Can Max Clifford make paedophilia a celebrity disease like cancer?
THE celebrity culture taught us that private tragedy is public grief. So. Max Clifford. How will the press react to the arrest of the tabloid hero who has handled so many shag ‘n’ tells? Mr Clifford must be presumed innocent. But he’s a celeb, isn’t he. A face. And in the current clime we are not to trust the familiar and the connected.
No paedophile has ever hired Max Clifford to explain their condition as an illness. Cancer, the dread disease that became the thing all famous sufferers are supposed to discuss in public, is one thing. Sexual deviancy is quite another. Before John Diamond died from cancer, he wrote about the illness in the Times and also in a book, C: Because Cowards Get Cancer Too. His Guardian obituary on Diamond said “it was a horrible irony that the illness that eventually ended [his] life was also, professionally, the making of him”. You could be professional victim of cancer. But, no, paedo has made it their stock in trade.
Bea Campbell, writing in the Guardian, said Princess Diana, in discussing her bulimia, was in that instant transformed from a pampered princess into an anti-imperialist force who had “joined the constituency of the rejected – the survivors of harm and horror, from the Holocaust, from the world war and pogroms, from Vietnam and the civil wars of South America and South Africa, from torture and child abuse”.
If vomiting your lunch can do that, can a wily PR handler turn paedophiles into victims and symbols of something familiar? In this Brave New World, would you ever bet against it?
In this video, Max Clifford is on Sky News. He’s discussing popstar sex and Jimmy Savile:
In 2007, private investigator Glenn Mulcaire admitted tapping into the messages sent to celeb PR fixer Max Clifford. Mulcaire was working for the News of The World. We know what happend next. But what if the NoW had not closed? The paper was not to all tastes but it did do investigative journalism. The NoW once named and shamed child abusers. The media that likes to see itself as higher brow is now looking to do the same. Twitter, a place billed as free and liberal has been the forum where anyone can be named and outed as a paedo without a shred of evidence.
Tom Watson, Labour MP for West Bromwich East, joined the gang. He spoke about a Tory paedophile ring in Westminster. He told us:
“What I am going to do personally is speak out on this extreme case of organised abuse in the highest places.”
He is so concerned about the power of this sahdowy elite that “I’ve kept a detailed log of all allegations should anything happen…I’m not going to let this drop despite warnings that my personal safety is imperilled.” Sod the NoW’s naming and shaming. Watson will just shame. No name needed.
Max Clifford is helping the police with their enquiries. He has not been charged with any crime, let alone tried in court. He denies any wrongdoing.
In the above TV segment, Clifford talks a lot of sense. Jimmy Savile was a revolting man. He was not a teenage popstar being jumped on by women a few years younger then him. He was a predatory paedophile who gained licence to get way with from an elite keen to manufacture a national hero.
Clifford makes a good point about the peado-panic. It’s not that all adults are closet paedos waiting to be exposed, disgusting individuals organised into rings. The paedo-panic is also to be labelled a paedo. It’s the worst thing to be called. The Telegraph said Savile’s behaviour was only “the tip of the iceberg“. We’ve been invited to look for peados everywhere.
Clifford say that the public see “no smoke without fire”. He’s wrong. The public are not so distrustful. We can accept that Lord McAlpine is entirely innocent. The smoke is produced not by the great unwashed, rather by the elite looking to define themselves by the obsession of our age.
Says Clifford:
“These allegations are damaging and totally untrue. On a personal level, they are very distressing for myself, my wife and loved ones. Anyone who really knew me all those years ago, and those who have known me since, will have no doubt that I would never act in the way I have today been accused.”
Hands up who wants to be rich and famous now?
Photo: Clifford leaves Belgravia police station.
Posted: 6th, December 2012 | In: Celebrities Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
