Commenters on this blog directly caused the exposure of Clement Freud in the ITV story. I published an anodyne obituary in 2009 giving my memories of Freud. One commenter wrote:

He was a notorious old goat and his pursuit of young women could verge on the sinister. I met one of his young ‘victims’ who told me about a job interview with him turning into a very traumatic experience.

And a second wrote the startling

Writing as one of his 1000s of sexual ‘victims’,
still surviving, terrified as I write for fear he is not yet quite yet dead – the man was an evil, conniving,
ruthless user for his own bottomless ego of all he came into contact with.
Our children – boys and girls are all that much safer for his demise.
And that is just the tip of an iceberg of political and media dirty dealings that reaches into the heart of the broken Britain he has left behind him.
His family will now, unfortunately, reap the rage and revenge of those he destroyed and their much needed justice for his many heinous – still untold – actions.

Six years later I was contacted by a journalist working for ITV who had leads on Freud and looking for more evidence. He had dug up those comments on my blog. Using the magic of the internet, I was able to trace the last commenter and put them in touch, with their permission, with the ITV team.

I also told them an anecdote I myself recalled. I was a young First Year Rep on Dundee University Students Association Council while Clement Freud was Rector. One day the then President of the Students Association, Ian Morris, came out of his office in a terrible mood after a phone call from Freud, saying that Freud had asked him to line up female students for him and was trying to use him as “a pimp”. This was not paedophilia but it was unpleasant – Freud was 35 years older than the students he was targeting.

It then all went quiet for a year before ITV contacted me this morning to tell me the story was running.

It is hard to know what to make of Freud owning a holiday villa close to where Madeleine McCann disappeared. Clement was apparently not in Portugal at the time. When you add in the fact that the McCanns’ sleazy “spokesman”, Clarence Mitchell, works for Freud’s son Matthew, the coincidences do add up. I am not jumping to any conclusions at present. But I found the following fascinating.

Clement Freud assured Kate McCann she had nothing to fear from the cadaver dogs giving a positive response inside the McCann’s hire car, hired after Madeleine “disappeared”. They had no evidential value. “So what are they going to do? One bark for yes, two barks for no?” asked Freud.