If it needs to be kept SO secret...

...you probably shouldn't be doing it in the first place.

And it would be a bit mad to bring new attention to it, wouldn't it, Harvey?

I think most people had completely forgotten about Harvey Proctor until the last couple of weeks. I dimly remember the case from the late 1980s; he was convicted for paying for sex from underage boys, but I had to look up the details of the case to fill in a lot of blanks.

He was convicted for sex with "17-20 year old male prostitutes" when the age of homosexual consent was 21. Now the age of consent is 16, that would not be a crime.

Point is, why is he holding press conferences to insist how he is not a paedophile? As far as I am aware, nobody was accusing him of such in public...so why such a vehement public denial? He says "homosexual witch hunt" but that's just flim-flammery to try to cloud the issue if you ask me.

No, this seems more orchestrated; by holding his press conference and graphically describing the acts that the police have interviewed him about (note: not accused him of), he's trying to ensure that any future trial into whatever he's really been up to these last thirty years is compromised.

I can't see any other reason to put his own name out there with the inference - quite deliberately, I'm sure - that the police are trying to tie him in with the wider Parliamentary paedophile ring. He obviously knows that he's on solid ground refuting it, which is unsurprising - not everyone could have been part of it - but as far as I'm aware, nobody but he and the police knew that he was being interviewed in conjunction with it at all. Now, after his press conference, everyone knows.

It's all very confusing.