THE McALPINE COCKUP: Keeping a sense of perspective

Putting the wrong Mcalpine in the frame is a disaster for the BBC, but it doesn’t make the search for perverts a witch-hunt.

Ken Clarke….absolutely nothing whatever to do with Welsh care-home abuse

Without in any way wishing to prolong Lord McAlpine’s agony in relation to those who wrongly accused him of paedophiliac tendencies (and Welsh Care Home abuse) the fact that the perpetrator was probably James ‘Jimmie’ McAlpine is unlikely to go away….any more than a ‘prominent Cabinet Member’ should now disappear from the media radar. 

I hate to be the first to observe this, but lest we forget, James McAlpine was related to his Lordship, and there has to be a question-mark over why the innocent peer Alastair McAlpine didn’t come forward earlier. The idea that Lord (Alastair) McAlpine didn’t know Jimmie – and wasn’t aware of his proclivities – is only credible if one accepts the concept of the former being deaf and blind to family matters for five decades. Jimmie chaired Alfred McAlpine, and the current Lord McAlpine is a cousin.

There seems to me a strong possibility that Alastair kept quiet to protect the family name. So when he says today that he is “saddened that the media could sink so low”, I’m not sure we should take that assertion entirely at face value.

Founder Alfred McAlpine’s son Robert handed the North West/Wales leg of the family business over to Jimmie in the 1960s. Jimmie’s penchant for juvenile chauffeurs was infamous, and numerous residents in the area surrounding Penrhyn (where the family bought an enormous slate mine) are quite certain he was responsible for multiple cases of care home and other youth-establishment abuses in the Wrexham-to-Chester belt of Britain. The general view there (accompanied by an accepting Welsh shrug) is that, as he was a prominent and influential resident at the time, Plod predictably touched a forelock and left him to continue on a merry dance of rape and ravish.

Anyone who’s covered the care home abuse story on the ground could have established this and more. Thus, the journalistic incompetence within the Beeb has to rank as something both regrettable and predictable. But none of that must be allowed to stall the impetus of this investigation. Although David Cameron now looks vindicated by the BBC’s over-eagerness to atone for the Jimmy Savile affair, the Prime Minister has had a lucky bounce – no more.

In the meantime, in what The Slog imagines is an entirely unrelated episode, we turn our attention to Ken Clarke QC MP’s wedding day as part of our new series The Level Playing Fields of Britain. Here we see a gay band of young blades in November 1964 just before Suedophile Ken pledged his troth and went on to claim the glittering prizes. One is struck – is one not? – by the astonishing coincidence via which every last usher invited by Jazzophile Ken went on to equally great things later. Yes, be it stuffing mad cow disease down their kids’ necks or selling out to Brussels, every one of these chaps became a shining light. They began by being awful pretty, and gradually they became pretty awful. Such is life.

[To be a teensy bit fair here, let me just point out that Michael Howard did start out with nothing, went to Grammar School, is amusing in private, and has a delightful wife]

Earlier at The Slog: Don’t gag Schofield, applaud him

Filed under: PAEDOPHILE SCANDALS: Don’t cry too long for Lord McAlpine Tagged: awful Beeb cockup, Jimmie McAlpine, Jimmy Savile, Ken Clarke, Lord McAlpine, North Wales care home abuse, wedding photo from 1964, Wrexham