seen quite enough action whilst she worked with Mortimer Wheeler. From 1974, Kenyon was the Honorary Vice President of the Chester Archaeological Society. She died at Wrexham in 1978.
So Kathleen was in the Wrexham/Chester area whilst Dafydd and the paedophile gang were operating there and whilst the 5th Baron Kenyon allowed them free reign in UCNW – whilst his son Thomas was partaking of the services that the paedophile gang provided.
The British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem amalgamated within the Council for British Research in the Levant in 1998, was officially renamed the Kenyon Institute in July 2003 in honour of Kathleen Kenyon. The Kathleen Kenyon Archaeology Collection, a collection of Kenyon's books and papers purchased from her estate in 1984, is housed at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. The finds from her excavations are held in a number of collections, including the British Museum and the UCL Institute of Archaeology, while the bulk of archive is located at the Manchester Museum.
So there's the myth of a few more outstanding careers built upon pure talent busted.
Paxo's book details big wigs who exerted control over 'the establishment' at the time that I was working at St George's Hospital Medical School, 1989-91. The institution was, as described in previous posts, colluding with organised child sexual abuse and trafficking, class A drugs offences, research fraud and much other wrongdoing which was resulting in patient harm.
My post 'BMA Calling, BMA Calling' mentions some very odd happenings when I shared a house with Dr Andrew Aldridge, a junior surgeon at St George's and his wife Di, who worked for a City firm. I don't know how much Andrew knew about the appalling corruption at St George's, but I do remember that his family lived at Alderley Edge in Cheshire and were Tories. Andrew's father's business was I think a carpentry/furniture business. His family were definitely not Top Doctors, they were business people.
Alderley Edge is a very wealthy area and it was where many of the professional people who concealed the activities of Dafydd et al lived. The crooked barrister George Carman QC lived near there and the area was crawling with senior police officers, Top Docs, financiers, lawyers etc. Sir Peter Morrison was just down the road at Chester molesting children.
I cannot imagine that Andrew and his family would ever find the conduct of Dafydd et al acceptable, but I do wonder if they were duped or whether their political allegiances blinded them. Andrew and Di considered me a real old leftie and I remember that once I tried to tell Andrew what I had been told about Jimmy Savile. Andrew just wouldn't have it and told me that Savile was 'a Samaritan'.
An 'NHS volunteer'
No Andrew, he was a very serious sex offender, which is what I had been told by the time that I shared a house with you. Peter Morrison was a very serious sex offender as well – Thatcher knew about it and Professor Geoffrey Chamberlain, with whom your mum and dad drank champagne at graduation, was concealing the crimes of Savile, Morrison and many more.
At the time that I was living with Andrew and Di and was under attack from Dafydd and the paedophiles' friends, the constituency MP for Alderley Edge was the illustrious Neil Hamilton. Hamilton has of course featured previously on this blog and used to socialise with Peter Morrison. However, Hamilton's constituency – Tatton – was created in 1983. Peter Morrison was elected as the MP for Chester in 1974 – and was one of those who supported Thatcher to succeed Ted Heath as leader of the Tory Party – but there had been organised abuse of young people in the region long before 1974. Dafydd and Gwynne had been in business for decades and things really got going in 1968 when John Allen opened the Bryn Alyn Community and was rapidly followed by many other abusive people with money to spare who suddenly decided to open a children's home or school in north Wales.
Before the constituency of Tatton existed, Alderley Edge and neighbouring Wilmslow were in the constituency of Knutsford. Knutsford had been held by the Tories since the pre-Cambrian. Between 1945-70, the MP was Walter Bromley-Davonport – so he was there when Dafydd and John Allen put their Big Business Plan into action. The Bromley-Davonports were friends of Sir Ronnie Waterhouse.
In 1970, John Davies was elected MP for Knutsford – he resigned in Nov 1978, after developing a brain tumour. Davies was the MP when Sir Peter Morrison decided that Chester was the constituency for him – although his family seat was in Wiltshire and his house was in London – and as business boomed for Dafydd et al.
John Davies was the first Director of the CBI, 1965-69. He was Minister of Technology in 1970 in Ted Heath's Gov't; then Secretary of State for Trade and Industry and President of the Board of Trade, 1970-72; Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster with special responsibilities for the co-ordination of British policy towards the European communities, 1972-74; and then Shadow Foreign Secretary under Margaret Thatcher, 1976-78.
Davies was born in Blackheath, London in 1916, the second son of Arnold Davies, a Chartered Accountant and his wife Edith Harding. Davies went to Windlesham House School in Sussex and St Edward's School, Oxford. He followed his father into accountancy and served in the Royal Army Service Corps in WWII. Davies spent most of the war in the Combined Operations headquarters. From 1945 he worked for Combined Operations Experimental Establishment (COXE). In 1943, he married Vera Bates, only child of George William Bates, Managing Director of Barratts Shoes and his wife Elvina Taylor. They had two children; a daughter, Rosamond Ann and a son, Francis William Harding Davies.
Davies joined the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company as an accountant in the marketing division and worked for the company in London, Stockholm and Paris; the company was renamed as British Petroleum in 1954. In 1956, Davies was promoted to be General Manager (Markets) for BP and in 1960 he was Director of BP Trading.
In 1961, Davies was appointed as Vice-Chairman and Managing Director of Shell-Mex and BP Ltd. He also became a Director of Hill Samuel Group. Due to his position he was made a member of the Grand Council of the Federation of British Industry and Chaired a committee on technical legislation.
Davies supported initiatives such as the National Economic Development Council, where Gov't, employers and trades unions met to discuss the economy and set up a joint CBI-TUC joint committee. He was supportive of British entry into the European Community when the Gov't applied in 1967.
Davies surprised some, such as Enoch Powell in May 1967, when he made a speech in California in which he observed that the Labour government's measures to keep pay and prices down were working; Powell considered this not only untrue but an example of collaboration in which 'the very spokesmen of capitalism' were doing the work of the socialists. As CBI chief, Davies had some quango appointments as a member of the British Productivity Council, the British National Export Council and the Council of Industrial Design. He was briefly a member of the Public Schools Commission.
After the devaluation of the pound in Nov 1967, Davies became much more critical of the Gov't. Increasingly he would lambast Labour ministers on television, although he continued to work together with Ministers in private.
In 1969, Davies was recruited by Heath to join his Gov't once he won the next election. Heath was looking to lead a 'businesslike' Gov't and believed that senior business figures serving in senior posts would provide more expert management. Davies began to be more quotably critical, describing the 'solemn and binding' accord between the Gov't and the TUC (after the failure of 'In Place Of Strife') as useful only in the lavatory.
Davies failed to win the selection for the Conservative nomination at the Louth by election of 1969 and for Cities of London and Westminster for the General Election. However, with Conservative Central Office support, Davies was found the seat at Knutsford, which was solid Tory country. He won the seat in the General Election in June 1970.
The Chairman of the Tory Party who would have worked so hard to get John Davies into the constituency of Knutsford was barrister Lord Anthony Barber, who was Chancellor of the Exchequer under Heath. Barber had been the MP for Doncaster, 1951-64 and then was MP for the Cheshire constituency of Altrincham and Sale, 1965-74. He had been PPS to Harold Macmillan, 1957-59 and was Minister of Health in 1963 – not long after Enoch Powell had stated that he would not allow things to continue at the North Wales Hospital, but then inexplicably backed off from his vow to close the place down but never explained why. Barber served in the RAF during WWII and was almost certainly a member of the security services.
In his capacity as Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, John Davies reiterated Heath's pre-election policy of refusing to intervene in industry. In the House of Commons on 4 November, Davies said:
"We believe that the essential need of the country is to gear its policies to the great majority of people, who are not 'lame ducks', who do not need a hand, who are quite capable of looking after their own interests and only demand to be allowed to do so." (Hansard 5th Series, volume 805, column 1211)
The term 'lame ducks' became associated with Davies. However, when Rolls Royce (a vital defence contractor) ran into financial difficulties early in 1971, it was decided that the Gov't should help by bailing it out. When nugatory efforts did not help, the company was nationalised to prevent it from going bankrupt.
In June 1971, the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders went into receivership after the Gov't refused it a £6 million loan. The workers at the yard, led by Communist shop stewards, decided to hold a 'work-in' when they occupied the yard and continued production. This industrial action tended to refute claims that trade unions were work-shy and was therefore embarrassing to the Gov't. Davies' London home was firebombed by the Angry Brigade on 31 July 1971. In February 1972, the Gov't changed its policy and decided to retain three of the four shipyards at a cost of £35 million, although Davies knew they would never operate on a commercial basis.
Davies moved sideways to become Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster in November 1972. Davies' role was predominantly behind the scenes in making sure British law was in compliance with European law. In Cabinet discussions, Davies advocated a confrontational approach to the trade unions, although he feared for the future.
In 1979 Davies was to be made a life peer as Baron Harding-Davies, but died before the creation of the peerage passed the Great Seal. Peerage history was made when, by Royal Warrant bearing the date 27 February 1980, Queen Elizabeth II granted his widow Vera Georgina the title of Lady Harding-Davies; his children The Hon. Frank Davies and The Hon. Rosamond Ann Metherell were given the rank of children of a life peer.
So someone somewhere was very grateful to John Davies for something. It was only equalled when in 1983 Thatch made the child molesting Speaker of the House George Thomas Viscount Tonypandy, although as a gay paedophile George Thomas had produced no heirs who could inherit the title.
It did mean that he could dress up though:
John Davies's son Frank Davies is an Anglo-Canadian record producer. Davies has been a major contributor to the growth of Canada's music industry and its creative community for more than four decades. He is credited with discovering, producing, publishing, and developing the careers of many celebrated artists and songwriters, as well as being an advocate for their status. Davies received the Juno Awards 2014 Walt Grealis Special Achievement Award, recognizing individuals who have made a significant impact on the Canadian music industry.
Davies was educated at Windlesham House School near Brighton, Pangbourne College and Strasbourg University in north-east France. In 1972 he married the Canadian pop singer Lynda Squires. The marriage produced three children, Meghan Mae Harding Davies, now Ehrensperger, Emily Gwyneth Emerson Davies-Cohen, and Kate Theresa Georgina Davies.
Davies started his music career in 1964 as a French correspondent to Billboard magazine. He later worked for both EMI Records and Liberty Records in London until the late 1960s, before migrating to Canada in 1970. There, he co-founded the independent record label Daffodil (named after the national emblem of Wales and as a symbol of hope and new beginnings), which became the first Canadian label to be distributed by a 'major' in that country, in the shape of Capitol/EMI.
In 1978, alongside Daffodil, Frank Davies formed Partisan Music, a production and publishing company that entered into an exclusive deal with a U.S record company (Capitol) to develop talent for that label worldwide – a Canadian first.
In early 1982 Davies put his label and production company on hold to become President of ATV Music Canada. At ATV, he developed the songwriting careers, of Eddie Schwartz, David Tyson, Aldo Nova, the Pukka Orchestra, Headpins, Chilliwack and Toronto, and became a full-time music publisher.
In 1986, as a result of ATV's purchase by Michael Jackson, Davies formed The Music Publisher (TMP) and built it into Canada's largest and most successful independent music publisher over the next 14 years. Frank Davies sold TMP to Alliance Communications Corporation and A&F Music in 1994, staying on as its President/CEO until the end of 1999, at which time he founded the music consultancy firm he currently operates – Let Me Be Frank Inc.
TMP secured over 1,500 cover recordings, of the 5,000 Canadian songs Davies published, by artists as diverse as Joe Cocker, Bonnie Raitt, Alice Cooper, The Doobie Brothers, Tom Cochrane, Cher, Don Henley & Sheryl Crow, kd Lang, Tanya Tucker, Alannah Myles, Loverboy, Terri Clark, Emmylou Harris, Wynonna, George Jones, Bette Midler, The Carpenters, Blue Oyster Cult, Amanda Marshall and The Guess Who. Indeed, I can guess who:
'Do ewe mean mari-jew-ana?'
During the TMP years Frank Davies signed and published the songs of many more songwriters and artists. TMP opened a Nashville office in the mid-90s.
Since founding Let Me Be Frank Inc, Davies has been the executive producer for albums by Serena Ryder – whom he brought to EMI Music – The Rankin Family and The Treasures whose debut was released by Universal in the spring. He is currently working on the solo debut for Heather Rankin. LMBF also publishes the works of longtime client and record producer David Tyson, is a consultant to corporate client Ole Media Management, and has consulted to Microsoft/XBox, as well as the Dept of Canadian Heritage, the Neighbouring Rights Collective of Canada and to a variety of songwriters, artists and music publishers with respect to the sale and acquisition of their copyright catalogues.
Davies has served as a director on industry boards including CARAS (Vice President/Trustee), CMRRA (Chair), FACTOR, PROCAN, Canadian Music Publishers Association (CMPA), OMDC, SOCAN and the Socan Foundation (Chair).
In 1998 Frank Davies founded the non-profit Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame/Le panthéon des auteurs et compositeurs Canadiens (CSHF/PACC) serving as its Chairman until 2004. The Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame has inducted Canadian songwriters such as Gordon Lightfoot, Leonard Cohen, RUSH, Robbie Robertson, Joni Mitchell and Oscar Peterson.
Frank Davies has sat on the following Canadian Boards:
CHAIRMAN – Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame, 2000-04
Ontario Media Development Corporation, 2001-02
FOUNDING MEMBER – Canadian Independent Record Production Association, 1970
VICE-PRESIDENT & TRUSTEE – Canadian Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences, 1983-90
CHAIRMAN – The SOCAN Foundation, 1990-97
Foundation to Assist Canadian Talent on Record (FACTOR) 1985-88
Society of Composers, Authors & Music Publishers (SOCAN) 1990-99
Performing Rights Organization of Canada (PROCAN) 1983-89
Music Promotion Foundation (MPF) 1985-90
EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE – Canadian Music Publishers Association, 1982-2000
CHAIRMAN – Canadian Musical Reproduction Rights Agency, 1982-2000
Frank Davies has bagged the following awards:
Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame, Special Achievement Award (2005)
Society of Composers, Authors & Music Publishers of Canada Special Achievement Award (2004)
Canadian Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences Dedicated Service Award (1993)
Juno Award Dedicated Service Award (1990)
MARQUEE MAGAZINE FRANK DAVIES named one of the 'Top 30: Canadian Music's Power Brokers'
PROCAN AWARD Dedicated Service Award (1990)
THE RECORD 'Music Publisher of the Year' (1990)
RECORD WORLD MAGAZINE (US) Gold Label Award (1977)
At the time that my life was made deliberately unbearable by people at St George's and when Tony and Sadie Francis were busy perjuring themselves in order to try and have me imprisoned – with the full knowledge of the BMA, the MDU and the MDU solicitors Hempsons – the Tories were determined to force Thatch out.
This man – a lawyer from south Wales and a lifelong friend of Ronnie Waterhouse – who undoubtedly knew about the crimes of Dafydd and the paedophiles, stuck the first knife in:
Most of the bestest friends of Dafydd and the paedophiles backed this man – originally from Swansea – when he challenged Thatch for the leadership, Thatch's campaign being run by Peter Morrison:
This man also stood against Thatch – he had been Home Secretary throughout many of the years when the crimes of Dafydd and the paedophiles were simply ignored and their victims died in prison:
This was the eventual lucky winner:
The following people all held leading roles in Gov't Depts which were directly responsible for concealing the paedophile rings active in north Wales and in London while I worked at St George's:
Politics being what it is, some of those in this Hall of Lame will have been working for the security services and will protest that they were gathering info and working behind the scenes without breaking cover. Whatever it was that they thought they were doing, it absolutely was not enough. They were frightened to touch the Top Doctors and they shouldn't have been. They should have admitted to the public what was going on, admitted that the NHS was not safe and gone in there and arrested Dafydd et al. They didn't and people died.
Up in Bangor University, this man was in camouflage as he kept the paedophile gang in business:
After Eric Sunderland died, his widow fulfilled her lifelong ambition and purchased herself a Porsche. A few years previously the body of one of the Hergest Unit patients who had died as a result of serious clinical negligence was kept in cold storage for months because he hadn't left enough money to pay for his burial and none of his three surviving relatives – two of whom were also near-destitute mental health patients – could afford to pay for his funeral either. The dead man had grown up 'in care'. Eventually after much wrangling, the local authority agreed to pay for a pauper's funeral. No members of mental health staff went, but a few Hergest patients did.
The nearest Porsche dealers to Mrs Sunderland's house at Beaumaris are in Ellesmere Port and Cheshire – Knutsford and Warrington, just down the road from Risley Remand Centre.
Happy motoring Mrs S, one hopes that it is not a case of CRASH, as it was for my house mate and a few other witnesses to the wrongdoing of the paedophiles and their friends. And if you develop a brain tumour, for God's sake don't go to the Walton Centre.
The man ensuring that things continued to run smoothly at the hands of Eric was of course the Chancellor of UCNW:
Carlo's Private Secretary who told people that Carlo couldn't get involved when people wrote to Carlo informing him that children were being abused in north Wales was Edward Adeane:
Read about the slippery character Adeane in my post '95 Glorious Years'.
Sir Peter Morrison – the child molester
His supplier:
The woman who died in the Ritz, alone, except for a paid Angel who was in attendance. As opposed to being murdered by the screws in Risley Remand Centre or somehow ending up buried in the grounds of the North Wales Hospital Denbigh:
Author Sally BakerPosted on June 15, 2018 October 15, 2018 Categories Bangor University, British Medical Association, Forensic Psychiatry, Gwynedd County Council, Gwynedd Social Services, Jimmy Savile, Lawyers and Judges, Margaret Thatcher's Cabinet, Medical Defence Union, Mindfulness, North Wales Child Abuse Scandal, North Wales Hospital Denbigh, Prisons, Psychological therapies, Springfield Hospital, St Georges Hospital Medical School, Uncategorized, University of Oxford, Welsh Assembly Politicians, Welsh Office, Westminster Polticians, Ysbyty GwyneddTags 1st Baron Kenyon, 4th Baron Kenyon, 5th Baron Kenyon, A and F Music, Adolph Hitler, Alan Sorrell, Alan Walters, Alannah Myles, Aldo Nova, Aled Griffiths, Alice Cooper, All Souls, Alliance Communications Corporation, Amanda Bluglass, Amanda Marshall, Amy Kenyon, Andre Maltraux, Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, Angry Brigade, Anthony Giddens, Archeological Society of India, Arnold Davies, Aston University, ATV Music Canada, Australian National University, Bangor Magistrates Court, Bangor University, Barbara Balbirnie Lee, Barclays Bank Plc, Barratt's Shoes, Baylor University, BBC, Belvedere College, Benito Mussolini, Bette Midler, Billboard Magazine, Black Wednesday, Blue Oyster Cult, BMA, Bonnie Rait, BP, British Academy, British Airports Authority, British Museum, British National Export, British Petroleum, British Productivity Council, British Red Cross, British School of Archeology Jerusalem, Broughton Higher Grade School, Bryn Alyn Community, Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame, Capitol, CARAS, CBI, Centre for Policy Studies, Charles Leigh, Charles Saatchi, Cher, Cherie Booth, Chester Archeological Society, Chilliwack, Christopher Murray Grieve, City University, Civitas, Claire Fox, Clann Albain, Clarissa Dickson Wright, CMPA, CMRRA, Communist Party, Compton Verney, Conservative Central Office, Conservative Christian Fellowship, Conwy Social Services, Council for British Research In The Levant, Council of Industrial Design, COXE, Cyril Fox, Daffodil Records, Dafydd Iwan, Dafydd Wigley, Daily Mail, Dame Kathleen Kenyon, David Cameron, David Green, David Hunt MP, David Ormsby-Gore, David Tyson, David Waddington, Deirdre Grieve, Design Council, Diane Aldridge, Don Henley, Douglas Hurd, Dr Andrew Aldridge, Dr Dafydd Alun Jones, Dr Sadie Francis, Dr Tony Francis, Dyfed County Council, Dyvenor School, E.F. Schumacher, Eddie Shwartz, Edward Heath, Edwina Hart, Electra Investment Trust, EMI Music, Emily Davies-Cohen, Emmylou Harris, Enoch Powell, Ernest Hemingway, Evening Standard, FACTOR, FGM, Foundation for Science and Technology, Frank Davies, Gabriel Moshenka, Geoffrey Howe, George Bates, George Carman QC, George Jones, George Orwell, George Thomas, Glyn Jones, Goldman Sachs, Gordon Lightfoot, Gwenan Carrington, Gwynedd County Council, Gwynedd Social Services, Gwynfor Evans, Hansard, Harefield Hospital, Harold Macmillan, Hasnet Khan, Headpins, Heather Rankin, Hempsons, Hergest Unit, HIV, HM the Queen, Horace de Vere Cole, Hugh MacDiarmid, Huw Griffiths, Illustrated London News, In Place of Strife, Industrial Participation Association, Institute of Archeology, Institute of Economic Affairs, Ioan Bowen Rees, Jane Morgan, Jeremy Paxman, Jimmy Savile, Joanna Griffiths, Joe Cocker, John Allen, John Borland, John Davies MP, John F. Kennedy, John Hopkins University, John Major, John Papworth, Joni Mitchell, Kate Davies, KD Lang, Keir Hardie, Ken Clarke, Kenneth Baker, Kenyon Institute, King George V, Lady Harding-Davies, Laugholm Academy, Laurie Taylor, Learned Society of Wales, Leonard Cohen, Let Me Be Frank Inc, Li berty Records, Living Marxism, Lloyd Tyrell-Kenyon, LMBF, London Museum, Lord Anthony Barber, Lord Brian Flowers, Lord Harlech, Lord K.O. Morgan, Lord Lloyd Tyrell-Kenyon, Lord Max Beloff, Lord Nigel Vinson, Loverboy, LSE, Lt Col Sir Walter Bromley-Davenport, Lucille Hughes, Lydia C. Carr, Lynda Squires, Manchester Museum, Mandy Leigh, Marc Horne, Margaret Collingridge, Margaret Thatcher, Margery Fry, Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill, Martin Mere Wildfowl Reserve, Matthew Taylor, Mavis de Vere Cole, MDU, Meghan Ehrensperger, MI5, Michael Beloff QC, Michael Heseltine, Michael Jackson, Michael Trevlyn, Michael Wheeler, Microsoft, Mindfulness, National Assembly of Wales, National Economic Development Council, National Museum of Wales, National Party of Scotland, Nature in Art Trust, Neil Hamilton, Neil Kinnock, Neville Chamberlain, Newcastle City Council, Newsnight, Nigel Lawson, Nora Kenyon, Norman Lamont, North Wales Hospital Denbigh, North Wales Police, Northumbrian National Parks and Countryside, Ole Media Management, OMDC, Ontario Media Development Corporation, Oscar Peterson, Owen Dudley Edwards, Oxford University Archeology Society, Oxford University Press, P.G. Wodehouse, Pangbourne College, Partisan Music, Peter Walker, Plastic Coatings Ltd, Prestwood Homes, Prince Charles, Princess of Wales, PROCAN, Professor Brian Griffiths, Professor Dick Hobbs, Professor Eric Sunderland, Professor Geoffrey Chamberlain, Professor Leopold Kohr, Professor Linford Rees, Professor Loic Wacquant, Professor Mark Williams, Professor Robert Bluglass CBE, Professor Robert Dudley Edwards, Professor Roy Evans, Professor Sir Magdi Yacoub, Prospect, Public Schools Commission, Queen's Award for Industry, Queen's Royal Regiment, Queen's Silver Jubilee Appeal, RAF, RAMC, Resurgence, Revolutionary Communist Party, Rhodri Morgan, Richard Gwyn Catholic High School, Risley Remand Centre, Robbie Robertson, Rolls Royce, Roman Catholic Church, Ron Davies, Ronald Vinson, Rosamond Metherell, Royal Army Science Corps, Royal College of Art, Ruhi Behi, Rural Development Commission, RUSH, Ruth Dudley Edwards, Ruthers University, Sandra Betts, Saunders Lewis, Serena Ryder, Sheryl Crow, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Sir Edward Adeane, Sir Ferederic Kenyon, Sir Frederick Crawford, Sir Herbert Read, Sir Keith Joseph, Sir Mortimer Wheeler, Sir Peter Morrison, Sir Ronald Waterhouse, Small Is Beautiful, SNP, SOCAN Foundation, Somerville College, Spanish Civil War, Spiked Online, Springfield Hospital, St Bartholemews Hospital, St Edward's School Oxford, St Georges Hospital Medical School, St Hugh's College Oxford, St Paul's Girls School, Strasbourg University, Sugar Board, Sunday Times, Tanya Tucker, Terri Clark, Tessa Wheeler, Thames Polytechnic, The Carpenters, The Daily Telegraph, The Doobie Brothers, The Guardian, The Guess Who, The Merthyr Pioneer, The Moral Maze, The Pukka Orchestra, The Rankin Family, The Rolling Stones, The Sunday Telegraph, The Times, The Treasures, The Walton Centre, Thomas Tyrell-Kenyon, TMP, Today programme, Tom Cochrane, Tony Blair, Toronto, TUC, UCL, UCNW, UNESCO, Universal, University College Dublin, University College of South Wales and Monmouthshire, University of Aberystwyth, University of Cambridge, University of Cardiff, University of Edinburgh, University of Innsbruck, University of Leicester, University of London, University of Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, University of Oxford, University of Porto Rico, University of Swansea, University of the Americas, University of Vienna, University of Warwick, Upper Clyde Shipbuilders, V.E. Nash-Williams, Valda Trevlyn, Viscount Tonypandy, Waterhouse Report, Wellbeing of Women, Wellcome Trust, Welsh Office, William Ormsby-Gore, William Waldegrave, Windlesham House School, Wynonna, XBox5 Comments on Events, Dear Boy, Events
One genre of book that I quite enjoy reading is the political autobiography or biography. A lot of politicians are quite vain and not as bright as they think that they are, so there are often some unintentional revelations in their autobiographies. For example Matthew Parris some years ago wrote about holidaying in Italy with his friends at a place that they termed the 'villa of shame', enjoying the company of 'boys who were always willing' – Parris wrote this years before journos started circulating lists of names of people suspected of being involved in the Westminster Paedophile Ring to bloggers like me…
On holiday last week I took a stack of theory books – but for light entertainment I also took a copy of Ann Widdecombe's autobiography, 'Strictly Ann'. I thought that this might be an interesting read because a few years ago I came across Ann's website, 'The Widdyweb', which fuelled my suspicions that she was quite mad. 'The Widdyweb' was a sort of Enid Blyton fantasy land in which Ann talked about her cottage which has lupins all the way up the path and the many cats that she has owned, including one called Mitten. Exploring 'The Widdyweb' enabled me to perhaps understand how Widdycombe managed to live on a different planet from the rest of us in which anyone who has the temerity to get divorced should be cast into the outer darkness. I recommended 'The Widdyweb' to my former PhD supervisor and he was sufficiently impressed by it's content to speculate that it might be a spoof. It wasn't, it was Ann's own work. ('The Widdyweb' has had an overhaul since then and it now features donkeys as well as cats and a lot of photos of Ann herself.) So I expected to delve further into Ann's fantasy world of lupins and cats called Mitten by reading 'Strictly Ann'.
I had a surprise. Widdecombe has quite a deceitful streak. She is of course famous for being one of the politicians who was not disgraced in the expenses scandal – I think that she, Jeremy Corbyn and Frank Field were about the only MPs not claiming for everything possible, but I would have predicted that. I don't share many of Widdecombe's views, but I would not expect her to be fiddling her expenses or pilfering in any form. But Ann's autobiography reveals a degree of low level cunning and hypocrisy that I honestly did not expect to find.
When I have heard Widdecombe contributing to discussions regarding politicians renumeration, she has always been someone who has argued that if politicians aren't generously paid, 'talented people' will not go into politics. (She doesn't use the same logic when she discusses appropriate salary levels for other public servants.) She very obviously considers herself an 'able' and 'talented' person. I knew that she was an Oxford graduate, so I presumed – particularly in the face of all this talk about ability and talent – that Widdecombe, like Cameron and a few other leading Tories who consider themselves a cut above the rest of us, had been academically very successful. Not so. Widdecombe was actually rejected by Oxford when she applied as a sixth former, although she made it very clear that she would have given her right arm to get in there. She did her first degree at Birmingham – which was her fifth choice of university. So a few other people said no to Ann as well as Oxford then. However, whilst at Birmingham, she had developed a desperation to enter politics and her preferred way of doing that wasn't to become active in local government as a councillor, it was to somehow get involved with the Oxford Union – because Ann had got wind that was the route that the big names used. To do that she needed to be studying at Oxford – so she applied again to pursue a Bachelor's degree at Oxford after she had graduated from Birmingham. Ann's parents offered to fund the Oxford degree. Ah, the myth of the naturally talented woman who got where she did in life by hard graft begins to unravel – a large quantity of readily available parental dosh played a crucial part at an early stage…
To be fair to her though, there was a lot of hard graft involved as well. Not cleaning toilets, or stacking shelves, or even studying (she ended up with a Third) – the hard graft involved a great deal of toadying, networking and beavering away in the Oxford Union with other aspiring politicians. Ann really loved being part of the Oxford Union, she didn't see it in terms of a bunch of immature over-privileged tossers playing games at all, she really got down to Business there. She became Secretary of the Oxford Union and was also active in the Federation of Conservative Students (whose later activities became so offensive that Tebbit had to intervene and I think that the organisation was dismantled). In Ann's words 'we were fuelled by ambition and a will to carve out success for ourselves' and she 'met and talked to a wide range of politicians, broadcasters and academics'. She waxes lyrical about meeting the likes of David Owen (they loved him so much that Dr Death received a 'huge ovation') and the place was so packed for Enoch Powell's burfday that people were forced to sit on the windowsills.
After Oxford, Widdecombe beavered away for many years trying to get into Parliament before she finally succeeded. She landed a mind numbingly boring job after graduation with Unilever, but spent every waking moment planning her future political career. It was all highly strategic and centred around getting to know the right people. She joined the Bow Group because, as with the Oxford Union, she perceived that to be where her version of the beautiful people hung out: 'I was just one of a very ambitious set of young professionals who yearned to get into Parliament'. Ann mentions that the Bow Group was actually a bit left wing for her liking, but it was where the influential people were….
Despite their dangerous socialist tendencies, Ann made some good mates among the Spartists in the Bow Group. Richard Barber, who interviewed her when she applied to join, became her solicitor and another member, Michael Stern, became her accountant. She began working on papers with the Bow Group with folk like Richard Luce and Edward Leigh. Those readers interested in the rumours swirling regarding the Westminster Paedophile Ring might be interested to note that some of the names being bandied around as suspects were/are members of the Bow Group. Not that Ann Widdecombe's name has appeared on any of the documents that I've been sent.
Ann was also keen on the idea of another Tory organisation where those with influence hang out, the Carlton Club. She had a problem there though, because for years they wouldn't admit women. (However, as soon as they did relent, Ann joined – she became the first woman to become a full member of the Carlton in 2008 and was the first woman to serve on their General Committee.)
Ann was desperately trying to get onto the candidates list at Conservative Central Office, but for some reason they didn't seem too impressed with her. She mentions that a Lord Lothian gave her a reference. I presume that this was the father of Michael Ancram – Ann had campaigned for him and acted as his PA when Ancram was trying to get elected himself in the 1974 General Election. Ancram inherited his father's title in 2004 and is now in the Lords. Ann was obviously quite impressed with the Ancram clan, there is much name dropping of all the aristos that she rubbed noses with when she was working hard to get Michael into Parliament. She states that after she returned from Ancram's campaign she 'spent the next 13 years focussed on the House of Commons'.
Despite the best efforts of pere Ancram, Ann continued to have difficulty finding her way onto the candidates list, but she persisted. She was interviewed by Marcus Fox but rejected – he wanted 'councillors with dirty hands'. She was told by John Lacey, the Central Office Area Agent for the south east, that to be accepted onto the candidates list she needed a record and that 'there was an absence of professional information' about her. At one point she was simply given a bollocking and told that the party were getting fed up of smart arses who had joined bodies like the Oxford Union and the Bow Group in order to bag a seat in Parliament.
Ann eventually ended up on something called the deferred list, which seems to have meant that she could apply to be a candidate but that she would receive no help from Conservative Central Office. They certainly meant 'no help' as well – people on the deferred list weren't even informed of forthcoming selections (Ann, I think that Central Office might have been trying to tell you something). Widdecombe had a solution to that though – she ingratiated herself to someone who worked at Central Office and got them to access the info for her.
This is where it became entertaining. Ann's mole kept an eye open and told her of EVERY seat that arose – and Ann applied for all of them, and boasts of the 'creativity' she employed as she made up cock and bull stories regarding her 'connections' to the constituency and desperation to represent the folk who lived there. She also took care never to mention her involvement with the Bow Group at interviews, because she believed that the Bow Group was unpopular with constituency parties. Ann may have been very good at identifying people who could assist her up the career ladder but she certainly wasn't very good at finding out about the constituencies upon whose doors she was hammering. Her research involved a visit to the local library a couple of days before her interview. The depths of Ann's ignorance and her shameless ruthlessness is particularly evident from her account of being called for interview on Anglesey no less.
Ann travelled all the way up to Anglesey from her base in the south east for the selection. She manages to sum up Anglesey as 'all sheep and Rio Tinto Zinc'. There are sheep on Anglesey but there are other things as well. What there is not on Anglesey is zinc. There is a place called Parys Mountain where copper was historically mined and there was an industrial plant called Anglesey Aluminium – which was owned by Rio Tinto. Aluminium is nothing to do with zinc, it is a different element with a different position in the Periodic Table. 'Strictly Ann' is a book littered with smug comments regarding the perceived ignorance of other people in terms of their lack of knowledge of Latin, Shakespeare and the Bible. Yet Ann does not know the difference between two metals – and she very obviously didn't bother to find out. At the time that she went for that seat on Anglesey, Anglesey Aluminium was a huge employer, so presumably she would have been after their votes. But she couldn't even be arsed to find out what they produced. Ann's confusion probably arose from the history of Rio Tinto who owned Anglesey Aluminium – at some point in the dark ages, Rio Tinto had merged with another company that was involved with zinc. But not on Anglesey. Furthermore I would have thought that the name 'Anglesey Aluminium' contained a clue as to what was being produced.
But guess what – the selection panel didn't care that they had a total ignoramus on their hands. They loved Ann and she loved them! Which is weird, because Widdecombe knew bugger all about Anglesey and obviously didn't care that she knew bugger all, she doesn't mention the issue of language which would have been very important on Anglesey, she doesn't concern herself with the socio-economic problems that plagued the region at that time and she wasn't even that interested in the sheep. But Anglesey really wanted her, they were biting her arm off. She 'stayed with an officer of the association so was under scrutiny the whole time and the interview was a rip-roaring success'.
Now one passion of Ann's that has been a life-long obsession really is her commitment to the anti-abortion cause. It seems to be the only thing that she is indeed committed to – it's the one thing that she doesn't lie about or keep under wraps if necessary. It also caused some people to see her as an unsuitable candidate – she was perceived by some to be uncompromising and dogmatic and by others as a one-policy candidate. She devotes much of her autobiography to accounts of her anti-abortion campaigning and the reasons for her strong feelings on this matter and gives details of some very deceitful tactics that she and other anti-abortion campaigners used in their attempts to force legislation regarding this issue through Parliament. I am wondering whether it was Widdecombe's enthusiasm for outlawing abortion that made her so attractive to Anglesey.
My post 'The BMA And It's Ethics' detailed how a co-ordinated effort by Top Doctors in north Wales made it impossible for women in that region to access NHS abortions until well into the 80s/90s – the region was notorious for this and the Top Doctors crowed about their success in preventing abortions being carried out legally on the NHS in north Wales. Where did the Top Doctors tend to live if they worked in north west Wales? Anglesey. They colonised the area between Menai Bridge and Beaumaris in particular – that area is next to the Menai Strait, it's very pretty, it's where the more expensive and luxurious properties are and it's near the hospitals in Bangor. I am not exaggerating here – that stretch is literally full of Top Doctors, I used to live there myself and huge numbers of the people living in Llanfairpwll/Menai Bridge/Llandegfan/Beaumaris were Top Doctors – or academics. It was always the reason that was given for Ysgol David Hughes in Menai Bridge performing so well academically – numerous children had mums and dads who were university lecturers or doctors. And if the residents of those villages weren't Top Doctors, they were nurses or NHS managers or people who worked with the Top Doctors. They didn't tend to live in Gwynedd because it was a bit wet and hilly there and the houses weren't so grand – their colony was on Anglesey.
Widdecombe will absolutely not have kept her commitment to anti-abortion a secret during that selection. And I bet that the Anglesey Conservative Association contained a few Top Doctors or their associates who sounded the candidates out concerning their stance on abortion as well. They must have thought that Christmas had come when Widdecombe arrived – the Top Doctors of north Wales were getting very angry at the idea that they might be put under pressure to offer terminations and what would be more helpful to them than a local MP who would back them up all the way?
Sadly for Anglesey Conservatives though, it was a dream that was snatched away. Ann dropped them! A seat in Burnley had also come up and of course Ann had applied for that too (totally committed to Burnley as well!) and although Derek Laws, the Welsh Area agent, wanted Ann to withdraw from Burnley because Anglesey were so desperate to snare her, Conservative Central Office insisted that she follow procedure which meant keeping her name in the hat for Burnley and the Burnley election happened first. Anglesey seem to have been particularly miffed about this – Widdecombe's book mentions that years later by which time she was in Parliament she bumped into someone from Anglesey and they asked her if she regretted letting them down. Ann herself has no regrets – it wasn't a safe seat! She mentions of course that the candidate who was eventually selected for Anglesey was Keith Best and the seat was 'lost' from the Conservatives a few years later. She fails to mention that it was lost because Best was convicted of fraud and ended up in prison.
Ann wasn't elected in Burnley and her search for a seat continued a while longer. Readers might well be wondering by now how Widdecombe was actually managing to sustain herself in the south east whilst spending so much time campaigning for the Tories, grovelling to influential people and indeed charging off around the UK in hot pursuit of a seat. It transpires that Ann had a very understanding employer. She got fed up of Unilever pretty quickly and took up a job as an administrator at the University of London. She wasn't just on reception, she actually worked her way up to a very senior role in the University Court dept and ended up being responsible for the financial part of the project that merged the London medical schools ie. the merger between Guys and Tommy's and University College and Middlesex. Ann Widdecombe will have been party to an awful lot of very interesting information in that role – and if she'd kept certain people happy she would have made some very influential friends. Which Ann seems to have been very good at doing anyway. One person who was very keen to help Ann further her career in the Conservative Party was her boss at London University, Peter Holwell.
Peter Holwell seems to have been a very useful boss to have – he allowed Ann an awful lot of time off to go campaigning (she doesn't mention any obligation upon her to take this as unpaid leave) and she even mentions that she took her secretary from the University with her campaigning – the secretary played a full on role as well, answering letters, preparing canvassing returns etc. Did the authorities at London University know that two of their staff – a senior administrator and her secretary – were taking weeks off work in order to bag one of them a seat in Parliament? We are talking the 80s here, the Thatcher years, when universities were being berated for their wastefulness, their lack of productivity and were subjected to severe financial cuts.
But Peter Holwell didn't just give Ann weeks off to fight elections and supply her with a secretary to do this. He seems to have participated in a great deal of subterfuge with Honest Ann. Readers of my vintage will remember that in 1982 the Tories became so vexed about the CND movement – in particular the women's protests at Greenham – that they established a campaign in opposition to this which certainly had everyone rolling in the aisles: 'Women and Families for Defence', led by the dreadful Lady Olga Maitland, who doubled up as a gossip columnist for the Sunday Express. (Olga was as bad as Ann in terms of only bothering to get to know certain people. In one press interview she waxed lyrical about her love of dinner parties, but stressed that she only invited selected people 'like Edward De Bono and his wife'. I won't be receiving an invitation then.) Ann was involved with this campaign and was a key figure in running it – during her time at London University. She mentions that Peter Holwell was 'keenly interested in my political activity and was a sympathiser' – the preparations for the launch of 'Women and Families for Defence' were 'carried out in secrecy' and were referred to in London University as 'the initiative'. Holwell was in on it all and all Ann had to do was ask for time off from the University for 'the initiative'.
What exactly was going on in the senior ranks of the Court at London University in the 1980s?
Peter Holwell is still alive, although long retired. He's been a busy bee though. He was listed as a Company Director for:
A.C.A. Ltd; Leeds Castle Foundation; Edge Foundation; Friends of the Courtauld Institute; Samuel Courtauld Trust; Setoncrest Ltd; Law 646 Ltd; Zoo Operations Ltd; Zoo Enterprises Ltd; Whipsnade Wild Animal Park; Zoo Restaurants Ltd.
Some of these organisations are well-known, some seem to be businesses connected to London University and some are frankly opaque and rather suspicious….
But to return to 'the initiative' which was so generously supported in complete secrecy by the upper echelons of London University. 'Women and Families for Defence' was always presented by the Tories as being a movement led by real women who wore nylons and were called Lady, rather than a bunch of screaming lesbians of doubtful sanity which of course were what made up the ranks of CND. Yet Ann tells us something else – although the initiative was supposedly led by Olga assisted by the likes of Angela Rumbold and Virginia Bottomley, Ann states clearly that it was all 'initiated' by a man called Michael Lingens, a Bow Group officer, who needed a 'women's group' to make an 'even bigger noise' than the Greenham women. So who was this Michael Lingens who told the ladies what to do?
Michael Lingens was a Councillor in Hammersmith and Fulham 1982-86 and became Chairman of the Bow Group in 1984. These days he is described as a 'corporate lawyer'. He is a partner in an organisation called CharlesRussellSpeechlys and is described on their website as being a man who 'advises on corporate and transactional work for public and private companies, primarily in the healthcare sector'. Lingens has 'worked with a number of the UK's leading care home operators in recent years'. He is 'responsible for the firm's offices in continental Europe and Chairman of the International Committee which co-ordinates the firm's international activities in general'.
So it sounds rather to me as though Michael Lingens these days is in the business of privatising the NHS. Which is certainly interesting – Ann's job at London University (when she was actually at work to do it) involved overseeing the reconfiguration of some leading London hospitals/medical schools and in 'Strictly Ann', Ann explains that of course she's committed to the NHS, but years after her adventures with Olga Maitland et al when she became Shadow Secretary for Health 'a major plank of my policy was to introduce private sector money to the NHS'. Ann enjoyed the miracles of private medicine herself when she suffered a detached retina. She trotted along to Moorfields Hospital and consulted the surgeon Lyndon da Cruz expecting to hear the worst and told him that she did know that 'lots of people go through life with the sight of only one eye'. She was delighted to be told that 'but YOU won't have to'. Ann recalls that 'they were the most beautiful words I had heard in many years' and observed 'how blessed I am to have BUPA cover'. I didn't realise that BUPA had a spiritual aspect to it, but at least Ann didn't have to go blind like the rest of us who don't have BUPA cover are obviously expected to. 'Strictly Ann' is full of references to the Good Book and indeed quotes from the Good Book but Ann really is no John Bell.
The corporate lawyer who is gobbling up the NHS is not the only person who assisted Ann, Olga et al with the initiative. They were, explains Ann, 'egged on' by Julian Lewis, who had been at Oxford with her. Ann admiringly explains how on one occasion a few years later, Julian 'actually managed to string pro-defence banners across Whitehall under which CND had to march on it's route to Trafalgar Square'. Julian helped Ann with her maiden speech when she finally did succeed in getting into Parliament in 1987. The subject of Ann's maiden speech was Trident.
So who's Julian? He's the Tory MP for New Forest East. In 1976 he received secret funding from the far-right organisation the Freedom Association to pose as a Labour Party moderate in an attempt to expose Militant Tendency entryism in the Labour Party. He is described as a 'leading opponent of CND and other left-wing organisations throughout the 1980s' and between 1981-85 he was the Research Director of the Coalition of Peace Through Security. In Parliament he actively pursues the retention and renewal of the UK Trident programme. Just to reassure everyone, in Sept 2010 he was appointed as a member of Parliament's Security and Intelligence Committee.
So that's who was pulling the strings of Ann and her mates. Funded without anyone's knowledge by London University, as was Ann's path into Parliament.
Ann did eventually manage to get elected in 1987, for Maidstone. Once more Peter Holwell did her a favour and allowed her to leave her job at London University without working out her notice. She mentions an early problem arising when she was newly elected – there was an 'acute cash crisis' at Maidstone Hospital, which was 'very new and flagship' and Honest Ann was called upon to manage the crisis (or perhaps the bad publicity?), which involved a series of discussions with the Health Authority Chair Anne-Marie Nelson, the hospital management, the Top Doctors, the Angels and the Minister Tony Newton. There were obviously very much more serious problems at that hospital than Ann admitted. Maidstone Hospital hit the media in 2007 as a result of a C diff outbreak, attributed to filthy conditions and overcrowding. In total, more than 1,150 patients became infected, 90 were estimated to have died as a result of infection and it was estimated that the infection contributed towards the deaths of another 240 patients. The Chief Exec was described as 'blameless' but was sacked nonetheless, with a severance payment of 250k. The Health Secretary at the time, Alan Johnson, intervened and the Dept of Health advised the Trust to withhold more than 2/3 of the payment. The case went to the Court of Appeal, the payment was restored and a judgement was issued that was highly critical of the Trust. Upon publication of the judgement the whole Trust Board resigned. So Ann didn't manage to sort that little local difficulty out then, despite 'Strictly Ann' containing anecdotes about the machinations that she and her colleagues used to ensure that bad news NHS stories didn't receive high profile coverage.
After all that toadying to actually get into the Commons, Ann very nearly came unstuck in 1992 when there was an attempt to deselect her by some members of her constituency association as a result of her anti-hunting stance. (Is it not ironic that it was this which nearly caused her to come to grief rather than the rest of the insanity and duplicity.) However, fellow anti-abortion campaigner Lib Dem David Alton was so mortified at the idea of Parliament without Doris that he came to her rescue. Alton theorised that to get Ann out of hot water, she needed the support of a high profile hunter and hey presto a letter from the Duke of Norfolk in support of Ann was sent to the constituency association. Ann was really chuffed when she found out that the Duke of Norfolk had written that he wished that he'd had her at his side when he was 'fighting the Mau Mau'. I'm wondering if Doris has any idea of what was alleged to have happened in the fight against the Mau Mau uprising – the Mau Mau militants were notoriously terrifying and vicious, so the colonial forces did not hold back where retaliation was concerned. Mau Mau were flogged until death, roasted alive, sexually assaulted with a range of objects, set alight after having paraffin poured over them and castrated. Interrogation methods used by the colonial forces included slicing off ears, boring holes in ear-drums and pushing pins into fingernails. One can only wonder in what capacity the Duke of Norfolk imagined that Ann would have proved useful.
The Duke of Norfolk's letter did the trick and Ann lived to fight another day.
In much the same way that it took Ann a very long time to actually get into Parliament, her progress once she was there was not what she had envisaged. As with the Chukas and the Yvettes and the Tristrams et al that have wrecked the Labour Party, doing a good job for her constituents as a useful backbench MP wasn't enough for Ann – she knew that she was meant for better things. Like Norman Tebbit, Ann is someone who seethes at the idea that much of an MP's role has now been 'reduced' to that of a 'glorified social worker'. How they hate it when those sodding constituents keep turning up with their housing problems or their benefit concerns or their complaints about the NHS. As Tebbit used to stress 'our job is to hold the executive to account'. Well that certainly is part of the job, but Tebs and Doris don't seem to have worked out that the reason why MPs surgeries are now brimming over with desperate people about to lose the roof over their heads or with no income because their benefits have been stopped or who have nearly been killed at the hands of the NHS and no-one will even respond to their letters, is that since 1979 successive Gov'ts have set about dismantling the infrastructure of the UK and now nothing fucking works. Desperate people have nowhere else to turn but their MPs, particularly when the public services themselves break the law. Parliament is not the Oxford Union Ann, no matter how much that you wish it was. That was you playing with a load of other pretentious spoilt idiots – when you get elected you have things called constituents to answer to.
Although Doris did notice that no-one seemed very enthusiastic about promoting her, she did what she had done previously – she hassled a lot of influential people demanding answers as to why her talents were going unacknowledged. Unbelievably it worked and Doris began to get promoted.
Now one of the early positions that Doris achieved that interests me is that of Parliamentary Under Secretary of State to Tony Newton. Doris describes that this involved a huge amount of work and that as the Parliamentary Under Secretary it was she who did the legwork – including handling all correspondence. Tony Newton was the Minister to whom Alison Taylor wrote in Feb 1988 describing the abuse of children in care in north Wales that was happening – including assaults that she had witnessed herself. Ann Widdecombe will have known about that letter. Furthermore by the time that she wrote to Tony Newton, Alison had already written to Margaret Thatcher. Tony Newton was Health Minister. This was pre-devolution, so the NHS in Wales was the responsibility of Westminster. By the time that Doris was the gofer for Newton, the authorities were aware of my allegations concerning the psychiatric services in north Wales as well.
But Doris also knew somebody who was directly involved in the North Wales Child Abuse Scandal – Peter Morrison, the MP for Chester, whom former Tory MPs now admit was known to be molesting under-aged boys and who was visiting children's homes in north Wales. Doris mentions Morrison a number of times in her book – Doris knew him as Thatcher's PPS and repeats a number of times that Morrison was giving Thatcher 'bad advice'. It is fairly clear now that Thatcher's administration were covering up what was happening in north Wales, including Peter Morrison's activities. Ann doesn't mention that, but she does make reference to another situation which she claims was covered up by everybody from 'Tony Newton downwards', that of the serious alcohol problem suffered by Nick Scott. She observes that no-one did him any favours concealing the fact that he was drunk and incapable and she is probably quite right. But I suspect that Doris knew that Tony Newton along with the Welsh Office were covering up something far worse than an alcoholic colleague – and who knows she might well have still been in contact with her old buddies the Top Doctors from Anglesey who had so wanted her as their MP, who were covering up exactly the same thing. By that time Keith Best had been elected for Anglesey – the Keith Best who was so uninterested and unhelpful when I went to see him about the wrongdoing of the Top Doctors. The Keith Best who had a role in the Welsh Office.
After her stint with Tony Newton, Doris was Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for David Hunt at the Dept of Employment. The David Hunt who was Secretary of State for Wales – twice – and who covered up the wrongdoing in north Wales as well.
Doris's autobiography makes it obvious that she was getting pretty pissed off with only being a mere Parliamentary Under Secretary and she was greatly pleased when she finally became a Minister of State in the Home Office. She was memorably Minister for Prisons under Home Secretary Michael Howard who maintained that 'prison works', as the prison numbers swelled with dispossessed people who were frequently mentally ill. Or in north Wales had complained about the psychiatric services or of having been molested in children's homes. Doris waxes lyrical about the features of prisoners – that they are usually illiterate and innumerate, that they often have mental health problems, that they usually come from 'broken families'. The one thing that she fails to mention is that a disproportionate number have grown up 'in care' – but I bet she knew it. Doris was a Minister in the Home Office at the time when Mary Wynch was chewed up and spat out, ruined, by the Home Office (see post 'The Mary Wynch Case – Details').
Doris was sufficiently attached to Tony Newton and David Hunt to mention how 'upset' she was when they lost their seats in 1997.
I find it very difficult to believe that Doris, whose whole modus operandi was predicated upon making friends with powerful people and helping ensure that things ran smoothly for them, had not heard an awful lot about the barrel of shite in north Wales that so many of those whom she was hobnobbing with were so deeply involved.
But even after Hunt and Newton had left the Commons, Doris found herself yet again close to someone else who played a major role in covering up the North Wales Child Abuse Scandal – she became Shadow Secretary for Health under William Hague. Whilst the cover-up that was the Waterhouse Inquiry was underway. Doris was a big fan of Hague and her explanation for his disastrous stint as Tory leader was that he simply arrived in that position too early in his career. Even in her account of her support for Hague as leader though there are indications of Doris's underhand activities. By the time that Hague stood in the leadership race, Doris had of course fallen out with Michael Howard in a very big way and certainly did not want him becoming leader of the party – she did of course launch a very public attack on him in which she notoriously claimed that there was 'something of the night' about him and what with that coming from Honest Plain Speaking Ann, it killed off Howard's 1997 leadership chance. Ann explains in her book how Hague was actually going to support Howard for leader in 1997 until she told James Arbuthnot – the principal Hague supporter – that she was going to launch a major attack on Howard. Hague subsequently reneged on his deal to support Howard. Ann wonders whether Arbuthnot told Hague that he was supporting 'damaged goods' – of course she has no idea whether Arbuthnot ever did tell him that, but she remarks that it would have been 'strange' if Hague's 'first lieutenant would not have told him what he had learned'. Of course it would Doris, that's why you set the cat among the pigeons…
Doris also had cause to call on the help of yet another person whom I have named on this blog as helping to keep the North Wales Child Abuse Scandal out of the media as much as was possible – Amanda Platell (see post 'Did Glenda Occupy A Key Role In Keeping It All Out Of The Media?'). In 1999, by which time Platell had her feet well under the table as Head of Press at Conservative Central Office, Peter Lilley made a speech which compromised one of Doris's policies. An early draft of Lilley's speech was leaked by a journalist – a journalist whom it was known was regularly briefed by Doris. Suspicion fell upon Doris and rumours flew – Doris was horrified that she had fallen under suspicion (I'm not sure why, if she was known to be briefing this journo on a regular basis it would seem logical to presume that she'd done so again). Fortunately for Doris, the helpful Amanda held a full investigation using some of her contacts that I mentioned in my previous post about her, two people were identified as being the source of the leak and were sacked. Doris remained – presumably to continue briefing journalists when she found it necessary.
Readers may remember that Doris fancied herself as Tory leader but never actually got that far. What is noticeable in Doris's book is that she had felt that this was her destination and she takes it as a matter of fact that she'd have been an absolutely brilliant PM. Fortunately for the rest of us it never actually happened. However Doris does spend quite a lot of time telling us all how she would run the world if anyone were ever rash enough to allow her to do so. She claimed to be speaking for a section of society that she termed the 'Forgotten Decents'. Which is an interesting concept from a woman who admired so many close colleagues who had concealed a paedophile ring. Of course Ann stood down from Parliament in 2010 and although she has made it known that she was miffed not to have been offered a seat in the Lords, her career post-politics has continued. She has become a sort of cabaret act, taking part in Strictly Come Dancing and the like. She devotes quite a bit of space to these activities in her autobiography.
Doris tells us how as part of a project for one TV programme she 'found a prostitute' called Collette from Peterborough, who wanted to escape from prostitution 'but could get no help'. A bit like those teenaged boys in north Wales that your colleague Morrison was molesting then Ann. Ann sadly observes that Collette disappeared with a mobile phone that the TV folk had given her and 'went off the radar'. Well some of the former residents of the children's homes were found dead after they'd given evidence about what had happened to them and no-one even gave them a mobile phone to bugger off with.
During the filming of another TV programme, Doris was appalled to encounter a 'work shy' man called Mick Philpott who 'pretended' to take on a job that Ann had found for him 'but never reported for duty'. Well if Ann had found him a job as a senior administrator at London University, he wouldn't have needed to have reported for duty, he could have pissed off around the country with the use of a secretary campaigning for a seat in Parliament. Doris was also deeply traumatised when she discovered that the work shy man had a rather complex domestic set up – he was in a sexual relationship with a number of different partners all at once (just like Marjorie Wallace then) and made reference to him 'servicing' them. Doris was appalled at the use of this phrase. I can tell that when Doris worked in London medical schools she was an administrator who didn't share a tea room with Top Doctors or their minions. Do you know what the absolute bog standard phrase at St George's was for shagging someone Doris? Servicing them. I heard it every day, among much ribald speculation relating in particular to various Top Doctors who were known to be serving – or being serviced – by numerous casual partners. Indeed one Top Doctor who achieved fame for being serviced by five different men in one weekend now appears in glossy women's magazines in relation to her campaigning work on FGM. I saw an article featuring her the other day. Unlike Ann, I don't really mind who services who if it's non-exploitative and between consenting adults, but the icing on the cake was when I was told that one of the Top Doctors at another medical school in London wasn't very popular because 'he has a pony tail and arrives on his motorbike every day'. I remarked that was hardly earth shattering and I was then told 'yes but the trouble is he has sex with his children, he's too much'. Yep, they knew that a professor of gynaecology in London was having sex with his children. They didn't like it, they gossiped about it but not one of them lifted a finger to investigate or stop it. St Georges was a medical school with a labour ward that used to be occasionally visited by social workers and police officers to remove new born babies from the care of women if they had been deemed unsuitable to care for their children. The man who was alleged to be having sex with his children is still on the Medical Register, he is actually still a very big name and is a Professor Emeritus who sits on the Boards of numerous medical charities. But of course St Georges had a Professor of Paediatrics, Oliver Brooke, who in the mid 1980s went to prison for possessing huge quantities of child porn.
Like some of the Top Doctors, Doris has rather inconsistent views where sexuality is concerned. She supported Section 28 because it was 'about protecting children'. (So that's why the Tories covered up a paedophile ring then!!) When discussing child sexual abuse she relies on the Margaret Hodge defence of 'we didn't know about it in the 70s and 80s'. Yes Doris, we did know about it. Molesting children was considered very unacceptable indeed, even in the 70s and 80s, which is why people went to such lengths to conceal it. The one thing that people didn't tend to accept in the 70s and 80s was that respectable middle class men with families and allegedly 'normal' lives might be involved in such activity – it was very much seen as the preserve of a loner in a flasher's mac. To illustrate the depths of society's ignorance regarding paedophilia, Doris mentions that Harriet Harman and Patricia Hewitt who were famously involved with the NCCL when it was affiliated to PIE are now 'exemplary mothers'. I'm not sure that I see the connection – Harman and Hewitt I am sure would never let their own kids near paedophiles but that did not stop them from doing some stupid things when they worked for the NCCL and then throwing hissy fits in the media when it was exposed many years later. But then Margaret Thatcher would never have let Mark and Carol near a paedophile gang but she ignored one that ran riot in north Wales on her watch because they were only molesting the kids of some sheepshaggers who were in local authority care. The one paedophile whom Doris does have harsh words for is Jimmy Savile – Doris blames the BBC. It wasn't the BBC who nominated him for a knighthood or invited him to Chequers for Christmas – it was Thatcher. And it wasn't the BBC who put him in charge of a high security hospital – it was Doris's colleague Edwina Currie….
Most staggeringly though, one paedophile who Doris has nothing but warm words for is the man who when Doris's dancing partner Craig Revel Horwood was a teenager took Craig travelling and used him, in Ann's own words, as 'rent boy'. This man was a lot older than Craig and Craig's mother was told a tall story in order to ensure that the travel plans weren't stopped. Craig told Doris that despite all this, his travelling companion was a nice man. Which he might well have been, but he was also a highly exploitative man who was happy to lie to people in order to have sex with a minor. Doris marvels at Craig's insights and wishes that the whole world could be as forgiving (which is odd coming from someone who is very keen on the idea of hanging people). She comments that friendship is a marvellous thing. Which I think is a fairly standard line that paedophiles use when approaching young people – and they tell them not to tell their mums what is going on.
So there's The World According To Widdecombe for you. Doris's political life has been one of daft simplistic ideas, of telling the plebs what's good for them, of ludicrous games learnt at the Oxford Union, of ruthlessly fawning to powerful people particularly if they have titles or a great deal of money and of chortling away with her Tory mates whilst making smug comments about socialists. As a paedophile ring ripped through north Wales, leaving a trail of death, destruction and people wrongly imprisoned in it's wake. Although Doris doesn't know the difference between aluminium and zinc, she considers herself a multi-talented erudite being and she spends a lot of time turning her nose up at the plebs who haven't read their Shakespeare. Had Doris been a different sort of electoral candidate for a seat in north Wales, she might well have bothered to become acquainted with some of the literature from the region. One of north Wales's most famous writers was someone called Kate Roberts. She wrote a book called 'Feet In Chains' Doris. Which just about describes the state of those kids in north Wales who were shagged senseless and beaten up in order to provide sexual services for some of your colleagues and were banged up in the North Wales Hospital or Risley Remand Centre if they complained about what was happening. Should any readers think that I might be overdoing it here, I should explain that as well as the people mentioned in this post, in her book Doris also names scores of other political chums whom she has hung out with and who helped her along her way. FIVE of those names appear on the list of names that I have been sent by a journalist as being suspected members of the Westminster Paedophile Ring.
Doris has now retired to Dartmoor with a load of cats. But the damage that this rather dim woman inflicted because she thought that she was Prime Minister material remains.
Author Sally BakerPosted on July 31, 2017 August 1, 2017 Categories Jimmy Savile, Language, Lawyers and Judges, Margaret Thatcher's Cabinet, North Wales Child Abuse Scandal, North Wales Hospital Denbigh, Prisons, Special Hospitals, St Georges Hospital Medical School, Uncategorized, University of Oxford, Welsh Office, Westminster PolticiansTags Alan Johnson, Alison Taylor, Amanda Platell, Angela Rumbold, Anglesey Aluminium, Ann Widdecombe, Anne-Marie Nelson, BBC, Bow Group, BUPA, Carlton Club, CND, Coalition of Peace Through Security, Conservative Central Office, Conservative Party, Court of Appeal, Craig Revel Horwood, David Alton, David Cameron, David Hunt, Department of Employment, Department of Health, Derek Laws, Dr David Owen, Duke of Norfolk, Edward Leigh, Edwina Currie, Enoch Powell, Federation of Conservative Students, FGM, Frank Field, Freedom Association, Greenham Common, Guys Hospital, Harriet Harman, Home Office, Home Secretary, House of Lords, James Arbuthnot, Jeremy Corbyn, Jimmy Savile, John Lacey, Julian Lewis, Kate Roberts, Keith Best, Labour Party, Lady Olga Maitland, Liberal Democrats, Lord Lothian, Lyndon da Cruz, Maidstone Hospital, Marcus Fox, Margaret Hodge, Margaret Thatcher, Margaret Thatcher's Government, Marjorie Wallace, Mary Wynch, Matthew Parris, Michael Ancram, Michael Howard, Michael Lingens, Michael Stern, Middlesex Hospital, Minister for Prisons, Moorfields Hospital, NCCL, Nick Scott, Norman Tebbit, North Wales Child Abuse Scandal, North Wales Hospital Denbigh, Oxford Union, Patricia Hewitt, Peter Holwell, Peter Lilley, Peter Morrison MP, PIE, Professor Oliver Brooke, Richard Barber, Richard Luce, Rio Tinto, Risley Remand Centre, Secretary of State for Health, Secretary of State for Wales, Section 28, St Georges Hospital Medical School, St Thomas's Medical School, Sunday Express, Tony Newton, Unilever, University College Hospital, University of Birmingham, University of London, University of Oxford, Virginia Bottomley, Waterhouse Inquiry, Welsh Office, Westminster Paedophile Ring, William Hague, Ysgol David HughesLeave a comment on Doris Karloff – Honest About Her Expenses But Not Much Else
Whilst writing and researching for this blog and discovering how dodgy an awful lot of the 'expert witnesses', lawyers and judges were who were involved in cases that I've written about here – as well as of course my own case – and after uncovering some of their very interesting networks and connections, I started thinking of a few high profile cases in which people were imprisoned for serious offences but robustly protested their innocence whilst making some intriguing allegations that were potentially explosive but never went anywhere. And I remembered Jonathan King. Jonathan King was a man who 'produced' truly dreadful happy-pop, a rather irritatingly bumptious self-congratulatory celeb who hit the buffers in 2001 when he was sentenced to seven years in prison for child sexual abuse. He was completely trashed in the media and even the vacuous presenters on daytime TV who had only a short while before been toadying to the 'millionaire music mogul' were denouncing him as the scum of the earth on air. King's career didn't recover after his release from prison – he was ruined in a way that for example Michael Barrymore wasn't. A sexually injured corpse was found in Barrymore's swimming pool whilst Barrymore was in residence, which one would have thought would spell the end for him really, but after a much publicised nervous breakdown and some shedding of tears on air, Barrymore ended up back on prime time TV again. King however was never allowed back among polite company. Ever since his arrest King has furiously maintained his innocence and stated that he was stitched up – some of the things that he did probably did him further damage, such as garnering the support of the likes of Simon Cowell and clapped out former Radio 1 DJs and articulating his view that Jimmy Savile was a wronged man, but once he was out of prison he busied himself writing his account of what had gone on and he also produced a notorious 'musical' entitled 'Vile Pervert'. Basically King alleged that he had been targeted for being gay, that the allegations against him were completely fabricated and that there had been some very dodgy legal manoeuvres in order to secure his conviction. He also claimed that he had been at Cambridge with the judge who sentenced him and that this judge had been involved in gay sex himself whilst at university. King was roundly labelled a particularly unsavoury paedophile who couldn't take his punishment like a man, but I did notice that the judge didn't sue him for defamation…
Recent evidence has emerged however suggesting that King may indeed have been the subject of a miscarriage of justice. This evidence includes one of King's accusers admitting that he'd concocted his story for money, King actually being in the U.S. at the time of one of the alleged offences, statements being fabricated and the dates of the alleged offences being altered during the course of the trial. A number of people outside of King's business circle are now suggesting that he was indeed wronged. It is now very evident that at the time that King was being pursued by the police, through the courts and then denounced by daytime TV presenters, that scores of other celebs – including Savile – were known to have been committing sex offences against children yet were treated very differently to King. The explanation usually proffered is the one that King originally espoused – it was a witch-hunt because he was a promiscuous homosexual man, rather than a promiscuous heterosexual man. This is possible, but King was jailed in 2001 – there were plenty of out gay celebs by then, indeed people in the pop music industry have been declaring themselves gay or bisexual since the early 70s. David Bowie launched his career on such claims. So I wondered if King had an enemy in a high place. I haven't found the answer to that question, but whilst I was researching the background to King's arrest and conviction, I came across something far more salient to this blog.
King was investigated by the National Criminal Intelligence Service after someone approached the publicist Max Clifford, trying to sell a story alleging sexual abuse by King and a number of other men. Of course Max Clifford himself has now met the same fate that befell King – he has been imprisoned for sex offences, one involving an under-age girl. When Clifford was charged and then convicted, he too protested his innocence but got the Jonathan King treatment and numerous people crawled out of the woodwork testifying that he was an utter toe rag. But Max Clifford was a man who would definitely have enemies – he had wrecked a lot of careers. Unlike King, Clifford's circle didn't stop at showbiz – Clifford's business involved people in politics as well. Clifford himself always claimed to be a Labour supporter who was so angry at what he claimed was the mismanagement of the NHS over many years by the Tories that he wanted to damage John Major's Government – he claims to have handled a few stories to embarrass the Tories. But Clifford was a friend of Murdoch's right hand woman Rebekah Wade (now Rebekah Brooks) and has caused a bit of difficulty for Labour politicians as well. He stands accused of breaking the story involving Ron Davies that caused Davies to stand down from the Welsh Assembly Government and David Blunkett maintains that Clifford was involved in the media story that precipitated his second resignation, Blunkett being a serial resigner a la Mandelson. Clifford himself admits that he handled the selling to the Daily Mail of the 'tell all' diaries of Tracey Temple, which caused much entertainment for those of us who think that John Prescott is the most appalling old git. That was in 2006. In the same year, Clifford announced his intention to expose politicians who fail to abide by standards expected in public office. He claimed to have a 'dedicated' team of 'loyal' investigators. Clifford maintained that he has always been interested in more than just money, that he couldn't stand hypocrisy in public life and was particularly disgusted by lying politicians. Now if in 2006 Max Clifford had wanted to expose lying politicians who had damaged the NHS, he could certainly have done so – because in that year I e mailed him and told him that I had documentary evidence of a number of politicians who had concealed serious wrongdoing in the mental health services, both in Wales and elsewhere. And I didn't ask Max for any money either – I wrote to him on the advice of a friend as threats and harassment from the north Wales mental health services rained down upon me and my friends and the disgusting Brian Gibbons, then the Health Minister for Wales, wrote me a letter refusing to investigate my complaint, telling me that 'this correspondence is closed'. There were deaths and imprisonments of Hergest patients on an almost weekly basis and I wanted everything exposed. I never received a reply from Max and I just presumed that because I hadn't offered him a story about Gary Glitter he wasn't interested – I had no knowledge then of Max's desire to nail a few political hypocrites. But I'm wondering if Max was rather more interested in my e mail than I thought that he was – Max will have a much better nose than me and I bet he realised that there will have been a link between my story and the north Wales child abuse ring, which had by then received huge media coverage. What if upon receiving that e mail he realised that he could do what he had always really wanted to do and expose a bunch of politicians who had not only stood by whilst patients had died but who'd concealed a paedophile ring as well? Is that why Max might have been telling people in London that he was going to expose some politicians and assembled a team of undercover investigators?
Shortly after I e mailed Max, I started to get worried. Much of my evidence and all the e mails regarding the wrongdoing of the mental health services were on the computer that I used to use at work in a shared office in Bangor University. I discovered that whilst I was out of the office someone had been accessing my computer. Someone was also rifling through my desk regularly. There was one person in this shared office who was working on a joint project with the North West Wales NHS Trust and I wondered of it was her – she had at one point yelled at me that my investigations into the NHS 'were threatening her career' (they were as well because I later discovered that she was in cahoots with some of the worst offenders in the local NHS and had been up to allsorts). So I tightened my security procedures. Shortly after I purchased a new laptop and began to gradually use that and transfer everything over. Before I'd finished, my old computer was stolen. Yes, an ancient crappy, third or fourth hand computer given to a PhD student on her uppers as a favour was stolen. It was stolen along with three other old computers from the same office. My PhD supervisor had placed them all in the corner along with mine, ready for eventual disposal. They were stolen by a former member of Bangor University staff who had until recently shared the office with me and others. He was witnessed by a colleague arriving with a van and removing the computers in broad daylight. My colleague rang the university authorities to report what was going on and the thief was ordered to return them. He gave a bizarre explanation for the theft – that he was setting up a consultancy and thought that the University wouldn't mind if he helped himself to a few old computers. Unfortunately the authorities at Bangor believed that my supervisor had encouraged him in this – he hadn't, my supervisor knew nothing about the theft until I visited him at home and told him. My supervisor was baffled by this man's behaviour and was speculating that perhaps he'd had a breakdown. But my supervisor was a vey trusting man – and he didn't know that I'd written to Max. But one thing that I did know about the man who made off with my computer was that he had a famous brother-in-law – a man called John McTernan, who at the time was the Director of Political Operations for a man called Tony Blair.
Well I never knew if any of my evidence did fall into the grubby hands of John McTernan in the wake of the Brinks-Matt Ancient Computer Robbery, but I've got even more evidence now McTernan and it's completely safe from you and your thieving brother-in-law.
Max Clifford remains in prison but continues to protest his innocence. I have no idea whether he is guilty or not but I do know that there are an awful lot of people who should be in there in prison with him.
Shortly after McTernan's brother-in-law made off with my computer, but before Max Clifford was arrested, I was contacted by an investigative reporter who wanted to make a TV documentary about my encounters with the mental health services. She read the incriminating evidence and met me a number of times and was very keen to run the story. The day before we were due to start filming she telephoned me and asked me to name a public figure in Wales who knew some of what had happened to me but who was not involved in any wrongdoing whatever. I refused, so she asked me again if I would name this person telling me that she'd protect me if I was frightened of them. I replied that I wasn't frightened of them – this person had done nothing at all wrong and I was not going smear an innocent person. I never heard from this journalist again after she told me that if I changed my mind they'd still run the story, but only if I changed my mind… I have never worked out what this journalist's motives were – but I did know that those we know and love were desperately trying to damage the person that I was asked to smear, because they were rumoured to be close to Carwyn Jones no less and this seemed to be an attempt to get at the Labour Party in Wales. I also subsequently discovered that the dreadful Robert Bluglass's daughter Amanda worked in the media herself. So I don't know if this had been an attempt at a political sting or if it was a mate of Amanda's trying to extract her father and his pals from a very big mess – but now I'm wondering if the 'journalist' might have been one of Max's 'undercover investigative reporters'. But it doesn't matter now – I'm publishing it all myself on this blog and I'm not asking myself to smear innocent people.
Footnote: It was I think Rhodri Morgan who stated that the Welsh Gov't wanted to put 'clear red water' between themselves and Westminster. Blair also seems to have had a problem with the Welsh – there is film-footage of him available watching sport on TV whilst yelling 'it's the fucking Welsh again'. Be my guest Tony, read along with me my blog post 'The London Connection' and feel free to film me afterwards yelling 'it's fucking New Labour again'.
Before I sign off, I'm pleased to announce that another topic covered by this blog recently has cropped up on the 'IPM' programme today, female genital mutilation that is. IPM often broadcasts some very odd things, but they've excelled this week. The programme featured a primary school teacher 'raising awareness' among her pupils regarding sexual abuse and FGM, very young pupils as well. Some of the stuff was fairly mainstream with it being explained to children that it wasn't a good idea to participate in conversations with people who asked you to remove your pants in their presence, but then we moved into the tropes of the exotic. The primary school teacher concerned had invited all the parents along to talk to them about FGM – and to ask them to 'share their experiences'. It transpired that one parent had actually undergone the most extreme form of FGM, thus had had nearly all of her external genitalia excised and much of what was left sewn up. So she told the other parents all about it. The primary school teacher, remarking upon the success of this meeting, commented that when the infibulated woman had stopped speaking, 'you could hear a pin drop'. I bet you could – parents evenings have certainly changed since I was alive. During the short time that I worked as a teacher it never occurred to me to ask the parents to describe the state of their genitalia to each other, we just used to discuss the children's progress.
Author Sally BakerPosted on May 6, 2017 May 7, 2017 Categories Bangor University, Jimmy Savile, Lawyers and Judges, North Wales Child Abuse Scandal, North West Wales NHS Trust, Prisons, Uncategorized, University of Cambridge, Welsh Government, Westminster Polticians, Ysbyty GwyneddTags Amanda Bluglass, Bangor University, Carwyn Jones, David Blunkett, David Bowie, Dr Brian Gibbons, Female Genital Mutilation, FGM, Gary Glitter, Hergest Unit, Jimmy Savile, John Major, John McTernan, John Prescott, Jonathan King, Labour Party, Max Clifford, Michael Barrymore, National Criminal Intelligence Service, New Labour, North West Wales NHS Trust, Peter Mandelson, Professor Robert Bluglass CBE, Rebekah Wade, Rhodri Morgan, Ron Davies, Rupert Murdoch, Simon Cowell, Tony Blair, Tracey Temple, Welsh Assembly Government, Welsh Government, Welsh LabourLeave a comment on When Showbiz Meets Politics