The rage and disgust that we feel at each fresh revelation of the crimes of Jimmy Savile has an unsatisfying quality. It is distinct from the normal course of outrage. The “normal” part is bad enough. The discovery that his sexual appetites ranged from necrophilia to the rape of children is hard to stomach partly because it is difficult to comprehend the existence of such a completely unrestrained id. No consideration of safety or law hindered him. Nor did his professed religious scruples.
It’s likely that some of his crimes, like the relentless groping, went unpunished because of the very different culture of those days, in which women were expected to evade or tolerate such behaviour, rather than to alert the authorities and make a formal protest. But the leap from serial groping, offensive and reprehensible though it was, to the systematic rape of the helpless, is one that marks this case out, and the sheer improbability of it explains a little of how he was able to persist for so long undetected, and, in public, unsuspected too.
When these things are brought to light, the immediate instinct is for punishment. In part, we look for scapegoats, and for people to blame: the hospital authorities, who did nothing; the BBC, which is in any case always guilty to the rightwing press, but in this case really did fail badly; the politicians who appointed him as a fundraising plenipotentiary with access anywhere (and, it turns out, to anyone) he wanted. But above all, we feel cheated by his death. It robs us of the dramatic, and purgative, aspects of a trial. When Charles II was restored, the bodies of three of the judges who had condemned his father to death were exhumed, publicly hanged at Tyburn, then decapitated and their heads exhibited on spikes at Westminster Hall, where his trial had taken place. This strikes us now as primitive and terrible but the savage, theatrical desecration captures and discharges something of the rage that Savile’s wickedness inspires today.
Later generations could take comfort in the belief of a judgment after death. If there is one thing to make the most benign agnostics wish that there were a God to punish sinners with eternal torment, it is the contemplation of history’s monsters. Oblivion is too good for the likes of Pol Pot, and for Jimmy Savile, too. The belief in divine justice after death supplied a comforting, and for some people necessary, suggestion that the world was ultimately morally balanced, and wickedness somehow punished as it deserved. Is there anything to put in its place? Setting out and enforcing the rules and habits that would in a well-functioning bureaucracy prevent Savile’s crimes is right and necessary, but it does not seem to satisfy the requirements of justice. One restitution might involve Savile’s fortune: why should his heirs enjoy the money that is surely due in compensation to his victims? Another might be some kind of public ceremony of what used to be called commination, a ritual expression of public condemnation and disgust. We have law suits for the first, and the destruction of his memorials – his gravestone was smashed – and of his memory for the second. But in the end the horror of his crimes remains.