Jimmy Savile was an unusual choice of icon for the revivalist ‘fear the Satan in our midst’ movement. That is possibly the reason why he is consistently described as a ‘fixer’, or the ‘go-between’, arranging young flesh for the more usual Satanic demon of debauched product of public schools or the clergy. There has long been a class divide element in the construction of the archetypical Satanist; young and vulnerable working class children from council estates drawn into a web of evil by the rich and powerful ‘upper class’.

The origins of the current obsession with the ‘evil in our midst’ can be traced to the activities of the emerging charismatic and fundamentalist Christian religious movements in the late 70s, where flamboyant ‘exorcisms’ encouraged acceptance of the reality of Satanic presence. At a time of declining regular worship, and the emergence on the ‘left’ of progressive views on sexual practices such as homosexuality, leaders of those religious movements were natural bed fellows for extreme right wing politicians of the ‘hang ’em and flog ’em’ persuasion such as Geoffrey Dickens.

That Dickens, an arch supporter of capital punishment, and an outspoken opponent of homosexuality, is currently the darling of the left is purely because they have overlooked his ‘other’ views and honed in on the element of those beliefs which support their view that the ‘working class’ are perverted and abused by the ‘upper class’.

Dickens was an early supporter of an organisation called ‘Reachout Trust’ – an Evangelical Christian charity. Their ‘Occult expert’ was a woman called Audrey Harper. Audrey’s tale follows a familiar pattern of degradation (as sold to Bella magazine. Bella? Really?) and final redemption by Evangelical Christians – after which she established a living as talking head commentator and ‘proof’ of the existence of Satanic Abuse Rings, and babies created for sacrifice.

Dickens wrote the foreword to Audrey Harper’s flight of recovered memory, called Dance with the Devil. Harper claimed to have been inducted into a Satanic coven in Virginia Water, in a ceremony which involved being smeared with blood; in her original version of the story the blood had come from a sacrificed cockerel, although she later substituted the dead bird in the story with a murdered baby.

Dickens, like Simon Danczuk, managed to be the representative of the good people of Rochdale, privy to all manner of inside information, without ever stumbling over the scandal of the very real child abuse occurring in Rochdale – but an absolute whizz at publicising unproven historic abuse by dead ‘Toffs’. Dickens is even managing it after his own death.

It is one of the wonders of the current furore over the missing ‘Dickens Dossier’ that few are asking ‘which dossier’? – for there were several. Several as in several different subjects, not several different copies.

If we take first, the dossier that everyone hopes the NSPCC investigation will find; the one which proves that Tories are intrinsically evil, that paedophilia as a practice is indelibly stamped on one’s DNA along with instructions on which political party to vote for, and thus those who vote Labour will never be infected by this evil – then there were several copies in existence.

Geoffrey’s wife had one copy. She burnt it; possibly because she had more reason than most to distrust anything Geoffrey had to say. He had not one, but two, mistresses that he flitted between – once famously announcing to a press conference that he had ‘left his wife’ but asking them to keep quiet, since he hadn’t actually told her yet…..

Just in the last few days it has come to light that allegedly Andrea Davidson had a copy. Yes, that Andrea Davidson, the professional forger who has shown up in every conspiracy theory worthy of note. The Andrea Davidson that allegedly had a close relationship with Tony Blair – but never thought to send him a copy for safekeeping. The Andrea Davidson that was parachuted into Iraq by the SAS – but never trusted those fine fellows sufficiently to entrust one of them with a copy. The Andrea Davidson that took refuge in the Ecuadorean embassy – but never gave Julian Assange the information that now the NSPCC seeks so urgently. Rats! Wouldn’t you just know it!

Leaving that aside – the first point to note is that Dickens claimed he sent the ‘dossier’ which Leon Brittan is accused of ‘losing’ describing the ‘cover-up’ to the ‘Lord Chancellor’ on the 24th March 1981. The Lord Chancellor at that time was Lord Hailsham, not Leon Brittan!

Dickens’ informant was a policeman who had worked on the original Paedophile Information Exchange inquiry – the leak itself something that was subject to a later inquiry. He was complaining that Peter Hayman was not prosecuted for his membership of PIE. Dickens associated homosexuality with paedophilia; so membership of an organisation which was campaigning to lower the age of consent for homosexual activity from (then) 21 became a ‘child abuser’ in his eyes.

Leon Brittan has recently said that he had correspondence with Dickens in 1984. Newspaper reports of 1983 (Daily Express August 25th) say that Dickens has ‘eight names, big people, really important names, public figures and I am going to expose them in Parliament’. Coincidentally, the same day, Scotland Yard handed the Director of Public Prosecutions the result of their two year trawl of names appearing in publications by PIE. Was the same policeman responsible for the original leak still talking to Dickens? Did Dickens really offer to courageously name names that would otherwise have remained unknown – or was he opportunistically jumping on the result of a painstaking and through investigation by the Police into PIE?

Just to muddy the waters further – in November 1983, the Daily Mail published a story from Dickens saying that he HAD handed a dossier to Leon Brittan – but not one naming 8 big names involved in PIE – but a dossier of alleged perverted homosexual activity in Buckingham Palace! Innocent young footmen and stable lads were being drawn into a ‘web of vice’ by wealthy patrons. Actually they were indulging in perfectly legal sexual practices – the law had changed by that time – but the age of consent was still 21 – homophobes could still equate paedophilia with homosexuality. Today those young stable lads and innocent footmen would be free to marry each other if they wished – Dickens would self-combust were he still alive.

Should the missing ‘Brittan’ dossier turn out to be the ‘Buckingham Palace’ dossier, as I suspect, then we shall be watching the pleasant spectacle of the left wing having hailed as a hero, the saviour of child abuse everywhere, a man who turns out to be a homophobic religious fanatic who wanted to deny homosexuals the right to express themselves and their sexuality freely.