I understand that the following is a whistleblower website based almost entirely on input from anonymous former and serving police officers who seem to be fed up with ongoing coverup of the most reprehensible paedophile activity by police officers.

I post it with caution and ask readers to drawn their own personal conclusions as to its veracity.

Quote:Police Paedophiles



Page updated on Wednesday 22nd May 2013 at 1655hrs


uPSD were primarily responsible for unmasking West Yorkshire Police paedophile, DC Michael Vause. Working with the Yorkshire Posts Rob Waugh we were able to propagate this nationwide news story. Without that publicity, Vause would have disappeared into retirement with his vile tendencies unknown to the wider public. Indeed, it became apparent only very recently that residents in the tiny village of Wentbridge, Pontefract where Vause lived, at the time of his conviction, were blissfully unaware they had a child abuser in their midst. Mainly due to the local Pontefract & Castleford Express newspaper steadfastly refusing to cover the story of the second convicted Pontefract police paedophile in the past few years. uPSD are also piecing together accounts of a child sex/pornography ring that operated in Knottingley and Pontefract during Vause's time serving as an officer there. We have the names of two police officers in the town who, allegedly, were having sex with underage girls.


A CID detective for most of his career and a seriously bent one at that, according to one very reliable account, Vause ended up in the police Professional Standards Department investigating other suspected paedophiles, would you believe? One of those West Yorkshire Police officers he investigated, former Police Band member PS David Oldroyd, was alleged to have abused his own child. The accusations were made by the suspect's own wife, but he was cleared by Vause. That same Band playing officer also perjured himself at Crown Court in Bradford but has faced no action yet from his own Force. That may well change, in the near future, as an outside police force investigation is now under way that will highlight that criminality.


During a Section 18 search of a fellow police officer's home, the paedophile Michael Thomas Vause removed a CD containing images of young children. Those were nephews and nieces of the officer under suspicion. Despite strenuous requests for an audit trail of the precise movements of that CD whilst in Vause's possession, his PSD protectors have steadfastly refused to provide comfort that Vause still does not hold a copy of that CD. They were aided and abetted in that deceit both by West Yorkshire Police Authority's Fraser Sampson, to whom the officer turned to for help, and Force Solicitor and Police Band member, Mike Percival. The latter-named will also feature in the Rogue Solicitors area of our site.


A third West Yorkshire Police paedophile was arrested after child images were found on his computer. A criminal file was prepared for the CPS but no charges were preferred and the inspector (a former custody sergeant in Wakefield) was allowed to retire on full pension. uPSD are aware of the identity of this individual and our enquiries continue.


The fourth and fifth West Yorkshire Police paedophiles are named as ex-PC's Christopher Snow and Michael Conlon.


Snow of Headingley, Leeds was jailed in 2011. He was sent down for 3 years and nine months, for a string of sex offences against children, including inciting a child into sexual activity. He was already the subject of a child sexual offences restraining order. He had resigned from the police after the first set of offences came to light in 2006. Judge Christopher Batty described Snow as devious in his grooming of teenage girls'. The children were aged between 13 and 15.


Conlon was sent down for making and possessing indecent child images, grooming and attempting sexual activity with a child. Jailing Conlon for two-and -a-half years, The Recorder of Leeds, Judge Peter Collier QC told him: "It's aggravated because you used the fact you were a police officer to build some measure of trust." Conlon served five years with West Yorkshire Police, ending in 2009.


Conlon was based at Killingbeck police station, the same location as Inspector 5′ Mick Starkey (see Jimmy Savile paedophile news page here). We cannot let the mention of Starkey pass without mentioning Sergeant, and now infamous Blobby Bobby', Matt Appleyard, another paedophile and rapist protector who is still a serving officer at the notorious Wetherby NPT (more on them here).


Killingbeck was also where one of the the infamous and illicit trysts between Rogue Officers DCI Elizabeth Belton and C/Supt Ian Whitehouse took place and the base of most of the bent West Yorkshire Police officers involved in the huge, and now notorious, Operation Douglas corruption scandal.


Some of those cases on West Yorkshire Police's roll of paedophile shame are historic but, nonetheless, significant as they involve former police officers who did not have their names listed on the Sex Offenders Register for life.


A disgraced Halifax police officer, who was stationed at Richmond Close Police Station, sexually abused a young girl and was jailed for four years at Leeds Crown Court in Febuary 2004. Peter Newton had served with West Yorkshire Police for more than 29 years admitted six offences of indecent assault against the girl who was aged 11 when the offences began.


Newton was not put on the Sex Offenders' Register for life and his name will be removed next year unless the decision is challenged. He had abused the girl over a period of four years. When Newton first groped and kissed the girl, she was too frightened to tell anyone. The nature of the offending got progressively worse including touching the girl's private parts and simulating a sex act with her. Newton's offending came to light when the abused girl confided in a teacher. Passing sentence, Mr Justice Wakerley said the case represented an enormous breach of trust.


West Yorkshire Police probationary officer, Simon Dagger, downloaded pictures of naked children from an American pornography site and was snared by police in the Operation Ore crackdown on internet child pornography. Appearing at Leeds Crown Court in April 2003, 24-year-old Dagger, from Pontefract, wept when he was told he would not be jailed for having around 45 indecent images of children stored on his computer. DC Mick Vause (see above) was also from Pontefract and, like Vause, Dagger received a three-year Community Rehabilitation Order with a condition of attendance on a sex-offender treatment programme.


The Court was told that Dagger accessed the child images from a library' of around 8,000 photographs stored on the computer. The vast majority were legal adult material with a handful of images involving children falling into the most serious category. He admitted five sample charges of possessing indecent images of children and was ordered to sign the sex-offender register for five years (ending 2008).


Dagger was adamant that he didn't get any sexual gratification from these images and it was his curiosity which spiralled out of control. Paedophile Vause also produced the same excuse with his famous line to the Judge: Curiosity killed the cat, Ma'am'


Now we uncover, in March 2013, yet another pervert that is running loose in the community who formerly worked for a significant period of his police career at Killingbeck, the same police station as PC Michael Conlon (see above). PC 3917 Gary Simpson, aged 41, was convicted in March 2010 on 20 charges of making and possessing indecent images under the Protection of Children Act 1978. He was also made the subject of a Sex Prevention Order under the Sexual Offences Act 2003. His computer was also confiscated which is a concern as it is known that at least one paedophile was operating at the time in the Professional Standards Department of West Yorkshire Police. DC Michael Vause has since been convicted of child pornography offences.


A jail term indicates that the images discovered on Simpson's hard drive were of a serious nature as only Level 4 or Level 5 images would normally attract a custodial sentence. Simpson was unmasked as a paedophile only when he showed the images to a fellow officer, who reported his concerns to supervisors.


The latest two West Yorkshire Police officers to be arrested on sex offences by their own Professional Standards officers are PCSO Liam Austerfield, a Wakefield Division NPT officer who was suspended in early April 2013 pending the outcome of criminal enquiries and then resigned just one week later. Austerfield was involved at the Brick House Youth Club in Ossett and uPSD understand that some of the alleged offences are connected to those duties. He was subsequently re-arrested for possession of indecent material shortly after the first arrest which, uPSD understands, followed a search of his home and siezing of Austerfield's property, including his computer. Austerfield appears at Barnsley Magistrates on Friday 24th May, 2013 charged with indecent image offences and inciting a child to have sex offences.


Response officer, PC Kevin Ellis from Castleford was arrested in mid-April after child porn images were found on his computer. He committed suicide the day after he was released on bail. For full story on the background to the arrest of Ellis click here. Once again, Ellis's local newspaper, the aforementioned Pontefract & Castleford Express, are happy to ignore the potential connection with the other two police officer paedophiles in a relatively small circulation area but gave substantial coverage to the jailing of a 75 year old paedophile member of the public in the same week.


This takes the West Yorkshire Police paedophile count to ten, if Austerfield is convicted, and uPSD fully expect more police paedophiles to be unmasked in the coming weeks, as our network of informants/investigators grows. We have a very strong lead concerning another Pontefract CID colleagues of Vause's, with a predeliction for under-age girls, who also lived in a village close to Vause's Wentbridge home. A third Pontefract detective has also been named by an informant also in connection with sex with under-age girls.


Throughout this process of exposing West Yorkshire Police child abusers we have been obstructed at every turn by West Yorkshire Police, and their devious co-conspirators at the Police Authority, but this is an issue of massive public interest and importance, particularly in the light of Jimmy Savile operating unfettered in Leeds for over 40 years by his local police force. Police & Crime Commissioner, Mark Burns-Williamson, occupied the Chairman's seat at the now defunct and disgraced West Yorkshire Police Authority during the entire period when these paedophiles have been exposed and has, on the face of it, chosen to look the other way. Burns Williamson also lives in Castleford, significantly enough.


Burns-Williamson's Vice Chair was dodgy long-term Leeds City Councillor and ex-Mayor of Leeds, Les Carter. What did he know about Jimmy Savile's rape and paedophile activities over the entire 40 years he has been a Councillor. Nothing at all, Mr Carter? Well, not quite. We do know that you put forward Savile to be the face of a crime prevention campaign in 2008 called Talking Signs in your role as Chairman of Safer Leeds Board (read here). The police officer running the campaign in his role as Community Safety Officer was none other than serial flasher, Sgt Ian Poskitt. Is it a coincidence that the police and Police Authority went to extraordinary lengths to conceal Poskitt's first two offences from public view?


Finally, why would Mr Vause be attending the Authority's last ever meeting in November 2012, which you chaired, when he was a convicted paedophile and then belatedly give apologies almost as the meeting started when it was realised that investigative journalist, Neil Wilby, was present at the same meeting?


What a tangled web we weave.

If, and I stress the word "if', members of the police force themselves are active paedophiles who can rest easy because they know that, in the main, their paedohphilia will be covered-up and that they will not be prosecuted - but perhaps forced to retire on pensions at worst, or shoved sideways --- then imagine the temptation of the present government not to take action against former senior Cabinet Ministers who, if formally named and arrested, might easily bring down the present government.

The whole pile of rotting stink that is today's United Kingdom Establishment deserves to fall in utter disgrace.

That's all I can say.

Wonderful to see professional police breaking ranks and exposing the criminal and corrupt amongst them. The consequences of continued cover up are corrosive to society and in individual cases deadly.

Message from the source of Tom Watson's PMQ: Does the British government have a formal policy to protect paedophiles?

The more you look in to the sewer the deeper it gets.
We can add the Lord Chief Justice to the Attorney General and the Director of Public Prosecutions ( as in the cases of Sir Peter Hayman,Cyril Smith etc ) to the list of our most senior judicial figures who are [allegedly] party to Establishment cover-ups at worst and the making of appalling decisions totally out of sinct with public opinion at best.
Members of the judiciary who make comments such as possessing and distributing indecent images of children is like collecting cigarette cards, raping a 7 year old is something that could happen to anyone of us, to stop someone teaching because he has sexually abused children would be a serious loss to the teaching profession should not only be immediately removed from the Bar but should have their own backgrounds looked in to. The path for a victim to get justice is so difficult even before they come face to face with judges holding theses views
It never ceases to amaze me how far the Establishment will go to protect itself, even brazenly right in the glare of the public spotlight
Where are the investigations and Inquiries in to the role of politicians etc in the cover ups over child sexual abuse
Immediately after the Newsnight debacle John Whittingdale was so fast out of the traps to demand the head of the BBC's Director General that he was in danger of tripping over all the mikes that were in front of him when he decided to be interviewed by every media oulet he could possibly get hold of. David Cameron immediately followed this up when the Savile story broke by stating that "every institution" must look at themselves and fully investigate why no-one reported/exposed such staggering levels of abuse. EVERY institution includes Parliament, Government, Attorney General, DPP.
John Whittingdale and David Cameron are remarkably silent on this now.
I would like to suggest where they could start and there are numerous historic situations which are not subject to current Police investigations and therefore there is no conflict of interests
The BBC and the NHS will no doubt be severely censured over Savile further down the line.
At least these institutions did not have a formal policy to protect paedophiles
I would suggest that Parliament and indeed Government did
How else are we to interpret Chief Whip, Tim Fortescue's statement on national TV ( ref. Michael Cockerell's BBC Documentary ) that rather than refer to the Police when an MP is caught sexually abusing a child it is just kept as a matter of record in the Dirt Book to be used as a vehicle of control in the voting lobby at a later date !!!!!!!!!!!!!
How else do we interpret Edwina Currie's statement, in her attempt to sell as many copies of a book as she could, that everyone at the top of the Thatcher Government knew Peter Morrison was a "PEDERAST" his reward promotion to be Deputy Chairman of the Tory Party, a Minister, Thatcher's PPS and in charge of her 1990 election campaign
How else do we interpret Gyles Brandeth's statements that everone in his constituency knew that Peter Morrison was a " filthy pervert"
How else do we interpret the cover ups at the highest level manifested in statements from puppet Attorney Generals and DPP's re. Peter Hayman, Cyril Smith, MP's allegedly caught up in various Police/US Customs sting operations etc etc
How else do we interpret the treatment of Geoffrey Dickens at the hands of Parliament at the time and the convenient loss of his " Dossier" since.
When and in what form will David Cameron be true to his word and order an investigation in to the role of Government, Parliament, the main political parties, the security services in at best a failure to expose child abuse from within their ranks and at worst a highly sophisticated cover up over the generations
[URL="http://spotlightonabuse.wordpress.com/2013/05/11/the-dirt-book-how-the-sexual-abuse-of-children-is-used-for-political-gain/"]THE DIRT BOOK: How the sexual abuse of children is used for political gain
[/URL]http://spotlightonabuse.wordpress.com/20...edophiles/

Magda Hassan Wrote:Message from the source of Tom Watson's PMQ: Does the British government have a formal policy to protect paedophiles?

The more you look in to the sewer the deeper it gets.
We can add the Lord Chief Justice to the Attorney General and the Director of Public Prosecutions ( as in the cases of Sir Peter Hayman,Cyril Smith etc ) to the list of our most senior judicial figures who are [allegedly] party to Establishment cover-ups at worst and the making of appalling decisions totally out of sinct with public opinion at best.
Members of the judiciary who make comments such as possessing and distributing indecent images of children is like collecting cigarette cards, raping a 7 year old is something that could happen to anyone of us, to stop someone teaching because he has sexually abused children would be a serious loss to the teaching profession should not only be immediately removed from the Bar but should have their own backgrounds looked in to. The path for a victim to get justice is so difficult even before they come face to face with judges holding theses views
It never ceases to amaze me how far the Establishment will go to protect itself, even brazenly right in the glare of the public spotlight
Where are the investigations and Inquiries in to the role of politicians etc in the cover ups over child sexual abuse
Immediately after the Newsnight debacle John Whittingdale was so fast out of the traps to demand the head of the BBC's Director General that he was in danger of tripping over all the mikes that were in front of him when he decided to be interviewed by every media oulet he could possibly get hold of. David Cameron immediately followed this up when the Savile story broke by stating that "every institution" must look at themselves and fully investigate why no-one reported/exposed such staggering levels of abuse. EVERY institution includes Parliament, Government, Attorney General, DPP.
John Whittingdale and David Cameron are remarkably silent on this now.
I would like to suggest where they could start and there are numerous historic situations which are not subject to current Police investigations and therefore there is no conflict of interests
The BBC and the NHS will no doubt be severely censured over Savile further down the line.
At least these institutions did not have a formal policy to protect paedophiles
I would suggest that Parliament and indeed Government did
How else are we to interpret Chief Whip, Tim Fortescue's statement on national TV ( ref. Michael Cockerell's BBC Documentary ) that rather than refer to the Police when an MP is caught sexually abusing a child it is just kept as a matter of record in the Dirt Book to be used as a vehicle of control in the voting lobby at a later date !!!!!!!!!!!!!
How else do we interpret Edwina Currie's statement, in her attempt to sell as many copies of a book as she could, that everyone at the top of the Thatcher Government knew Peter Morrison was a "PEDERAST" his reward promotion to be Deputy Chairman of the Tory Party, a Minister, Thatcher's PPS and in charge of her 1990 election campaign
How else do we interpret Gyles Brandeth's statements that everone in his constituency knew that Peter Morrison was a " filthy pervert"
How else do we interpret the cover ups at the highest level manifested in statements from puppet Attorney Generals and DPP's re. Peter Hayman, Cyril Smith, MP's allegedly caught up in various Police/US Customs sting operations etc etc
How else do we interpret the treatment of Geoffrey Dickens at the hands of Parliament at the time and the convenient loss of his " Dossier" since.
When and in what form will David Cameron be true to his word and order an investigation in to the role of Government, Parliament, the main political parties, the security services in at best a failure to expose child abuse from within their ranks and at worst a highly sophisticated cover up over the generations
[URL="http://spotlightonabuse.wordpress.com/2013/05/11/the-dirt-book-how-the-sexual-abuse-of-children-is-used-for-political-gain/"]THE DIRT BOOK: How the sexual abuse of children is used for political gain
[/URL]http://spotlightonabuse.wordpress.com/20...edophiles/

I think this whole question is adequately summed up in the title of this thread, "the Power of the Paedos" -- and the source of their power is almost certainly blackmail.

Read the comments of a Judge who has just retired, and weep.

Not even mildly Victorian imo, but definitely knocking on the door of the Dickensian.

The Slog.

Max Clifford - the Keeper of the Secrets.

He must be considering his options.

Quote:Max Clifford pleads not guilty to 11 indecent assault charges

Celebrity publicist denies allegations at Westminster magistrates court and says after hearing: 'This has been a nightmare'


Josh Halliday
The Guardian, Tuesday 28 May 2013 11.38 BST

Max Clifford has pleaded not guilty to 11 charges of indecent assault on seven alleged victims.

The celebrity publicist, who made his fortune shaping the reputations of some of Britain's biggest stars, spoke quietly but firmly as he denied the allegations read to him at Westminster magistrates court in London on Tuesday.

Clifford, 70, is charged with 11 indecent assaults, allegedly committed between 1966 and 1985 on girls and women aged between 15 and 19. He will appear at Southwark crown court on 12 June after his case was adjourned by the chief magistrate, the judge Howard Riddle. He must live and sleep at his home address in Walton-on-Thames, Surrey, and have no unsupervised contact with anyone under 18 as part of his bail conditions.

Speaking after the short hearing, Clifford held his wife's hand and maintained that the allegations were "totally without foundation".

"All I know is nobody ever said anything about me at all before Jimmy Savile.

"This has been a nightmare for myself and my family and I'm totally innocent of these allegations. Since December I've been in the dark, and anonymous people have made accusations from a long, long time ago. They are without any foundation."

Clifford said he had been arrested "in a very public way" and, asked whether he believed he was the victim of a witch hunt, added: "That's for you to make your mind up."

Dressed in a blue blazer, grey trousers and a white open-necked shirt, Clifford looked tanned and healthy as he sat alone in the large glass-encased dock. His wife, Jo Westwood, sat in the public gallery alongside a number of journalists.

Clifford made no further comment as he walked through a packed media scrum outside the court building. One member of the public shouted allegations about other entertainers as Clifford and his wife were jostled into a waiting taxi.

Clifford was first arrested in December under Scotland Yard's Operation Yewtree investigation, launched in the wake of the Savile scandal.

A former EMI Records junior press officer, Clifford has acted as a powerful intermediary between the press and on-screen stars for more than five decades, working as an early publicist for the Beatles and introducing British audiences to celebrities such as Muhammad Ali and Frank Sinatra in the 1960s.

Clifford went on to manage the reputations of public faces including Simon Cowell, the Olympic cyclist Chris Hoy and the late Jade Goody, who found fame on the reality show Big Brother in 2002.

He has helped orchestrate some of the most memorable tabloid front pages in Fleet Street history, not least the infamous March 1986 "Freddie Starr ate my hamster" story in the Sun.

In Max's own words, with commentary following from Carole Cadwalladr:

'At home, Max was the rock Louise and Liz relied on as he tried to keep them both strong and positive. But his own anxieties remained bottled up inside him... He leaned on no one but escaped from his worries through his work, playing sport, and organising sex parties.'

Crikey. It turns out that Max, routinely described in interviews as 'a squeaky-clean family man' was in fact southwest London's answer to Hugh Hefner. Or maybe Cynthia Payne, since at one point he refers to it as 'procuring': he set up stars with 'models, actresses, bored housewives, that sort of thing'. And at the same time that he'd been busy exposing Tory ministers and soap stars for sexual double standards, he had himself been a serial womaniser, all the while playing happy families back home in Surrey.

What took the police so long?

How will Max play it?

He must have "get out of jail free" cards.

However, if some of those cards threaten the true structures of power, the truthteller is likely to find that he's just played a "get found hanging with your cock out and an orange in your mouth" card. A card to destroy the reputation of the person who plays it.

Ask Stephen Milligan.

Hmmmmmm


----------------

Quote:
Circus Maximus

He's the most powerful man in tabloid Britain, and he's used his position as the nation's 'Ringmaster of Scandal' to arrange more than 150 front-page 'scoops' in the past 18 months alone. But Max Clifford, as it turns out, has a lurid secret of his own. Carole Cadwalladr dishes the dirt


Carole Cadwalladr
The Observer, Sunday 23 July 2006

So, here's a tricky question. Do I treat Max Clifford as he has treated others? Or, do I not? So, not that tricky, actually. Although, I do rather wonder at the form a Max Clifford revenge attack might take. Because, on the one hand, he says he's impervious to criticism as well as being rather engagingly honest about his failings, he never attempts to justify himself, 'because I know I can't' and readily admits to all manner of really not very nice personality traits, including lying, cheating and generally being a bit of a rat-bag. On the other, if my face appears next to a minor EastEnders character in next week's Sun, with a headline which reads something like, 'Who is X's New Mystery Minger?', you'll know that he was fibbing about this, too.
Oh, he's such a fibber, Max. There's not too many people in public life who'll cheerfully admit to telling barefaced lies, as Max does, ('an important part of PR is lies and deceit, but I'm the only person who'll ever admit to it') although it explains why the PR establishment loathes him, and why every interview he's ever done is seemingly a work of purest fiction.
But then, as Max tells me, the only thing that he would really mind is if someone said he was rubbish in bed. Or 'that I had a small willy'. It's why he always encourages his kiss'n'tellers to say that their man was an animal in the sack and could keep it up all night.
'I say to them, for God's sake, try and be a little bit generous. With Rebecca Loos that wasn't a problem, she was quite happy to say that about David Beckham.'
'And Tracey Temple?'
'And Tracey Temple,' he says although somehow this seems to lack the same conviction.
Because Max has been at it again. The deputy leader's mistress was his client, and he's made a tidy amount from the Prescott's marital misery. But then this is what Max does best.
He's the ringmaster of the nation's sexual scandals and the chief conduit by which we know what we know about the private lives of David Beckham, David Mellor, Jude Law and countless others.
The net result of all this - the disarming honesty - is that he's that classic postmodern literary device: the unreliable narrator. I have no idea where the truth ends and the self-aggrandisement begins, and although he's terrifically entertaining, telling salacious anecdotes with punchlines like 'blah blah, scandal, a household name, Freddie Starr actually, but you can't write that', I'm not at all sure that I trust him. In fact, I know that I don't. But, in fairness, the feeling's pretty mutual. He greets me by saying: 'Come on in. I'm afraid I can't remember your name although yes, I know we've met. I've read the cuts. You wrote that very sarcastic piece about me, didn't you?'
'It wasn't that sarcastic,' I say and he seems to agree, although it's hard to know because as well as talking to me, he's also padding through his house in his tennis shorts and trainers - he used to play water-polo for England and at 63 still runs and plays tennis twice a week - giving directions to the housekeeper and dictating some copy down the line to the Press Gazette, the journalist's trade paper now owned by his old pal, Piers Morgan, in which he has a column.
Still, at least this clears up one niggling question I had: that he knows that I've met him before. And, it's to his credit that although it becomes increasingly clear that he's highly suspect of the line my interview is going to take, it's game of him to agree to it. Because what Max knows is that I know rather more about his private life than he'd necessarily like made public. But then, Max Clifford didn't get to be Max Clifford without being both a risk-taker and a pretty astute judge of human character.
So, that's the plus side. On the minus side, I'm left rather wondering what that must say about me. Although when he tells me what he'd like me to write in the article, and what he wouldn't like me to write in the article, I can't help thinking that maybe he's made the tiniest miscalculation.
He's a while on the phone though, so the housekeeper makes me a cup of tea and I sit in the conservatory with a pampered little lapdog for company and admire the view out over his lawns and pergola and ornamental pond. The house - behind electronic gates, on a private estate - has acres of immaculately vacuumed cream carpet, a cream, gold and beige interior, and a wealth of ostentatious flower arrangements - orchids, lilies, great big green spiky things. It's all very Surrey: newly built but in a traditional style and slap-bang in the golf and G & T belt.
As well as the housekeeper in the kitchen, there's also a landscape gardener in the garden, a van load of builders in the driveway and then a specialist engineer turns up to have a look at Max's original Fifties jukebox.
He's quite an employment provider, Max. And this is just one of his houses. His old marital home, where he lived with his wife, Liz, who died of cancer in 2003, is half a mile away, and now home to his daughter, Louise. There's also the apartment in Marbella where he goes for three months of the year. Then there are the 10 people who work for him in his office, fielding calls, and liaising with the tabloids, and this is before we've even got around to the thorny subject of Max's 'PA', Jo.
Oh dear, yes, Jo is a thorny subject. Because, as well as being Max's PA, she's also his live-in lover. And, although this is something you are never going to read about in any tabloid newspaper, she's married - just not to Max. What's more, when I met her last year - on a press trip to Ireland , with Max and Brian McFadden - I didn't realise any of this at first. But then, I discovered, neither did her husband.
In fact, I would have remained in the dark, had Max not sidled up to me and said: 'By the way, Carole, for the purposes of this article, Jo is my PA.' And then the girls from his office got drunk and told me what every tabloid diary writer and showbiz reporter in the country apparently knew. And, for an ugly lesson in how the media works, here it is: none of them wrote about it because none of them could afford to offend one of the prime sources of quality scandal.
All of which left me with an unappetising dilemma: collude with Max, or potentially wreck someone else's marriage. In the end, I decided I didn't really want to embark on a new career as a tabloid hell-whore, and it wasn't until the Daily Mail carried a tame little diary item last autumn saying Max had a 'close companion' that he was semi-outed - although even then, it transpires, it was only because he granted his permission.
'I was down in the south of France at a launch, and the journalist, who I've known a very long time, said, can't we write it, Max? It's been such a long time, and we've been very good, can't we write such and such? I said, just leave it for a little while, and I'll let you know when we can do something. As long as it isn't too... you know.
They were very patient, for a couple of years. And then eventually I said, OK then.'
It's what Piers Morgan calls Max's 'get out of jail free card'. And as I point out to him it puts him in a more privileged position than any politician, TV presenter, or celebrity in the entire country.
'Oh, I don't know about that, poppet. Maybe, I suppose. Although there were plenty who tried to get me when I was doing my bit to bring down Major's government...'
They can't have tried that hard, though - because, last autumn, Max, together with Angela Levin, a journalist on the Mail, brought out his life story. And what a story it is. There's the rise from his humble working-class roots in Wimbledon, his early days at EMI, handling the Beatles before they got famous, and, later, Sinatra, and then there's his transformation into the country's scandalmonger-in-chief.
So far, so predictable. What I hadn't been prepared for - because the only interview he's done since the book came out was with a journalist who hadn't appeared to have read it - was paragraphs like this: 'At home, Max was the rock Louise and Liz relied on as he tried to keep them both strong and positive. But his own anxieties remained bottled up inside him... He leaned on no one but escaped from his worries through his work, playing sport, and organising sex parties.'
Crikey. It turns out that Max, routinely described in interviews as 'a squeaky-clean family man' was in fact southwest London's answer to Hugh Hefner. Or maybe Cynthia Payne, since at one point he refers to it as 'procuring': he set up stars with 'models, actresses, bored housewives, that sort of thing'. And at the same time that he'd been busy exposing Tory ministers and soap stars for sexual double standards, he had himself been a serial womaniser, all the while playing happy families back home in Surrey.
'I never had a conscience about it. I wouldn't say it's right. It wasn't. But to me it was another sport. I played football, I played water-polo, I played squash, I played tennis. And I...' '...played women?'
'Well you know what I'm saying, we played each other. And in my defence, not that I can ever defend myself, if you and I had had an affair, you would have known exactly what it's about. I'm greedy, I'm married, I love my wife, she does understand me, I have a wonderful life, I'm just greedy, can you accept that? If you can accept that, fine. If you can't accept that, I totally understand. Or, as and when you get fed up - and I'm not trying to justify myself, couldn't justify myself - but... I was straight with them. I didn't play them around. I didn't pretend to be... if you see what I'm saying.'
I do see what he's saying, but I'm a bit surprised. Maybe it's the sort of thing that men say to other men all the time, but they don't often brag about it to women. I also suspect it's why Max has been so astute in his dealings with people in a takes-a-goat-to-know-a-goat sort of a way, and why he's never shown much mercy towards his victims. He says that he turns down kiss-and-tells all the time, and that there's certain people he'd never stitch up even if he had cast-iron evidence (he's a life-long Labour supporter, and despite the trials John Prescott has just been through, he says he could never bring himself to do it to Blair).
But he doesn't have much sympathy for married men who get caught out. Because they're just like him. And he never got caught. And in any case, the danger of being caught was all part of the thrill.
How else to explain the 'sex parties'? He held them throughout the Sixties, the Seventies and right the way into the Eighties, always in the distinctly unglamorous locale of the outer London suburbs.
'It was absolutely ridiculous. I'll give an example. A mate of mine had a little flat in Colliers Wood. He was a printer and on a Friday evening, I used to use the flat. Mac would come back from the late shift at three or four in the morning, and there would be this one at it in that bedroom, and this one there, and that one there, and these ones standing in the corridor... he'd say, Max, I'm ever so tired, do you think you could ask such-and-such to leave, because I'm knackered. And these people, they would be household names.'
It sounds not so much like an anecdote as an account of a scene from a Sixties British sex comedy. Which isn't such a bad comparison actually, since Diana Dors was a 'friend' of Max's and in the book he drops fairly heavy hints about an affair.
'So what? People would be slipping away during the party?' I ask him. 'Or it would be happening in front of you?'
'It wasn't you do her, and you do him... it was natural combustion. Like-minded people. Coming together. And I was the ringmaster.'
'So, you were a participator? Or just the organiser?'
'Well, I would say it, but I was extremely selective. With me it was quality rather than quantity, which was why I was probably extremely lucky in terms of sexual diseases. Of course we'd never heard of Aids and things like that, I mean Jesus Christ! When I think back... so it was natural spontaneity. But, hmm, there was an awful lot of it.'
I'm not sure what I'm supposed to make of this information. Or why he's chosen to unburden himself about it now. Liz, his wife, to whom I don't doubt that he was devoted in his own way, 'suspected', he says, but never found out; but he did introduce his long-term mistress, Ria, to his daughter and when he says he had no conscience at all about it, he means it: he's so boastful! It makes me half-wish that somebody would come forth and say he's got a small willy.
He also claims to have 'retired' 10 years ago. But then, as Sir Jimmy Goldsmith put it, 'A man who marries his mistress creates a vacancy.' And, besides, as he keeps on telling me, 'Everyone's at it.'
'Nearly everybody I've ever known has affairs. Nearly every journalist I've ever met has affairs. I haven't met one, in 40-odd years, who hasn't. You wouldn't realise it, you wouldn't know it, you wouldn't believe it, but most of them are. It's not that I think they are, I know they are! What you've got to understand is that the biggest part of my game is not promotion, it's protection. Keeping things away from the media every year becomes a bigger and bigger slice of Max Clifford Associates.'
There's something a bit depressing about hanging out in Max's moral universe. It's a world where men are men and women are trollops. It's not that he doesn't have scruples - he does. But it's a pick'n'mix sort of philosophy that'd take a greater intellect than mine to disentangle. He's an unlikely but passionate advocate of social justice, hates what the Tories did to the NHS, and gives away buckets of his own cash to charity. His daughter, Louise, developed rheumatoid arthritis at the age of six, and, over the years, has had 17 major operations, all of which Max was there for - the last person she saw before going under, the first person she saw on waking up - and it's left him with an almost visceral hatred for the Conservatives and an evangelical zeal to raise money for children's charities.
But, when it comes to everything else, he's completely amoral, borderline psychopathic. Oh dear, I can't really say that, can I? Although if anybody is libel-proof it's surely I-tell-lies-for-cash Max. What I mean is that he seems to lack the ability to empathise in any meaningful way. With his wife, with the victims of his stories.
He had 150 front pages in the past 18 months, although, he says, it's the least of his business these days. He cross-fertilises like mad: the reason Gillian McKeith was on Celebrity X Factor is because both she and Simon Cowell are clients. The reason I went to Galway with Brian McFadden is because he and Club 328, a charter jet operation, were both clients. And then there's his 'protection' - and I'd like to say 'racket', because that's what it sounds like - paying people off here, getting them jobs there, although there's no doubt that he's a brilliant advertisement for his own services.
The reason, he says, that his sexual exploits were never exposed is because, 'I beat the tabloids at their own game. It was a competition. Another sport... And I won.'
He's a great one for competition, there's no doubt about that. He loves it, thrives on it, is currently involved in a feud with the News of the World because they stitched up Kerry Katona, his then client, and now won't deal with them, and he agreed to let Louis Theroux hang out with him for several months just to see if he could out-Theroux him (the consensus is that he did). Every tennis match he plays, he says, 'is like the final at Wimbledon. And when I kick a ball around, it's the World Cup. It's ridiculous, but I can't help myself.'
I think to myself that I wouldn't like to cross him, and there's an argument that this article will seal my journalistic death warrant, but then, what the hell, I go and ask him about Jo.
He's quite happy to talk about her. They met through one of his charities - she volunteers at a children's hospice. 'And I also knew her slightly from Cobham. I'd be having a cup of coffee and she'd be there with her husband. And you know, whatever, whatever. I always thought, "What an attractive woman." And she's my type. The colouring, the... whatever.
I've always gone for brunettes rather than blondes. Although that doesn't mean there hasn't been the odd blonde... but anyway, after Liz died, I needed somebody to help. Because Liz ran the house. She paid the cheques. I didn't have a clue. And I said to Jo, "Listen, love, I need someone, to run the home, to organise the cleaner..." and she came and said, "I'll do it." And then... well, it was just natural spontaneity.'
Ah, natural spontaneity, there it is again. It's a big thing with Max. He's been called a lot of things in his career. 'A little turd' by Edwina Currie, and the 'sleazeball's sleazeball' by David Mellor, which is almost enough to make you warm to him. 'But to me, people having sex isn't sleazy. It's great. It's one of the most pleasurable things in life. I'm very lucky in that from a very young age, sex is one of those things that I've really enjoyed. The way I do sport and a nice meal, and good conversation and being in love and all of these things.'
Which is funny when you think about the fact that he's made his name and fortune out of the nation's collective prurience. Sex, for Max, is not the free-and-easy love-in he describes, but a capital asset. The British market he says is the best in the world and in the book there's a nice little story about how every Friday night before he goes home, he takes a print-out of what he's got in the bank.
'And then on a Saturday morning I compare it with what I had the month before. And I always like to beat myself. I'm always in competition with myself.'
'So what did you have in the bank last Saturday?' I ask him. 'I think it was £1.7m in cash. And then this place cost me £3m, which I have a small mortgage on. And my other home, which is worth £2m, is paid for, Louise's flat is paid for, and my flat in Spain, which is worth about £1.5m, that's paid for.'
He only moved into the new house a couple of months ago, so that he and Jo had a new start in a new home and she's been to see a lawyer about getting a divorce. He's quite happy to talk about her, but then gives me strict instructions about what I'm allowed and what I'm not allowed to write about.
'I'm happy for anyone to imply whatever they want about me, but what I don't want is her daughter being upset. Her husband's been through enough anyway. I don't want to rub salt in the wounds. I'd much rather you said, 'There's a new lady in his life,' and left it at that.'
'But I've met Jo...'
'It's very simple, we're both very happy, and she's living with me...' and then he tails off to take another call, his fifth in an hour-and-a-half, although I don't mind because he has a helpful habit of repeating what the other person says so that you can follow the conversation.
'David Mills? Tessa Jowell's husband? He's interested in me representing him? Well, I'll tell him what I tell everybody. He's very welcome to come and have a chat and if I believe him, I'll take him on. And if I don't I won't. What was the name of the Italian chap who wanted me to represent him? You know, the ex prime minister. Berlusconi, that's it. Hmmm.
Well, we'll see won't we? But tell him I'm quite happy to sit down and talk to him.' And, then, Jo herself arrives. In Galway, I spent more than an hour chatting to her, and part of the reason I couldn't bring myself to do a Max on her was that I liked her. She's a rather glamorous fortysomething with a taste for gold jewellery and expensive handbags. And she was friendly, which is always a plus with me, and told me about her daughter, a ballerina, and looked pained when she said she had 'complications' in her personal life.
This time round, though, she can barely bring herself to look at me. She comes in to tell Max he's got to finish up because they need to go for lunch, and won't catch my eye. Things get even frostier when I go into the kitchen.
'You can't write about me!' she says. I don't really know how to respond to this and, in the end, I say, 'That's a bit unrealistic.'
'You can't go messing things up! Not just when I've got it all sorted out. You can say I'm the housekeeper, or something.'
'But I've met you,' I say. 'I'm talking to you now.'
'But you don't have to mention me! I've only just got everything sorted.'
Oh dear. If anybody knows the media game, it's Max, and he presumably knew precisely what he was doing when he agreed to the interview. As he told me, 'David Beckham is old enough and ugly enough to know what he was doing.'
As he is, too. Which makes me wonder what this interview is actually all about. If Max has another agenda, which I'm unwittingly fulfilling. Or if he simply believes that he's beyond the reach of any journalist. Who knows? He's older, smarter, more experienced and better connected than me and if anybody's going to come off badly from this, I've no doubt ultimately that it will be me.
I feel sorry for Jo, though, I do. She fell out of love with one man and into love with another, it's not exactly the crime of the century.
But she's been saved the baying hordes of paparazzi that anyone else would have had if Max had been as famous as Max but not Max. And to have not written about her would have been to collude with him on his mission to control the whole of the UK mainstream media.
I don't feel particularly good about it, though. And when they give me a lift to the station in his Bentley, the quiet purr of the engine does little to disguise the silence that reverberates around the cream-leather interior. When we say goodbye, Max turns in the passenger seat, and says, simply: 'Be gentle with her.'
I hope I have been. I just rather wish Max would sometimes think of doing the same.
Read All About It, edited by Max Clifford, is published by Virgin at £8.99.
Making a splash
Freddie Starr, March 1986, The Sun
This was the turning point in Clifford's career and the birth of a new type of 'creative' (ie made-up) PR. Fledgling publicist Max persuaded Kelvin MacKenzie, the then Sun editor, to run a story about how Starr put his friend Lea La Salle's hamster, Supersonic, between two pieces of bread and gobbled it up.
'Freddie Starr Ate My Hamster' is now the stuff of tabloid legend, nominated by the BBC as one of the greatest headlines of all time.
David Mellor And Antonia De Sancha, September 1992, The People
At the height of John Major's Back to Basics campaign, David Mellor was secretary of state for the newly created department of heritage, and Antonia de Sancha was an unemployed actress. Max approached The People with her story, they coughed up £30,000 and bugged her apartment, revealing Mellor's predilection for 'toe-jobs'.
This story is classic Clifford - he happily admits he invented the detail that Mellor wore his Chelsea FC strip during sex. Mellor resigned and now works in sports radio.
Mandy Allwood and The Octuplets, September 1996, News Of The World
When Mandy Allwood found out she was pregnant with octuplets following hormone treatment, she called Max. He tied her up in an exclusive deal with the News of the World until tragically, in the 19th week, she miscarried. She later successfully sued Clifford for secretly profiting from the story. He admits it was 'regrettable'.
Jeffrey Archer, Ted Francis And Monica Coghlan, November 1999, News Of The World
Jeffrey Archer's Mayor of London campaign was floundering when he was accused of spending the night with a prostitute called Monica Coghlan. The campaign finally died when Clifford made sure that the News of the World learnt how Archer's old school friend, Ted Francis, had provided Archer with a false alibi for that very same evening.
David Beckham And Rebecca Loos, April 2004, News Of The World
Max describes this as 'the greatest tabloid expose of the decade'. It was certainly one of the most lucrative, netting Loos around £700,000 in assorted deals with News of the World and Sky. In common with most of Clifford's kiss'n'tells by this stage, she called him, sparking a tabloid bidding war, and was then spirited off to a remote Spanish villa by a pair of NoW reporters.
Sven Goran Eriksson, Mark Palios and Faria Alam, August 2004, Mail On Sunday and News Of The World
When rumours first surfaced that FA secretary Faria Alam had had affairs with both Mark Palios, the FA Chief Executive, and Sven Goran Eriksson, she turned to Max, quit her job, and received £200,000 apiece from the Mail on Sunday and NoW. Palios resigned, as did Colin Gibson, the FA press secretary. Later, Alam tried to sue the FA for unfair dismissal. She lost and went on Celebrity Big Brother instead.
Jude Law And Daisy Wright, July 2005, Sunday Mirror
Jude'n'Sienna were the hottest couple in the land until 26-year-old nanny Daisy Wright got on the phone to Max. 'Jude was a masterful lover who made my whole body tingle,' she told the Sunday Mirror.
She thought they were falling in love and valued him as a 'friend'. Law dropped her like a stone and apologised to Miller, but not enough to dissuade her from dumping him and being branded 'Love Rat Law'. Jude'n'Sienna are now back together.
John Prescott And Tracey Temple, April 2006, Daily Mirror
The Daily Mirror broke the story after Barrie Williams, Tracey Temple's fiance, told them he'd become suspicious she might be having an affair after she started moaning 'DPM' (for Deputy Prime Minister) in her sleep.
He received £20,000, then Temple went to Clifford and a bidding war commenced. NoW offered £500,000, but because of its feud with Clifford, announced the offer was only good if he wasn't involved. In the end she stuck with him and sold the story to the Mail on Sunday for £250,000.



Circus Maximus

He's the most powerful man in tabloid Britain, and he's used his position as the nation's 'Ringmaster of Scandal' to arrange more than 150 front-page 'scoops' in the past 18 months alone. But Max Clifford, as it turns out, has a lurid secret of his own. Carole Cadwalladr dishes the dirt

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Carole Cadwalladr
The Observer, Sunday 23 July 2006

So, here's a tricky question. Do I treat Max Clifford as he has treated others? Or, do I not? So, not that tricky, actually. Although, I do rather wonder at the form a Max Clifford revenge attack might take. Because, on the one hand, he says he's impervious to criticism as well as being rather engagingly honest about his failings, he never attempts to justify himself, 'because I know I can't' and readily admits to all manner of really not very nice personality traits, including lying, cheating and generally being a bit of a rat-bag. On the other, if my face appears next to a minor EastEnders character in next week's Sun, with a headline which reads something like, 'Who is X's New Mystery Minger?', you'll know that he was fibbing about this, too.
Oh, he's such a fibber, Max. There's not too many people in public life who'll cheerfully admit to telling barefaced lies, as Max does, ('an important part of PR is lies and deceit, but I'm the only person who'll ever admit to it') although it explains why the PR establishment loathes him, and why every interview he's ever done is seemingly a work of purest fiction.
But then, as Max tells me, the only thing that he would really mind is if someone said he was rubbish in bed. Or 'that I had a small willy'. It's why he always encourages his kiss'n'tellers to say that their man was an animal in the sack and could keep it up all night.
'I say to them, for God's sake, try and be a little bit generous. With Rebecca Loos that wasn't a problem, she was quite happy to say that about David Beckham.'
'And Tracey Temple?'
'And Tracey Temple,' he says although somehow this seems to lack the same conviction.
Because Max has been at it again. The deputy leader's mistress was his client, and he's made a tidy amount from the Prescott's marital misery. But then this is what Max does best.
He's the ringmaster of the nation's sexual scandals and the chief conduit by which we know what we know about the private lives of David Beckham, David Mellor, Jude Law and countless others.
The net result of all this - the disarming honesty - is that he's that classic postmodern literary device: the unreliable narrator. I have no idea where the truth ends and the self-aggrandisement begins, and although he's terrifically entertaining, telling salacious anecdotes with punchlines like 'blah blah, scandal, a household name, Freddie Starr actually, but you can't write that', I'm not at all sure that I trust him. In fact, I know that I don't. But, in fairness, the feeling's pretty mutual. He greets me by saying: 'Come on in. I'm afraid I can't remember your name although yes, I know we've met. I've read the cuts. You wrote that very sarcastic piece about me, didn't you?'
'It wasn't that sarcastic,' I say and he seems to agree, although it's hard to know because as well as talking to me, he's also padding through his house in his tennis shorts and trainers - he used to play water-polo for England and at 63 still runs and plays tennis twice a week - giving directions to the housekeeper and dictating some copy down the line to the Press Gazette, the journalist's trade paper now owned by his old pal, Piers Morgan, in which he has a column.
Still, at least this clears up one niggling question I had: that he knows that I've met him before. And, it's to his credit that although it becomes increasingly clear that he's highly suspect of the line my interview is going to take, it's game of him to agree to it. Because what Max knows is that I know rather more about his private life than he'd necessarily like made public. But then, Max Clifford didn't get to be Max Clifford without being both a risk-taker and a pretty astute judge of human character.
So, that's the plus side. On the minus side, I'm left rather wondering what that must say about me. Although when he tells me what he'd like me to write in the article, and what he wouldn't like me to write in the article, I can't help thinking that maybe he's made the tiniest miscalculation.
He's a while on the phone though, so the housekeeper makes me a cup of tea and I sit in the conservatory with a pampered little lapdog for company and admire the view out over his lawns and pergola and ornamental pond. The house - behind electronic gates, on a private estate - has acres of immaculately vacuumed cream carpet, a cream, gold and beige interior, and a wealth of ostentatious flower arrangements - orchids, lilies, great big green spiky things. It's all very Surrey: newly built but in a traditional style and slap-bang in the golf and G & T belt.
As well as the housekeeper in the kitchen, there's also a landscape gardener in the garden, a van load of builders in the driveway and then a specialist engineer turns up to have a look at Max's original Fifties jukebox.
He's quite an employment provider, Max. And this is just one of his houses. His old marital home, where he lived with his wife, Liz, who died of cancer in 2003, is half a mile away, and now home to his daughter, Louise. There's also the apartment in Marbella where he goes for three months of the year. Then there are the 10 people who work for him in his office, fielding calls, and liaising with the tabloids, and this is before we've even got around to the thorny subject of Max's 'PA', Jo.
Oh dear, yes, Jo is a thorny subject. Because, as well as being Max's PA, she's also his live-in lover. And, although this is something you are never going to read about in any tabloid newspaper, she's married - just not to Max. What's more, when I met her last year - on a press trip to Ireland , with Max and Brian McFadden - I didn't realise any of this at first. But then, I discovered, neither did her husband.
In fact, I would have remained in the dark, had Max not sidled up to me and said: 'By the way, Carole, for the purposes of this article, Jo is my PA.' And then the girls from his office got drunk and told me what every tabloid diary writer and showbiz reporter in the country apparently knew. And, for an ugly lesson in how the media works, here it is: none of them wrote about it because none of them could afford to offend one of the prime sources of quality scandal.
All of which left me with an unappetising dilemma: collude with Max, or potentially wreck someone else's marriage. In the end, I decided I didn't really want to embark on a new career as a tabloid hell-whore, and it wasn't until the Daily Mail carried a tame little diary item last autumn saying Max had a 'close companion' that he was semi-outed - although even then, it transpires, it was only because he granted his permission.
'I was down in the south of France at a launch, and the journalist, who I've known a very long time, said, can't we write it, Max? It's been such a long time, and we've been very good, can't we write such and such? I said, just leave it for a little while, and I'll let you know when we can do something. As long as it isn't too... you know.
They were very patient, for a couple of years. And then eventually I said, OK then.'
It's what Piers Morgan calls Max's 'get out of jail free card'. And as I point out to him it puts him in a more privileged position than any politician, TV presenter, or celebrity in the entire country.
'Oh, I don't know about that, poppet. Maybe, I suppose. Although there were plenty who tried to get me when I was doing my bit to bring down Major's government...'
They can't have tried that hard, though - because, last autumn, Max, together with Angela Levin, a journalist on the Mail, brought out his life story. And what a story it is. There's the rise from his humble working-class roots in Wimbledon, his early days at EMI, handling the Beatles before they got famous, and, later, Sinatra, and then there's his transformation into the country's scandalmonger-in-chief.
So far, so predictable. What I hadn't been prepared for - because the only interview he's done since the book came out was with a journalist who hadn't appeared to have read it - was paragraphs like this: 'At home, Max was the rock Louise and Liz relied on as he tried to keep them both strong and positive. But his own anxieties remained bottled up inside him... He leaned on no one but escaped from his worries through his work, playing sport, and organising sex parties.'
Crikey. It turns out that Max, routinely described in interviews as 'a squeaky-clean family man' was in fact southwest London's answer to Hugh Hefner. Or maybe Cynthia Payne, since at one point he refers to it as 'procuring': he set up stars with 'models, actresses, bored housewives, that sort of thing'. And at the same time that he'd been busy exposing Tory ministers and soap stars for sexual double standards, he had himself been a serial womaniser, all the while playing happy families back home in Surrey.
'I never had a conscience about it. I wouldn't say it's right. It wasn't. But to me it was another sport. I played football, I played water-polo, I played squash, I played tennis. And I...' '...played women?'
'Well you know what I'm saying, we played each other. And in my defence, not that I can ever defend myself, if you and I had had an affair, you would have known exactly what it's about. I'm greedy, I'm married, I love my wife, she does understand me, I have a wonderful life, I'm just greedy, can you accept that? If you can accept that, fine. If you can't accept that, I totally understand. Or, as and when you get fed up - and I'm not trying to justify myself, couldn't justify myself - but... I was straight with them. I didn't play them around. I didn't pretend to be... if you see what I'm saying.'
I do see what he's saying, but I'm a bit surprised. Maybe it's the sort of thing that men say to other men all the time, but they don't often brag about it to women. I also suspect it's why Max has been so astute in his dealings with people in a takes-a-goat-to-know-a-goat sort of a way, and why he's never shown much mercy towards his victims. He says that he turns down kiss-and-tells all the time, and that there's certain people he'd never stitch up even if he had cast-iron evidence (he's a life-long Labour supporter, and despite the trials John Prescott has just been through, he says he could never bring himself to do it to Blair).
But he doesn't have much sympathy for married men who get caught out. Because they're just like him. And he never got caught. And in any case, the danger of being caught was all part of the thrill.
How else to explain the 'sex parties'? He held them throughout the Sixties, the Seventies and right the way into the Eighties, always in the distinctly unglamorous locale of the outer London suburbs.
'It was absolutely ridiculous. I'll give an example. A mate of mine had a little flat in Colliers Wood. He was a printer and on a Friday evening, I used to use the flat. Mac would come back from the late shift at three or four in the morning, and there would be this one at it in that bedroom, and this one there, and that one there, and these ones standing in the corridor... he'd say, Max, I'm ever so tired, do you think you could ask such-and-such to leave, because I'm knackered. And these people, they would be household names.'
It sounds not so much like an anecdote as an account of a scene from a Sixties British sex comedy. Which isn't such a bad comparison actually, since Diana Dors was a 'friend' of Max's and in the book he drops fairly heavy hints about an affair.
'So what? People would be slipping away during the party?' I ask him. 'Or it would be happening in front of you?'
'It wasn't you do her, and you do him... it was natural combustion. Like-minded people. Coming together. And I was the ringmaster.'
'So, you were a participator? Or just the organiser?'
'Well, I would say it, but I was extremely selective. With me it was quality rather than quantity, which was why I was probably extremely lucky in terms of sexual diseases. Of course we'd never heard of Aids and things like that, I mean Jesus Christ! When I think back... so it was natural spontaneity. But, hmm, there was an awful lot of it.'
I'm not sure what I'm supposed to make of this information. Or why he's chosen to unburden himself about it now. Liz, his wife, to whom I don't doubt that he was devoted in his own way, 'suspected', he says, but never found out; but he did introduce his long-term mistress, Ria, to his daughter and when he says he had no conscience at all about it, he means it: he's so boastful! It makes me half-wish that somebody would come forth and say he's got a small willy.
He also claims to have 'retired' 10 years ago. But then, as Sir Jimmy Goldsmith put it, 'A man who marries his mistress creates a vacancy.' And, besides, as he keeps on telling me, 'Everyone's at it.'
'Nearly everybody I've ever known has affairs. Nearly every journalist I've ever met has affairs. I haven't met one, in 40-odd years, who hasn't. You wouldn't realise it, you wouldn't know it, you wouldn't believe it, but most of them are. It's not that I think they are, I know they are! What you've got to understand is that the biggest part of my game is not promotion, it's protection. Keeping things away from the media every year becomes a bigger and bigger slice of Max Clifford Associates.'
There's something a bit depressing about hanging out in Max's moral universe. It's a world where men are men and women are trollops. It's not that he doesn't have scruples - he does. But it's a pick'n'mix sort of philosophy that'd take a greater intellect than mine to disentangle. He's an unlikely but passionate advocate of social justice, hates what the Tories did to the NHS, and gives away buckets of his own cash to charity. His daughter, Louise, developed rheumatoid arthritis at the age of six, and, over the years, has had 17 major operations, all of which Max was there for - the last person she saw before going under, the first person she saw on waking up - and it's left him with an almost visceral hatred for the Conservatives and an evangelical zeal to raise money for children's charities.
But, when it comes to everything else, he's completely amoral, borderline psychopathic. Oh dear, I can't really say that, can I? Although if anybody is libel-proof it's surely I-tell-lies-for-cash Max. What I mean is that he seems to lack the ability to empathise in any meaningful way. With his wife, with the victims of his stories.
He had 150 front pages in the past 18 months, although, he says, it's the least of his business these days. He cross-fertilises like mad: the reason Gillian McKeith was on Celebrity X Factor is because both she and Simon Cowell are clients. The reason I went to Galway with Brian McFadden is because he and Club 328, a charter jet operation, were both clients. And then there's his 'protection' - and I'd like to say 'racket', because that's what it sounds like - paying people off here, getting them jobs there, although there's no doubt that he's a brilliant advertisement for his own services.
The reason, he says, that his sexual exploits were never exposed is because, 'I beat the tabloids at their own game. It was a competition. Another sport... And I won.'
He's a great one for competition, there's no doubt about that. He loves it, thrives on it, is currently involved in a feud with the News of the World because they stitched up Kerry Katona, his then client, and now won't deal with them, and he agreed to let Louis Theroux hang out with him for several months just to see if he could out-Theroux him (the consensus is that he did). Every tennis match he plays, he says, 'is like the final at Wimbledon. And when I kick a ball around, it's the World Cup. It's ridiculous, but I can't help myself.'
I think to myself that I wouldn't like to cross him, and there's an argument that this article will seal my journalistic death warrant, but then, what the hell, I go and ask him about Jo.
He's quite happy to talk about her. They met through one of his charities - she volunteers at a children's hospice. 'And I also knew her slightly from Cobham. I'd be having a cup of coffee and she'd be there with her husband. And you know, whatever, whatever. I always thought, "What an attractive woman." And she's my type. The colouring, the... whatever.
I've always gone for brunettes rather than blondes. Although that doesn't mean there hasn't been the odd blonde... but anyway, after Liz died, I needed somebody to help. Because Liz ran the house. She paid the cheques. I didn't have a clue. And I said to Jo, "Listen, love, I need someone, to run the home, to organise the cleaner..." and she came and said, "I'll do it." And then... well, it was just natural spontaneity.'
Ah, natural spontaneity, there it is again. It's a big thing with Max. He's been called a lot of things in his career. 'A little turd' by Edwina Currie, and the 'sleazeball's sleazeball' by David Mellor, which is almost enough to make you warm to him. 'But to me, people having sex isn't sleazy. It's great. It's one of the most pleasurable things in life. I'm very lucky in that from a very young age, sex is one of those things that I've really enjoyed. The way I do sport and a nice meal, and good conversation and being in love and all of these things.'
Which is funny when you think about the fact that he's made his name and fortune out of the nation's collective prurience. Sex, for Max, is not the free-and-easy love-in he describes, but a capital asset. The British market he says is the best in the world and in the book there's a nice little story about how every Friday night before he goes home, he takes a print-out of what he's got in the bank.
'And then on a Saturday morning I compare it with what I had the month before. And I always like to beat myself. I'm always in competition with myself.'
'So what did you have in the bank last Saturday?' I ask him. 'I think it was £1.7m in cash. And then this place cost me £3m, which I have a small mortgage on. And my other home, which is worth £2m, is paid for, Louise's flat is paid for, and my flat in Spain, which is worth about £1.5m, that's paid for.'
He only moved into the new house a couple of months ago, so that he and Jo had a new start in a new home and she's been to see a lawyer about getting a divorce. He's quite happy to talk about her, but then gives me strict instructions about what I'm allowed and what I'm not allowed to write about.
'I'm happy for anyone to imply whatever they want about me, but what I don't want is her daughter being upset. Her husband's been through enough anyway. I don't want to rub salt in the wounds. I'd much rather you said, 'There's a new lady in his life,' and left it at that.'
'But I've met Jo...'
'It's very simple, we're both very happy, and she's living with me...' and then he tails off to take another call, his fifth in an hour-and-a-half, although I don't mind because he has a helpful habit of repeating what the other person says so that you can follow the conversation.
'David Mills? Tessa Jowell's husband? He's interested in me representing him? Well, I'll tell him what I tell everybody. He's very welcome to come and have a chat and if I believe him, I'll take him on. And if I don't I won't. What was the name of the Italian chap who wanted me to represent him? You know, the ex prime minister. Berlusconi, that's it. Hmmm.
Well, we'll see won't we? But tell him I'm quite happy to sit down and talk to him.' And, then, Jo herself arrives. In Galway, I spent more than an hour chatting to her, and part of the reason I couldn't bring myself to do a Max on her was that I liked her. She's a rather glamorous fortysomething with a taste for gold jewellery and expensive handbags. And she was friendly, which is always a plus with me, and told me about her daughter, a ballerina, and looked pained when she said she had 'complications' in her personal life.
This time round, though, she can barely bring herself to look at me. She comes in to tell Max he's got to finish up because they need to go for lunch, and won't catch my eye. Things get even frostier when I go into the kitchen.
'You can't write about me!' she says. I don't really know how to respond to this and, in the end, I say, 'That's a bit unrealistic.'
'You can't go messing things up! Not just when I've got it all sorted out. You can say I'm the housekeeper, or something.'
'But I've met you,' I say. 'I'm talking to you now.'
'But you don't have to mention me! I've only just got everything sorted.'
Oh dear. If anybody knows the media game, it's Max, and he presumably knew precisely what he was doing when he agreed to the interview. As he told me, 'David Beckham is old enough and ugly enough to know what he was doing.'
As he is, too. Which makes me wonder what this interview is actually all about. If Max has another agenda, which I'm unwittingly fulfilling. Or if he simply believes that he's beyond the reach of any journalist. Who knows? He's older, smarter, more experienced and better connected than me and if anybody's going to come off badly from this, I've no doubt ultimately that it will be me.
I feel sorry for Jo, though, I do. She fell out of love with one man and into love with another, it's not exactly the crime of the century.
But she's been saved the baying hordes of paparazzi that anyone else would have had if Max had been as famous as Max but not Max. And to have not written about her would have been to collude with him on his mission to control the whole of the UK mainstream media.
I don't feel particularly good about it, though. And when they give me a lift to the station in his Bentley, the quiet purr of the engine does little to disguise the silence that reverberates around the cream-leather interior. When we say goodbye, Max turns in the passenger seat, and says, simply: 'Be gentle with her.'
I hope I have been. I just rather wish Max would sometimes think of doing the same.
Read All About It, edited by Max Clifford, is published by Virgin at £8.99.
Making a splash
Freddie Starr, March 1986, The Sun
This was the turning point in Clifford's career and the birth of a new type of 'creative' (ie made-up) PR. Fledgling publicist Max persuaded Kelvin MacKenzie, the then Sun editor, to run a story about how Starr put his friend Lea La Salle's hamster, Supersonic, between two pieces of bread and gobbled it up.
'Freddie Starr Ate My Hamster' is now the stuff of tabloid legend, nominated by the BBC as one of the greatest headlines of all time.
David Mellor And Antonia De Sancha, September 1992, The People
At the height of John Major's Back to Basics campaign, David Mellor was secretary of state for the newly created department of heritage, and Antonia de Sancha was an unemployed actress. Max approached The People with her story, they coughed up £30,000 and bugged her apartment, revealing Mellor's predilection for 'toe-jobs'.
This story is classic Clifford - he happily admits he invented the detail that Mellor wore his Chelsea FC strip during sex. Mellor resigned and now works in sports radio.
Mandy Allwood and The Octuplets, September 1996, News Of The World
When Mandy Allwood found out she was pregnant with octuplets following hormone treatment, she called Max. He tied her up in an exclusive deal with the News of the World until tragically, in the 19th week, she miscarried. She later successfully sued Clifford for secretly profiting from the story. He admits it was 'regrettable'.
Jeffrey Archer, Ted Francis And Monica Coghlan, November 1999, News Of The World
Jeffrey Archer's Mayor of London campaign was floundering when he was accused of spending the night with a prostitute called Monica Coghlan. The campaign finally died when Clifford made sure that the News of the World learnt how Archer's old school friend, Ted Francis, had provided Archer with a false alibi for that very same evening.
David Beckham And Rebecca Loos, April 2004, News Of The World
Max describes this as 'the greatest tabloid expose of the decade'. It was certainly one of the most lucrative, netting Loos around £700,000 in assorted deals with News of the World and Sky. In common with most of Clifford's kiss'n'tells by this stage, she called him, sparking a tabloid bidding war, and was then spirited off to a remote Spanish villa by a pair of NoW reporters.
Sven Goran Eriksson, Mark Palios and Faria Alam, August 2004, Mail On Sunday and News Of The World
When rumours first surfaced that FA secretary Faria Alam had had affairs with both Mark Palios, the FA Chief Executive, and Sven Goran Eriksson, she turned to Max, quit her job, and received £200,000 apiece from the Mail on Sunday and NoW. Palios resigned, as did Colin Gibson, the FA press secretary. Later, Alam tried to sue the FA for unfair dismissal. She lost and went on Celebrity Big Brother instead.
Jude Law And Daisy Wright, July 2005, Sunday Mirror
Jude'n'Sienna were the hottest couple in the land until 26-year-old nanny Daisy Wright got on the phone to Max. 'Jude was a masterful lover who made my whole body tingle,' she told the Sunday Mirror.
She thought they were falling in love and valued him as a 'friend'. Law dropped her like a stone and apologised to Miller, but not enough to dissuade her from dumping him and being branded 'Love Rat Law'. Jude'n'Sienna are now back together.
John Prescott And Tracey Temple, April 2006, Daily Mirror
The Daily Mirror broke the story after Barrie Williams, Tracey Temple's fiance, told them he'd become suspicious she might be having an affair after she started moaning 'DPM' (for Deputy Prime Minister) in her sleep.
He received £20,000, then Temple went to Clifford and a bidding war commenced. NoW offered £500,000, but because of its feud with Clifford, announced the offer was only good if he wasn't involved. In the end she stuck with him and sold the story to the Mail on Sunday for £250,000.

Jan Klimkowski Wrote:Max Clifford - the Keeper of the Secrets.

He must be considering his options.

Quote:Max Clifford pleads not guilty to 11 indecent assault charges

Celebrity publicist denies allegations at Westminster magistrates court and says after hearing: 'This has been a nightmare'


Josh Halliday
The Guardian, Tuesday 28 May 2013 11.38 BST

Max Clifford has pleaded not guilty to 11 charges of indecent assault on seven alleged victims.

The celebrity publicist, who made his fortune shaping the reputations of some of Britain's biggest stars, spoke quietly but firmly as he denied the allegations read to him at Westminster magistrates court in London on Tuesday.

Clifford, 70, is charged with 11 indecent assaults, allegedly committed between 1966 and 1985 on girls and women aged between 15 and 19. He will appear at Southwark crown court on 12 June after his case was adjourned by the chief magistrate, the judge Howard Riddle. He must live and sleep at his home address in Walton-on-Thames, Surrey, and have no unsupervised contact with anyone under 18 as part of his bail conditions.

Speaking after the short hearing, Clifford held his wife's hand and maintained that the allegations were "totally without foundation".

"All I know is nobody ever said anything about me at all before Jimmy Savile.

"This has been a nightmare for myself and my family and I'm totally innocent of these allegations. Since December I've been in the dark, and anonymous people have made accusations from a long, long time ago. They are without any foundation."

Clifford said he had been arrested "in a very public way" and, asked whether he believed he was the victim of a witch hunt, added: "That's for you to make your mind up."

Dressed in a blue blazer, grey trousers and a white open-necked shirt, Clifford looked tanned and healthy as he sat alone in the large glass-encased dock. His wife, Jo Westwood, sat in the public gallery alongside a number of journalists.

Clifford made no further comment as he walked through a packed media scrum outside the court building. One member of the public shouted allegations about other entertainers as Clifford and his wife were jostled into a waiting taxi.

Clifford was first arrested in December under Scotland Yard's Operation Yewtree investigation, launched in the wake of the Savile scandal.

A former EMI Records junior press officer, Clifford has acted as a powerful intermediary between the press and on-screen stars for more than five decades, working as an early publicist for the Beatles and introducing British audiences to celebrities such as Muhammad Ali and Frank Sinatra in the 1960s.

Clifford went on to manage the reputations of public faces including Simon Cowell, the Olympic cyclist Chris Hoy and the late Jade Goody, who found fame on the reality show Big Brother in 2002.

He has helped orchestrate some of the most memorable tabloid front pages in Fleet Street history, not least the infamous March 1986 "Freddie Starr ate my hamster" story in the Sun.

A case this old would likely be very hard to prove. Victims often want to remain silent, as here they are put on trial.

A defendant in this kind of crime almost never admits to it.

Dawn

Dawn Meredith Wrote:A case this old would likely be very hard to prove. Victims often want to remain silent, as here they are put on trial.

A defendant in this kind of crime almost never admits to it.

Dawn

Dawn - when the stars, the powerful, and sometimes ordinary people, had a problem that needed fixing, an expose that the press were going to run, they would go to Max Clifford. For several decades, he was the Fleet Street Fixer.

There are big political games being played with this prosectuion.

Clifford knows where a lot of the skeletons are buried, evidence which most probably could put very powerful people in prison.

Will he tell some of those stoires?

We shall see.

Excellent piece from The Slog

Quote:

THE PAEDOFILE: Part 2 of a Slog Special….

How Cumbria County Council hired a paedophile-pimp childkiller in its child protection department…and promoted another employee while he stood trial for distributing paedophile pornography

And why MP Madeleine Moon is unlikely to take any real action in Bridgend

Yesterday, I posted at some length about how Conservative Under Secretary of State Edward Timpson is a dyed-in-the-wool member of the Care System being set the task of reforming that system….and doing everything but that. In today's second part of this study of contemporary systemic child abuse in Britain, The Slog looks in more detail at how tribal instincts promote cover-ups of every kind, and with astonishing regularity, at local government level.
Having been hounded by a couple of irate care' system workers following recent Slogposts about endemic perversion in Britain's childcare system "it's just more conspiracy theory fantasy" etc etc I thought last week it might be useful to put the rarity' claim to rest. However, since then so much evidence of rotten local government has come to light on the subject, this has turned into a Slog Special double-header. My goal along with thousands of other commentators is to once and for all end the glib "it's only a small problem" drivel put about by the likes of Edward Timpson.
We start in Bridgend.
A Walesonline post of five weeks ago recorded how Bridgend Council's Serious Case Review (SCR) into the care of Child S found she was left in the care of a carer…even though the Council knew he had a record of sexual offences against children. Her case was passed to a new social worker who traced the carer's record and blew the whistle. By this time, S's neighbour had also raised the alarm about the child being molested by the carer.
The Council did nothing.
After further prodding and outbursts, Bridgend opened a file on the case, and offered the convicted child sex offender an NSPCC risk assessment. He refused to take it. The police now piled in and confirmed the man's record of abuse.
The Council at last now did something. It closed the case file.
Bridgend MP Madeleine Moon will be writing to council leader Mel Nott (left) to make sure the SCR report's recommendations have been implemented. I'm not holding my breath on this one, if only because the Council's response thus far has been the usual heady mixture of smugness and obfuscatory jargon. For example, In this case, the previous convictions of the former male carer for sexual offending were known about by the relevant agencies, but the historic nature of these and the absence of any identified current concerns led professionals to believe that he no longer posed a risk'. There it goes again, the same tripe about no longer a threat': anyone engaged in studying chronic paedophiles knows that redemption levels are minute. So why do these employees keep on insisting the opposite? It remains hard for the objective observer to put this down entirely to ignorant stupidity….a theme that continues in more cases presented later in this post.
I'll tell you the other reason why I'm less than impressed with MP Moon (seen left with Jacqui Smith) simply writing to Mel Nott about this. Haringey Council by every report's account a slipshod authority when it comes to childcare has been through five SCR's about this in the last four years. In Bridgend county borough there have been thirteen over the same period.
I would've thought an urgent Parliamentary Question at least Madeleine. But I doubt if that's going to happen: you see, Ms Moon is through and through Labour….as is her mate Mel Nott.
And I'll tell you another reason why Maddy won't want to rock any boats here: before becoming Labour MP for Bridgend, she worked for, um, Bridgend social services. Yesterday's post on this issue observed, about Under-secretary for children Edward Timpson, Edward Timpson is the personification of a system that fails. No wonder he speaks in favour of it.' Similarly, no wonder Mad Moon MP is restricting her Mel Nott response to a letter.
A large proportion of uninvestigated paedophilia incidents can be traced back, with dogged research, to a political (or other interest) group's desire to protect its own. Such unethical blind eyes and cover-ups are conducted without any thought for those who have suffered: in Cruel Britannia today, tribally-sociopathic corruption is almost the norm…always remembering that the person they're covering for is psychopathically cunning in the first place.
Paedophile fireman William Wyllie insisted he was innocent when charged by Lancaster police with serious paedophile offences; he did this because it meant he could carry on being paid after suspension from his Fire Brigade job. While he was awaiting trial, however, his senior officers promoted him.
There are suspicions locally that he was paid and promoted to make Wyllie look like a jolly good egg who'd been mistakenly charged. In fact, there had been rumours about his activities for some time. And then two days before his trial, the fire station manager switched his plea to guilty. Earlier this week, he was sentenced for crimes that included swapping indecent images of children with London-based prolific HIV-positive paedophile Steven King, jailed in 2011 for four years for arranging to have sex with children as young as five. Wyllie's sentence? A three-year community order, which will involve three years' supervision and a sex offender treatment programme. This is a farcically light sentence from a judge on a man who swindled the taxpayer with help from this employers.
The Cumbrian Fire Service is answerable to Cumbria County Council. Jill Stannard, head of Cumbria County Council, retired early at 55 a few weeks ago…and has been given a golden handshake on top of her very nice thank you local government pension. Currently, the Council is refusing to say how much the payoff was but she was on £170,000 per annum salary. While in her role, Ms Stannard pushed through measures to increase the price of meals-on-wheels, and a cut in the wages of the County's teaching assistants. It may seem like I'm drifting off the point here, but I'm not: this sort of back-scratching and secrecy is endemic in local government.
"What always strikes me here in Cumbria," she said on her retirement, "is that, no matter what the challenge, our staff always face it head on and find solutions. This council is a great place to work with truly dedicated and committed staff and, as I prepare to leave, I take this opportunity to once again pay full credit to the people who work here." Especially William Wyllie, it seems.
Why did the Council try to put Fireman William Wyllie in the best light? I can't say with certainty: but I can point out Cumbria Council's odd track record in such matters. Let us turn to the case of Lianne Smith.
Smith (left) was appointed a manager in Cumbria County Council's child protection department in 2003. By 2007, she and her husband Martin Smith were under a cloud relating to sexual abuse of children and pimping them to paedophiles. During this time, Mrs Smith also worked as a high-class hooker. The couple moved on hastily to Staffordshire (whose endemic paedophilia problems I've posted about several times in the past) where her partner was this time charged with raping infant girls. Released on bail (why?) he skipped abroad with Lianne Smith, and was finally extradited from Barcelona after Spanish police caught up with him in May 2010.
Immediately afterwards, Ms Smith checked into a hotel and murdered her two daughters. In 2010, her husband was given a 16-year sentence for his crimes. He committed suicide in December of that year.
Amazing that, don't you think? Amazing, but not remotely unusual. During 2011, half of all sex offenders were spared jail. Judges let 2,497 or 43% of the 5,784 convicted walk free from court. Between 2005-2011 while the Smiths were about their business with the blessing of local Councils the number of sex criminals allowed straight back into the community increased by 20%. Over the same period, child abuse carried out by offenders within a year of their community sentences soared by 250%. 60% of paedophiles receive sentences of under three years. But during the 2004-11 period, sexual assaults on boys and girls under 13 more than doubled.
So then, Edward Timpson MP: still think this is all conspiracy theory? You do? OK, then I'll just have to carry on.
A paedophile ring in Oxford seven men were sentenced on May 23rd had been active on an industrial scale for eight years, but Oxford social services failed to take any action. Oxfordshire County Council CEO Joanna Simons accepted that the Council had been "at fault" but insisted she will not be resigning after the ring's members were found guilty of child rape, trafficking and organising prostitution in Oxford.
"There is going to be an independent serious case review which will look at the actions of all the agencies concerned… [but] my gut feeling is that I'm not going to resign because my determination is that we need to do all that we can to take action to stamp this out," she opined gallantly. Yet another SCR to keep the protection board too busy to investigate how exactly they got away with it.
Child protection experts said that the six victims of the ring were "let down by those who were meant to care for them and obvious signs of abuse were missed". The gang continued its brutal sexual abuse despite the concerns of some social workers….and reports to police officers at an early stage. But were they let down by incompetence or insider protection? This happens so often across Britain, I truly cannot believe that every single case is down to trained personnel who've gone blind at some point and not noticed. There is more going on here, and the British political Establishment knows this perfectly well. From the Richmond Council scandal to Staffordshire via Plymouth and Bridgend up to Cumbria, Councils are protecting employees, police are ignoring the signs, and obvious perverts are getting through the vetting procedures. How?

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

I've put up this Special for many reasons, but there's one I think could be the most important. On Tuesday 18 June, 2013 at 12:30 and then again at 18:00, there will be a public meeting in The Ramada Plaza Hotel, Wrexham. The Wrexham to Chester belt is a particularly important area for the study of child trafficking from the UK care home system. The Secretary of State for Justice, Chris Fishbrain' Grayling MP, announced in November 2012 that a review of Sir Ronald Waterhouse's inquiry into the abuse of children in care in the Gwynedd and Clwyd Council areas would be established. The Issues Paper can be found on the Macur Review website. Mrs Justice Macur has issued this statement:
I consider it to be extremely important to make myself and my team available in a venue local to the events and circumstances which led to the "Waterhouse Inquiry" to meet with and hear from the people who were directly or indirectly involved and wish to impart information which may be significant to my review. It is vital to engage directly with those affected by the issues central to my review.'
Now this could easily turn into yet another review of an enquiry reopened after a previous enquiry enquired into a police report about why a previous police investigation got nowhere and then was closed. This is a golden opportunity for concerned people to make it strenuously clear to the Establishment that citizens of the UK are now tired of non-reforms of the Family Courts by Grayling, and systemic deckchair rearrangement by Edward Timpson in the childcare system.
It is a chance to be constructively voluble. It is, perhaps, an opening for those who care about our vulnerable children to speak up about the continual glossing-over of organised paedophile access to children removed from their families by the State. We are not going to weed these people out of the system by creating yet more committees and writing yet more pamphlets or asking the odd teacher to warn kids off internet porn. To get rid of weeds, if you aren't going to do it by hand, requires a systemic weedkiller that will burn out the roots.
I further think that we need to take note of this extract from the Mancur press release:

This is not a press conference. There will be an opportunity at the start of the 12:30 session for media to take pictures/film for background however there must be no sound-bites of the session itself. Recording equipment must be switched off and packed away for the duration of both sessions'

I'm not sure I follow the logic of that: as this is a review not a trial hearing, there is surely no case for sub judice concerns here. In particular, the must be switched off and packed away' bit is all too typical of the Establishment's desire for cards to be held tightly to chests at all times. The media may not be able to record audio-visually, but they can still report what they see and hear. Those with media contacts should start perstering MSM hacks to get on the case with all speed.