In Plain Sight: The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile (37 page)

47. SIR JAMES

T
he new decade began with Britain’s first female prime minister in residence at 10 Downing Street. Jimmy Savile had been keen to capitalise on the promise of his early contacts with Margaret Thatcher, who he had hosted on a visit to Stoke Mandeville in December 1977. He even claimed a share of the credit for her election triumph. When they had filmed a segment for
Jim’ll Fix It
at the Houses of Parliament, she’d asked him to fix it for her to become PM.

After the election of 3 May 1979 had swept the Tories into power and Thatcher into office, he said Downing Street staff had followed up to secure her the spoils. ‘Her secretary rang to say she was rather upset because I hadn’t been round to give her her badge. ‘I reported to Downing Street a few days later and presented [it].’
¹

Savile ‘bumped into’ Thatcher again soon afterwards, during the Conservative Party conference at Blackpool. He was in the process of completing ‘Jim’s Daily Dozen’, a month-long series of sponsored runs through towns across Britain, sponsored, thanks to Brooksby, by Hoover and Procter & Gamble. Savile told the prime minister that he would like some of the money raised to go to a charity of her choice.

He was wooing her, and it was working.

Mrs Thatcher would present a cheque for £10,000 to the NSPCC, courtesy of Jimmy Savile, at a luncheon at Downing Street on 6 February 1980. As his host heaped praise and photographers snapped away happily, Savile squirmed with faux embarrassment. It was merely the prelude to the serious business of his visit. He
needed something back from the prime minister, especially having agreed to spare her government’s blushes by leading the campaign to build a new National Spinal Injuries Centre at Stoke Mandeville Hospital.

The wooden Nissen huts housing the unit since 1944 had been badly damaged in a series of winter storms. Five ceilings had collapsed, seriously jeopardising the centre’s ability to treat the 750 inpatients and 2,000 outpatients it saw each year. When no NHS funding was forthcoming for repairs, the country’s leading spinal injury facility faced up to the prospect of imminent closure. Staff and patients staged a sit-in protest that generated column inches in the newspapers but little else. Time was running out.

The situation at Stoke Mandeville dominated the meeting Jimmy Savile orchestrated with Dr Gerard Vaughan, minister of state for Health. Over tea and cake at the House of Commons, Vaughan outlined the new government’s thinking on the National Health Service, a philosophy which ordained that special projects such as rebuilding work at hospitals, even such urgent work as that required at Stoke Mandeville, would need to be supported by voluntary contributions, in line with the cuts in public expenditure Prime Minister Thatcher was implementing across the board. Vaughan suggested this meant they had a problem. ‘Not really,’ replied Savile, and they struck a deal.
²

Jimmy Savile would lead a campaign to rebuild the spinal injuries unit at Stoke Mandeville using private money and donations. In other words, it was to be a pioneering example of the type of ‘partnership’ between government and the public that the prime minister was so keen to promote.

‘Jim needed high profile institutions,’ explained Janet Cope, who had worked at Stoke Mandeville Hospital since she was fifteen. ‘The spinal injuries centre was world famous, it was unique. It pioneered the treatment of the paralysed. Broadmoor was the first hospital for the criminally insane; Leeds General Infirmary was on his doorstep and a huge teaching hospital. Little local hospitals were no good to him. They were not high profile enough.
He needed something that would smack you in the face. Stoke Mandeville was very, very high profile and it brought Jim fame and us money.’

Jimmy Savile launched the campaign in late January at a press conference at Church House, Westminster. The target, he said, was between six and ten million pounds. He maintained he was unconcerned about those who said it was the responsibility of the NHS, and therefore the government, to find the money.

‘This is the way they used to build hospitals years ago,’ he said, ‘and it’s not that bad a way to build a hospital in these straitened times.’ He went on to explain that a £5 donation would pay for a brick, £50,000 would provide a bed and £250,000 would fund a ward.
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Afterwards, Vaughan pledged the government’s support for the appeal. ‘This is a unit we must sustain, look after and develop,’ he told the assembled reporters. ‘There is a public responsibility to see that these people get the kind of care they deserve.’ When asked what backing the government would give, Vaughan replied, ‘There’s a limited amount of money available in this country for health care. If we want more, we have to look outside the NHS.’ According to the Spinal Injuries Association, he did at least offer assurances that government money would pay for the running costs of the new centre.

Savile rounded off proceedings by asking for the first donation to the new fund. On hand was Douglas McMinns, a retired businessman from Buckinghamshire who handed over a cheque for £150,000. As Vaughan posed outside with the cheque and two young paraplegics from Stoke Mandeville, Jimmy Savile reiterated that he was very happy to support the government’s controversial stance.

The very next day, an editorial in the
Daily Mail
began banging the drum: ‘Those like Mr Savile, who tirelessly take the hat round for this country’s hospitals, do a wonderful job,’ it boomed. ‘The
Daily Mail
is wholly in favour of a financially beleaguered National Health Service tapping as much as it can from the charitable impulses of the public.’
⁴

Despite the economic malaise afflicting Britain, the response was instantaneous. A spray paint company pledged to donate a penny for every can sold that year. Ski Yoghurt offered £100,000. Quaker Oats offered £200 a mile for Savile to run a marathon around Ben Nevis. BUPA sponsored an entire ward. Meanwhile, all over the country ordinary people found unusual ways of raising money, from sitting in baths of baked beans to donating money left by the tooth fairy. Cheques and postal orders flooded into the Spinal Injury Centre offices at Stoke Mandeville, where members of staff suddenly found themselves pressed into action as campaign organisers.

At the Downing Street luncheon, Jimmy Savile had pressed the prime minister on the subject of tax deduction for charitable donations. Not, in this case, to enhance his own bank balance, but because it would significantly facilitate the success of the campaign. Thatcher had told Savile that she considered the existing arrangements a ‘considerable disincentive to those who are contemplating charitable donations’.
⁵

A week after his visit to Downing Street, Savile sat in his small flat on Park Crescent, a short walk from Broadcasting House, and began penning a letter: ‘Dear Prime Minister, I waited a week before writing to thank you for my lunch invitation because I had such a superb time and I didn’t want to be too effusive. My girl patients pretended to be madly jealous + wanted to know what you wore + what you ate. All the paralysed lads called me “Sir James” all week. They all love you. Me too!! Jimmy Savile OBE.’ He signed off with three kisses.

The roadmap had been unfurled and the destination was now clear: a knighthood.

This fawning letter was not the first piece of correspondence on the matter of the premier’s lunch with Jimmy Savile. A confidential memo sent on the afternoon of the event from Mike Pattison, Thatcher’s private secretary, to Martin Hall of the Treasury, and also copied to Gerard Vaughan’s office at the Department of Health, requested the chancellor’s clarification on the seven-year covenant system.

Two weeks later, a note from the Treasury revealed that the chancellor had already decided that the next Finance Bill would reduce the time necessary for charitable covenants to qualify for tax relief from seven years to four. ‘We cannot even hint at this to Jimmy Savile at present,’ Pattison wrote in his memo to the prime minister. ‘We have to treat it as a Budget secret. Would you like to write to Jimmy promising to take it up personally as in the attached draft [of a letter]? We will then give you a follow-up letter when the Budget has been announced.’
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Jimmy Savile was moving in rarefied circles. In May 1980, following his annual sponsored walk in aid of the Central Remedial Clinic in Dublin, he sat down for a meeting with Charles Haughey, the newly elected Irish prime minister. Haughey had requested the meeting through Lady Valerie Goulding, the aristocratic founder of the clinic. In the early 1970s, the two had worked closely when Haughey was head of the clinic’s fund-raising committee.

Afterwards, in a note written on Central Remedial Clinic headed paper, Lady Goulding repeated a suggestion made by Ireland’s most senior politician at the time, stating Savile ‘could be a good mediator as he really is very well in with Mrs Thatcher and members of the opposition as well.’
⁷
In subsequent years, Savile became a regular visitor to Haughey’s home in Abbeville, Kinsealy.

As well as his direct line to the prime minister, he admitted to frequently calling in to Buckingham Palace: ‘Yes, I can call them up there and go round for a chat, but I can’t say any more than that,’ he told one reporter.
⁸

Years later, he was more forthcoming with me about the extent of his relationship with the royal family, and how he put it to use in persuading Victor Matthews, construction magnate and proprietor of the
Daily Express
, to come on board with the bid to rebuild the facilities at Stoke Mandeville.

‘I know exactly what I can do and what I can’t do,’ Savile said of his royal associations over breakfast at Ossie’s Café in Marylebone. ‘What I did with [Matthews] was give him an out. I said to him, if you come across anybody that can help us or get
involved, let me know. I left his office and phoned the palace. I got the Duke of Edinburgh’s secretary to write a letter to him saying, “I understand you are going to help Jimmy Savile build Stoke Mandeville Hospital. This is a wonderful thing and will be much appreciated by the country. Philip.”

‘When I went round … to see the Duke of Edinburgh, he said, “The letter: it’s gone.” He said to me, “Do you know the geezer?” And I said, “No, never met him before in my life.”’

Savile told me he’d received a telephone call the very next day. Matthews told him that he’d got the letter and realised Savile had ‘put an arm up his back’. Matthews put it to Savile that he had dictated the letter. It was an accusation he didn’t deny. As he recalled, Matthews then asked him, ‘Why are you so honest?’ To which he replied: ‘I’m always honest with the people I deal with.’ He claimed Matthews then said, ‘Who says you’ve got a deal?’ Savile replied, ‘Prince Philip.’

Matthews knew he’d been manipulated and asked Savile what it was that he wanted. ‘Your building company, the
Daily Express
and the London
Evening Standard
[also owned by Matthews],’ came the reply. The deal was struck.

‘What was in it for him?’ Savile asked rhetorically, having polished off his eggs on toast. ‘Well, he was still a mister at the time. I’m not saying what I did was get him a title or anything like that but he finished up in the House of Lords.’ A dedicated Thatcherite, Matthews was indeed awarded a peerage by the prime minister towards the end of 1980. The fact he also owned the Cunard Line, and therefore the
QE2
, was an added bonus for Jimmy Savile, given that he was now persona non grata with P&O.

On 6 March, Gerard Vaughan updated the prime minister on the progress of the fund-raising campaign: ‘Jimmy Savile has made an excellent start,’ he wrote. ‘The fund is approaching £300,000, largely from small donations which are coming in well. He and I, with the Department, have also established a number of potential sources of more major finance; and (though he is keeping this confidential at this stage) Victor Matthews has promised him full
involvement – of the Express newspapers and, even more important, of the building components of the Trafalgar Group (Trollope and Colls and Cementation).’

The extent of Savile’s blossoming relationship with Prince Charles became clearer in the same note sent by Gerard Vaughan to the prime minister: ‘Even more encouraging, though again confidential at this stage, Jimmy Savile tells me that the Prince of Wales has agreed to be Patron of the Appeal.’
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The relationship with Prince Charles was sanctioned and fostered by the Duke of Edinburgh who viewed Jimmy Savile as someone who might be useful for his eldest son when it came to the common touch. Savile had met Charles and talked with him at various events but now he joined a circle of unofficial advisers to the heir to the throne, chiefly because of their shared interest in disabled charities. Charles had visited Stoke Mandeville in 1977, where he met and talked with the Spinal Injuries Centre founder, Dr Ludwig Guttman. His relationship with Savile blossomed over the following years, to the point where Princess Diana would describe the disc jockey and fund-raiser as her husband’s ‘mentor’.

Donations to Jimmy Savile’s Stoke Mandeville Appeal topped the £1 million mark within eight weeks. Readers of the
Daily Express
, which threw its weight behind the campaign, received an ‘I Fixed It for Jim’ lapel badge and car sticker when they filled out and returned a donation coupon in the newspaper. From teenage schoolgirls doing a sponsored swim to nurses donating their lunch money, penniless housewives sending in Green Shield stamps to Borstal boys walking from London to Nottingham, it was a campaign that seemed to capture the imagination within every strata of society. And there on the news and in the papers, on the nation’s lapels and in its car windows, was the face of Jimmy Savile.

The enthusiasm for the Stoke Mandeville campaign marked the opening of an era of national charity appeals.

‘People who are disabled are not like us,’ Savile pointed out as the money kept pouring in. ‘They can enrich our lives far more
than we enrich theirs. I might be doing something for them – but they do an even better thing for me.’ They most certainly were, for inadvertently they were making him bulletproof.