I Think, Therefore I Am (A Pervert)
Everyone reading this will have at some time been guilty of an occasional ‘unnatural sexual proclivity’. Don’t try and deny it, you dirty sods. You got away with it, as well. How do you sleep at night, knowing this? Easy – you enact a few more; because that’s when you indulge, in the place you can do anything you like with anyone you like and nobody can touch you. They’re called fantasies, and take place in the original ‘virtual’ sense; nobody gets hurt, no laws are broken and they’re not real; they’re also nobody’s business but yours.
The former diplomat and alleged deputy-director of MI6, Sir Peter Hayman, was only ever charged with one offence – ‘An act of gross indecency in a public toilet’, something he engaged in with (one assumes) another grown man. Not uncommon at one time, especially amongst high-ranking diplomats and spies whose adolescent awakenings took place in strictly all-male environments and whose early adult lives were lived in an era when any expression of homosexual leanings could result in being placed at the mercy of blackmailers, the ruination of a career and a prison sentence. Such chaps grabbed what they could get when they could get it.
Of course, an establishment figure had a network of contacts in high places that the average importuner was denied and any potential scandal could be swept under the carpet for the greater good. When it came to national security at the height of the Cold War, and in the wake of the Cambridge Spies, it’s no wonder the powers-that-be were jittery and eager to avoid any exposure that could provide the enemy with an advantage. A cover-up simply for the sake of protecting ‘one of their own’ – an over-familiar accusation after the event – is not necessarily true where those working in such sensitive areas were concerned; as there was a far bigger picture to take into account, the odd reckless lapse by someone who should have known better meant he couldn’t simply be hung out to dry.
In the case of the late Sir Peter Hayman, the recent release (whether by accident or design) of a government file punctuated by references to his particular proclivities shows the kind of concern hardly unique for someone in his lofty position; that the document dates from the 1980s is also important. At that time, what most still regarded as the leading unnatural proclivity was homosexuality. Homosexual acts between consenting adults in private may have been decriminalised in 1967, but the gay age of consent was still twenty-one and men of a certain age weren’t keen to make such leanings public. Remember this was an era when the openly gay Peter Tatchell stood as the Labour candidate at the notorious Bermondsey by-election of 1983 and was undermined by a dirty tricks campaign rightly or wrongly attributed to his Liberal opponent, Simon Hughes; George Michael was firmly in the closet with a sun-bed as his sole companion; Boy George declared he’d rather have a cup of tea than sex; and the onset of the AIDS panic strengthened the mistrust many had of any man who wasn’t turned on by Sam Fox’s assets.
Not that any reference to homosexuality would cause today’s moral crusaders to choke on their muesli, however; indeed, under normal circumstances, there would probably be someone starting a Facebook petition to have Sir Peter Hayman’s 1984 charge overturned and demanding a posthumous pardon. But in this specific case, that won’t happen because his file contains references to paedophilia, something mercifully indefensible that has excited and aroused the Westminster witch-hunters of 2015. Apparently, Hayman was a member of the Paedophile Information Exchange, which is a Godsend to those who claim they now have evidence that the late Geoffrey Dickens MP was right all along.
Hayman subscribed to the long-defunct kiddie-fiddler’s collective, but wasn’t a member of the organisation’s executive committee. Nevertheless, he accidentally left a batch of P.I.E-related material on a bus in 1978, something that seems shocking from today’s perspective – he travelled on public transport??? When the police investigated, they traced the material to a flat in Bayswater owned by Hayman, who had used the apartment to conduct correspondence of a dubious nature and under an assumed name; whilst sniffing around, the boys in blue uncovered over forty diaries in which Hayman had chronicled his sexual fantasies. Crucially, however, there was no evidence discovered that Hayman had been an actual abuser of children beyond what went on in his imagination. He was cautioned not to employ the Royal Mail to handle any of this obscene material and, despite the fact that Geoffrey Dickens displayed his equally vivid imagination in the wake of Hayman’s non-imprisonment, no Victims came forward when ‘Private Eye’ revealed the story three years later, and that was the end of that – until now.
What’s worth remembering in the case of Sir Peter Hayman is that there is no proof that he was a serial child-abuser whatsoever; not that this matters to publicity-seeking MPs either married to women young enough to be their daughters or with a proclivity for a pie that isn’t an acronym. Believing they’d have to settle for relieving themselves on the resting place of Leon Brittan, they now have something else to support their campaign. It couldn’t have come at a better time.
I should imagine to most, the nature of Hayman’s fantasies were pretty repugnant; but was he not entitled to have them, all the same? When it comes to non-sexual fantasies, everyone has imagined doing things they would never countenance in real life, whether that be robbing a bank or committing murder; similarly, the majority have some sexual fantasies that they would equally never contemplate indulging in outside of their heads. That’s what fantasies are all about – private, imaginary daydreams that are utterly irrelevant beyond that context. Yes, Hayman made the mistake of writing his down, but isn’t that what every novelist does? Anthony Burgess was not a rapist because he created a character who is precisely that in ‘A Clockwork Orange’, and Shakespeare was not a murderer because he created Othello. All are written translations of the imagination, not confessions of actual incidents committed by the authors.
It would be easy to evoke yet one more invention by Orwell, that of the Thought Police, or even to cite Philip K Dick’s ‘Minority Report’, whereby future criminals are arrested for crimes they’ve yet to commit; but the fact that somebody can be labelled guilty of something they merely imagined is a chilling development indeed. Our minds are supposed to be the last refuge of freedom, where there are no CCTV cameras and thoughts cannot be monitored; but with Britain’s prisons beginning to house those who publicly expressed a fantasy on social media, it’s hard not to believe that even the imagination is now poised to fall under another section of another proposed piece of legislation.
Je suis coupable. As are we all.
Petunia Winegum
-
February 3, 2015 at 4:25 pm -
Be interested to know if they were the fantasies of a Pederast, but I was always taught that it was rude to read other people’s diaries.
I noticed that in the testimony of one recent trial the alleged perp was said to be showing boys porno and was then only interested in those who got the Excitations, as the Beach Boys might have phrased it. The man is supposedly on trial for paedophilia, so presumably he’ll be found innocent.
-
February 3, 2015 at 4:33 pm -
Was that the wacky weatherman?
-
-
February 3, 2015 at 4:51 pm -
Excellent post Pet, unfortunately I’m cooking dinner (Nuremberg sausages and potatoes, thank you for asking) so can’t give it the ponderance it deserves. But I was always taught that the thing that made us British and not ‘European’, why ‘Billies’ and ‘Dans’ don’t regularly kick the bejeezus out of each other south of Geordie Land or east of Anglesey , was the Elizabethan ‘leitfaden’ that ‘ a man might believe what he wanted, so long as he didn’t try to overthrow the State’.
That candle light by the martyrs of both sides has to shine into the depths of all our fantasies and guide all ‘morality’ laws; One may fantasize all night long about buggering a troop of Brownies so long as one doesn’t act on it.
-
February 3, 2015 at 4:59 pm -
… this was an era when the openly gay Peter Tatchell stood as the Labour candidate at the notorious Bermondsey by-election of 1983 and was undermined by a dirty tricks campaign rightly or wrongly attributed to his Liberal opponent, Simon Hughes; George Michael was firmly in the closet with a sun-bed as his sole companion; Boy George declared he’d rather have a cup of tea than sex; … and Jimmy Savile was on the cover of Gay news….
https://pinktriangletrust.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/gaynews-jimmy-savile4.jpg?w=640-
February 3, 2015 at 5:03 pm -
Hah! I’d forgotten about that. Funnily enough, he doesn’t seem to have had his face gracing the front cover of the P.I.E publication, ‘Magpie’ – as far as I know.
-
February 3, 2015 at 5:07 pm -
’twas written he was a founder member.
Still waiting for evidence. -
February 3, 2015 at 6:10 pm -
“‘Magpie’ – as far as I know.”
Oh dear, say it ain’t so! I forsee certain 80s ITV children’s TV presenters ….
Run Bastable and Boyd RUN away NOW, spraying libel writs in your fleeing paths! (not that I was ever allowed to watch ‘Magpie’ because of course it was on ITV and therefore not suitable).
-
February 3, 2015 at 6:17 pm -
[wiki]”The first presenters (Magpie) were the former BBC Radio 1 disc jockey Pete Brady” Guilty, by God, GUILTY!
-
-
-
-
February 3, 2015 at 5:11 pm -
You’re right about fantasies.
But doesn’t the possession of material from an organisation actively promoting activities that may have been in those fantasies suggest he was taking the first steps on a journey to realise them? Whether he reached that destination is another matter, but surely for someone in government, it should have ben a cause for concern?
-
February 3, 2015 at 5:13 pm -
It was a cause for concern. That’s why we even know it ever happened.
-
February 3, 2015 at 5:16 pm -
“but surely for someone in government, it should have been a cause for concern?”
Presumably it was, and presumably that was why someone had prepared a dossier marked ‘security implications’ and that presumably means that everyone had done exactly what they should have done in respect of someone who hadn’t actually broken any laws yet….-
February 3, 2015 at 5:45 pm -
You’re correct – possessing pictures of children posed in or for sexual gratification was not a crime (if that is what the materials were)… but was he allowed to continue his job , knowing the access this might have given him?
From Wikipedia:
The Independent stated in his obituary that he started a commercial career in 1974, upon retirement at age 60.[3] However The Guardian reported in 2014 that he later served in the intelligence services, and was “long-time deputy director of MI6″.[5] The Daily Telegraph characterised him as an “MI6 operative”
-
-
-
February 3, 2015 at 5:25 pm -
I’ve just published an article about Hayman elsewhere, I appear to have had a thought about him that no one else has. Maybe he was not a genuine paedophile but a spy?
What really annoys me though is people who persist in using “try and” instead of “try to”.
-
February 3, 2015 at 9:11 pm -
Is that what really annoys you? An insignificant solecism?
-
February 4, 2015 at 2:42 pm -
More than mere words can say.
-
-
-
February 3, 2015 at 6:03 pm -
I would dearly love for someone to one day sit down in front of Watson or Danczuk and point out to them that given every single stone they have unturned so far has produced nothing to shore up their leaky theory about a high level sex abuse ring operating in government in the 1980s, are they not simply participating in the reheating of thirty year old homophobic attitudes that presumed that every gay man was automatically engaged in the process of buggering little boys, hence the law requiring them to confine their grubby little habit to men over the age of 21.
Given that these attitudes are now considered unenlightened, contemptible and beyond the pale, how can they justify continuing to stand by them?
-
February 3, 2015 at 9:28 pm -
I suspect it’s just an attempt to smear the Tories before the election. Most of the people are dead and any evidence is so long ago, so it can all be manipulated. If Dickinson had a real dirt file , why didn’t he copy it? Make several copies and deposit them with friends solicitors etc?
Of course with no real evidence and the deaths of witnesses or alleged participants it can all be grown into a lovely pre election stink —- the wicked wicked Tories-
February 4, 2015 at 9:24 am -
Dickens was an absolute twat who ought to be ridiculed by the left, and rightly so.
-
February 7, 2015 at 9:58 pm -
I would have thought there is a very good answer for this and one that the hysterics foaming at the mouth have never considered : Dickens I am sure himself had enough sense to realise that his so-called dossier which was mostly compiled from anonymous sources was a defamation time bomb should it get into the ‘wrong’ hands and that it was he and whoever passed on any of the info to a third party and information from it leaked out to the media, could be legally and financially destroyed by it.
And I would have thought that Leon Brittan and the Home Office officials thought exactly the same. That could be the very reason Dickens handed his ‘dossier’ to Leon Brittan alone and from all accounts, Brittan dealt with it in exactly the right manner.
I speculate that when Dickens’ widow also realised upon her husband’s death that it was a ticking libel nightmare and destroyed it for that reason and no other.
However in this era of Stalinist revisionism of recent history the fanatics & hysterics believe mere mention of the existence of a ‘dossier’ means proof of it’s contents just as they shake & hyperventilate over a scribbled piece of paper re Elm Guest House.
I think today you could write anything about a politician you don’t like, on a bog wall in Westminster tube station (maybe even scribble Jimmy Savile Was Here, take a ‘selfie’ of it and publish it and the go-jams & Ickes of the world would have all the proof they needed & eventually Simon Danczuk MP would thunder about it to an obliging tabloid that here was even further proof of the infamous VIP Westminster Pedo Ring/
-
-
-
February 3, 2015 at 6:53 pm -
“it’s hard not to believe that even the imagination is now poised to fall under another section of another proposed piece of legislation.”
He wrote some of them down in physical diaries. Today, he’d probably write them on a computer. If the material is stored, even for his own private use,
in the cloud somewhere, it looks as though he might be liable to a charge of publishing obscene material: “R v Perrin is specifically concerned with ‘publishing’ electronic data under the Obscene Publications Act 1959 and states that the mere transmission of data constitutes publication. It is clear from the decision in R v Perrin and in the earlier case of R v Waddon (6 April 2000 unreported), that there is publication both when images are uploaded and when they are downloaded.” The Obscene Publications Act itself does not restrict itself to images: “In this Act “article” means any description of article containing or embodying matter to be read or looked at or both, …”-
February 3, 2015 at 7:00 pm -
Just to extend that: perhaps it’s not in an external storage service, and he stores it at home. If he access it from (say) a tablet over WiFi from one of those little networked storage drives sold for home use, well then, WiFi is radio, and that too is transmission (broadcasting, indeed!). Come to that, so is transmission over a physical cable inside his house.
-
-
February 3, 2015 at 7:50 pm -
Look, if the CSA mafia on Twitter say he was a raging paedophile then a raging paedophile he was. It matters not if there was not a scrap of evidence that he followed through on his fantasies. They want him to be one so that’s that.
All the evidence they need is that the infamous “Nick” – he who witnessed not one, not two but three murders and yet still survived to tell the tale – has named him.
-
February 7, 2015 at 10:05 pm -
“Nick” should have been arrested as an accessory to murder. Not even witnessing one is forgivable but three? And he participated in acts , so he claims, up to the age of 16 so he is not child.
-
-
February 3, 2015 at 7:54 pm -
*applause* I will maybe add more when I am not completely shattered after travel, lack of sleep and one of my occasional encounters with true evil
-
February 3, 2015 at 8:32 pm -
“one of my occasional encounters with true evil”
Normally I would make a joke but somehow I sense you mean it. You don’t seem the sort to misuse the term ‘evil’ so I can only hope your encounter left you unscathed. *thoughts with you *
-
-
February 3, 2015 at 7:55 pm -
One of your best so far, Petunia. Sparky and to the point. Keep it up!
-
February 3, 2015 at 8:21 pm -
You could probably put most literature down as ‘fantasy’ of one sort or another. Especially the raunchier stuff. Perhaps we should just arrest all authors and poets, just in case.
-
February 3, 2015 at 8:25 pm -
Punished for imagination? It’s already started in the USA – best to get ‘em while they’re young, it seems…
-
February 3, 2015 at 11:02 pm -
I have got the impression Watson is rowing back a bit. His tweets have been quite interesting, as much as for what he’s NOT claiming.
-
February 4, 2015 at 12:59 am -
‘it’s hard not to believe that even the imagination is now poised to fall under another section of another proposed piece of legislation’
It wouldn’t be surprising, given how the last major attempt, under present legislation failed.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/06/30/obscenity_law_where_now/
-
February 4, 2015 at 1:23 am -
Especially with Kent seeming to be dead keen on this for some reason.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/04/26/obscene_publications_chat/
I had another look around tonight to see if I could source this properly, as when I wrote here last week that the feminists’ shock troops, in the CPS and elsewhere, would be working on their tactics as to how to get the wrong sort of written works banned over the next few years, I doubted if anyone believed me to be unduly serious. But I was sure that I had read something of the kind in my daily browse through The Register, as I distinctly remember that I could hardly believe that anyone could seriously be considering prosecuting online chat. When we have progressed to that, nothing that they dream up now could surprise me.
So you’re quite right. They – whoever they might be this week – might as well bug people’s homes, or directly tap their neural cortices, if crime is to be a function of what men and women think and say, as opposed to what they really do.
When you extrapolate the principles involved in acceptance of that sort of mind set on into other areas, and the potential impact of their tacit approval by the ignorant being used as a means for the few to exert control of the masses, we’re in serious danger of seeing our children being unwittingly led, by the nose, in a rapid regression back to the darker parts of what the last century’s revolutionary movements achieved
The very fact that we have arrived at where we are today tends to show that the stance that ‘that will never happen’ is not necessarily a wise position to take
-
-
February 4, 2015 at 2:26 am -
What about that guy who wrote for the Independent until found to be making his interviews up, can’t remember his name but I remember reading his story about the rape/ seduction of a 10 year old who enjoyed it and couldn’t believe he would get paid for it! The ‘story’ was hastily removed but not before a lot of people had read it. Probably his fantasy but why wasn’t he investigated ? I am far from easily shocked but I was quite stunned by it.
-
February 4, 2015 at 9:21 am -
There is a body of psychiatric opinion that a major problem for those adults who later recount their stories about their childhood sexual activity is that they feel conflicted because they are not allowed to admit that at the time they did like it because that is… inappropriate.
This aspect is generally brushed under the litigation/publicity carpet as just some kind of hypnosis: “Grooming”; and those psychologists who do discuss the phenomenon are viewed as somewhat off-kilter with the mainstream.
-
February 4, 2015 at 9:30 am -
This morning Tom Watson is promoting Labour’s new plan to teach sex education to 5 year old so to “educate them” to “not bully” homosexuals.
I’m sure the irony of this is not lost on anyone here. -
February 4, 2015 at 10:33 am -
I remember Mark Lawson once interviewing Stephen Fry about an incident that happened to Fry at public school, one that Lawson defined as ‘rape’ and did his best to portray as a traumatic incident. Fry admitted he enjoyed it, but Lawson had to interpret it as sexual assault.
-
February 7, 2015 at 10:29 pm -
Didn’t jazz entertainer George Melly once say he screwed a well known Tory MP while at school?. He couldn’t get away with saying that today with Tom Watson around.
-
February 10, 2015 at 12:45 pm -
I see Stephen Fry wants all ad-hominem crime pardoned a la Saint Turing. Give ‘em an inch and they want another five…
Be interested to know if any of David Smith’s historical crimes will get included in this trawl if Steve pulls it off.
“After he was dead, we got to know much moor about this otherwise unknowable man. With the lifting of reporting restrictions we discovered that David Smith had no less than 22 prior convictions!! He had even been in prison as recently as 2002, when he received a seven year sentence. He had first been in prison as long ago as 1966!! I worked out that David Smith would have been 19 in 1966; I also recalled that any homosexual acts whatsoever were illegal in 1966. So far as I can tell, from reading all the reports I could find, all of David Smith’s 22 convictions are associated with male victims.”
http://jimcannotfixthis.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/the-strange-death-of-liberal-england.html
-
-
-
-
-
February 4, 2015 at 10:02 pm -
Not lawson. Pamela Stephenson. Loon.
-
February 4, 2015 at 10:42 pm -
I don’t know which interview you saw, but the one I saw was conducted by Mark Lawson. Prat.
-
February 5, 2015 at 10:47 am -
I haven’t seen the Stephenson one but there’s nowt about under-age nookie in the Lawson one, only his falling in love with a boy when he was about 15 (judging from the context although it is not specified)
http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XMTMyODM5Njg4.html
-
-
{ 41 comments… read them below or add one }