Simpering Starmer said SORRY over Savile more than a decade ago… so is Boris really so bad to mention it?
There is no evidence to suggested that Keir Starmer was involved, as Director of Public Prosecutions between 2008 and 2013, in the baffling decision not to bring charges against the sick paedophile Savile.
Yet, in an angry session in the House of Commons, Boris Johnson screamed across the dispatch box that Starmer spent most of his time as DPP ‘prosecuting journalists and failing to prosecute Jimmy Savile.
Boris was absolutely right in his first claim – a matter of record that Starmer was in charge of the arrests of dozens of journalists as part of Operation Elveden, which investigated payments made by a small numbr number of reporters to police and public officials.
I’m not sure what happened to the police and public officials who made a few quid on the side…
But the suggestion that Starmer, by being head of the CPS, missed an opportunity to prosecute Savile for his crimes had the House in uproar and earned a rebuke from Commons Speaker Sir Lindsay Hoyle. Boris’s own backbenchers were a bit shocked too.
Former Tory chief whip Julian Smith declared that the ‘false and baseless personal slur . . . cannot be defended’, while others accused the Prime Minister of peddling a lurid far-Right conspiracy theory.
But are they right?
The ‘conspiracy theory’ says that, as head of the CPS, Starmer personally blocked Savile from being charged for child sex offences.
But that is not what Boris said.
Instead, he said that Starmer ‘failed to prosecute’ Savile. And since Starmer ultimately ran the public body that made the decision not to charge Savile, the Prime Minister’s claim seems hard to dispute.
However, Starmer himself was not the CPS’s ‘reviewing lawyer’ or directly involved in Savile’s case.
In 2011, two years after those police interviews, Savile died, aged 84. In 2013, the true scale of his depravity came to light: he had raped at least 34 women and girls and sexually assaulted up to 450, including children as young as eight.
Starmer, then still DPP, set up an inquiry chaired by Alison Levitt QC. This concluded that at least three prosecutions against Savile would have been possible in 2009 if ‘police and the prosecutors’ had taken a different approach. (Levitt also blasted the CPS for deleting all records of the Savile case from its systems in 2010.) The report did not indicate that the DPP himself had been involved but Starmer, deeply contrite, said: ‘I would like to take the opportunity to apologise for the shortcomings in the part played by the CPS in these cases.’
#starmer #boris #savile
