There is a huge amount of dancing on eggshells going on today in the media about the dossier on paedophile activity with which Leon Brittan came in contact in the 1980s. It is pretty plain there is a subtext here.

A number of people have contacted me for some years over the Elm Guest House paedophile ring. Frankly I did not particularly believe it, or thought it was exaggerated. But I confess my eyes have been opened by the Jimmy Savile, Cyril Smith and Rolf Harris affairs and the extent of complicity and even protection which they received from the establishment.

I have blogged before that, in the Savile case, as his behaviour was apparently compulsive and constant, I found it hard to believe it was not known in the very senior societal circles in which he spent so much of his time. I am convinced that perception was right.

Savile is not linked in to the Elm House paedophile ring, as far as I know, but Cyril Smith is. So were the then head of the Royal Protection Unit and of Special Branch. That to me raises all sorts of queries about whether they were not just participating themselves but protecting someone very senior indeed. I have been convinced that it is true that social workers interviewing child victims were indeed threatened with guns by Special Branch to drop it, and that paperwork has been confiscated and destroyed.

On Cyril Smith, Channel 4 Dispatches on 12 September 2013 reported that:

‘Speaking for the first time, former CID officer Jack Tasker tells the programme that Special Branch officers arrived at his office, told him to halt his investigations and demanded that the file be handed over to them,.“They made it quite clear that anything that was kept by us would bring repercussions if we didn’t hand it over; that as far as we are concerned, the inquiry is finished … you will take no more inquiries into Cyril Smith

Compare that to what happened to child protection officer Chris Fay in his Elm House investigation, as reported in the Express:

Mr Fay, 67, of south London, said: “It became very dangerous. People seem to forget that Special Branch could do what they liked, they were a law unto themselves.

“At one point they had me up against a wall by my throat with a gun at my head telling me in no uncertain terms that I was to back away if I knew what was good for me.

“A colleague of mine had the same treatment, as did a number of the volunteers. Victims who were actually abused at Elm House were also physically stopped from coming to speak to us at the NAYPIC office in north London.

“I witnessed Special Branch officers manhandling them and turning them away with a warning to keep their mouths shut. It was blatant, it was open, they were acting like gangsters.

In both Rochdale and in North London, Special Branch intervened to block the appropriate authorities on the ground from investigating what was a genuine paedophile scandal. I can see no other possible explanation than that the scandal involved figures a great deal more senior than Cyril Smith. From the Elm Guest House we have a pointer who some of those people were.

I really don’t want to blog any more about this, and I recommend you to have a search online. That involves trawling around some of the less pleasant parts of the internet, and I have seen material that is horribly anti-Semitic and anti-gay. But after years of dismissing the stories, on the grounds that they are promulgated by unpleasant people, in unpleasant newspapers, or cannot be true, I realise I was wrong.

I had an impeccable source that Obama’s anti-Scottish statement was orchestrated not only with him, but with the BBC who planted the question. I have no doubt it is true. I want to take this further with the Electoral Commission and the BBC Trust, but to do that I need confirmation of my whistleblower’s account.

On 6 June I therefore contacted No. 10 through their official website and asked whether any government official or adviser had previously briefed the journalist who asked Obama the question on independence. On 10 June I received the reply:

“Your message has been forwarded to the appropriate Government Department so that they may reply to your concerns directly.”

Another three weeks later, still there has been no contact from the “appropriate government Department”. I therefore went back to the Prime Minister’s Office to complain about the lack of a reply.

Answer came there none.

Derek Bateman has posted the reply to the BBC’s curt rejection of the academic study documenting its extreme bias in the Scottish Independence referendum debate. It is lengthy but well worth reading.

A couple of days ago, posting the video of Peter Cook’s wonderful satire of the judge summing up the Thorpe trial (which performace was itself a twenty year on reprise) I calculated that, to a student today, the reference was as distant as a joke about an event in 1938 was to me as a student. Yet I remember, vividly, the detail of Norman Scott crying as he bit the pillow and poor Rinka getting shot. That made me think I am very old indeed.

This was reinforced by reading a review of the current Monty Python Live revival. Again, to me as a student, the Goons seemed ancient history, so irrelevant and distant that I found older people’s nostalgia for them a part of the gulf between me and their different world. Well, to today’s students, Monty Python is two decades more removed than the Goons were from me.

I got into Monty Python a couple of episodes in to the first series, as word got round the school. There was something slightly illicit about it. There was a divide between those who could watch it and those whose parents refused to have it on (families only had one TV in those days). I seem to recall – and it may be a false memory – that it was even quite difficult to find, subject to strange time changes in the schedule, but I may just be building on a recollection of one night’s disappointment.

I wrote above that it made me think I am old, quite deliberately. I don’t feel old at all. Emotionally, I don’t feel significantly different to how I felt at eighteen – despite an extraordinary collection of life experience, I feel love and compassion in just as consuming a way as I did as a teen. I certainly don’t feel a great deal wiser, and I don’t seem to have become more cautious, and certainly not more right wing. But I make absolutely no effort to be young, What I have not done is adapt my tastes – I do not try to be trendy, (and that word perhaps is itself dating).

When I see my reflection, I always have a moment of disconnect as to who that heavy, fat, lined person is. I wonder how I got trapped in here. It is not that I am in denial about how old I am or how I look. I don’t have a different image of my physical self in my head. It is just that I can’t imagine that stolid and respectable person being moved or wracked by the emotional storms inside me or the radical thoughts on society. Than I realise I must misjudge others, daily, on the basis of their appearance.