How Politics Works

First of all...

It's Ken! Everyone loves Ken, don't they? He's one of the Tories that even Labour supporters could probably get on with.

Trouble is, Ken had recently been up in court in a case which a Ben Fellowes had accused him of groping him in a Parliamentary office during the course of a Cook Report investigation into Cash for Questions (or Bombs or whatever it was at the time). Fellowes was actually 19 at the time, but was pretending to be 15, which is presumably where the charge originated.

Then Ben Fellowes was acquitted of "perverting the course of justice", i.e. lying about it. So where does that leave us? And where does it leave Cuddly Ken?

Enter Lord Janner and a seemingly unrelated series of cases:

From the CPS report:

"The Crown Prosecution Service stated that the case met their evidential test for prosecution and they would have otherwise have prosecuted on 22 counts of indecent assaults and buggery, against nine persons which are alleged to have occurred between 1969 and 1988."

However, as Janner was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease in 2009 and it has apparently progressed to such a point where his evidence could not be relied upon in court, all that can be done is a "trial of the facts", in which he will be undoubtedly found guilty.

Since the Ben Fellowes acquittal, another man has come forward claiming that he was molested by Ken Clarke when he was 14. You may not have heard much about this - not a lot of detail has been released - but mainly because...

Enter Harvey Proctor! (see last post).

Harvey Proctor: "not a paedophile"

And who's talking about Ken Clarke now? No-one.

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.