Mirror backs away from publication
Sources close to former secret service agent Tony Holland have sent information to the Slog over the last week. One purports to be an extract from a letter written by a former MI5 operative naming former Tory Minister Michael Portillo, which includes the phrase ‘Portillo was taking little boys to his cottage in France.’ Retaining an open mind, The Slog looks at the impenetrable fog of sexual, legal, and media perversion involved.
The officer writing the extract adds that Tony Holland ‘worked in the [security services] department that gave those stories to Geoffrey Dickens…we are trying to get it publicised by the Daily Mirror at the moment, but apparently they are not happy – even though Tony has the full documentation to discredit members of the Establishment.’
Nobody should jump to conclusions about what this may or may not mean; but it does raise some interesting issues:
1. The words ‘taking little boys to his cottage’ would on the surface suggest ‘real’ paedophilia: but on the other hand we have seen the Black Arts applied to Stuart Hall, Dave Lee Travis, Rolf Harris and Jim Davidson. Most of the eventual press releases upon conviction have referred to ‘with children as young as nine’ in Stepford Wives style….but on examination, it’s always the 9 year-old’s charge that the defendant denies. Also we do know that Dickens, in his naivety (albeit well-meant) regarded all under-age homosexual intercourse as paedophilic.
2. I do confess to finding the phrase ‘documentation to discredit members of the Establishment’ somewhat concerning. When a person says ‘punish the guilty’ he or she might be a zealot, but one senses that person has justice in mind, not dirty tricks: using information ‘to discredit’ someone smacks of Freudian linguistics, I think.
3. While it is impossible to date exactly the period involved from the extract I’ve seen, it seems likely that – given the level of MI5 interest – it was during Portillo’s time as a Cabinet Minister. During the 1990s Major Government, he was Defence Secretary….a post that involves an unusually high level of MI5/6 contact. Not long afterwards, a former Northern Ireland spook mentioned to me that Mr Portillo’s appointment had been “vigorously opposed” because he was felt to be “an easy mark for blackmailers”. The age of consent for gay men was not lowered from 18 to 16 until 2000.
Some of you will have noted (left) in the Murdoch press yesterday, a blatant attempt to obstruct the course of justice via a pretty virulent campaign to rubbish and discredit – there’s that word again – the head of the Crown Prosecution Service. I don’t know the lady, and for all I know she may deserve the hammering she’s getting. But is does seem blindingly obvious, does it not, that Newscorp has begun this process of assassination immediately prior to more charges about to be dumped upon the head of all-round wide boy Mazher Mahmood. For it is no longer hard at all to join up the dots leading from Mahmood to an historical cesspit of Newscorp and Met Police collusion during which (to be polite) Magna Carta was deemed by those involved to be – at best – in abeyance.
I introduce this element in order to dismiss knee-jerk rejections of ‘conspiracy theory’….or as Boris Johnson so dishonestly called the phone hacking allegations, “a load of left-wing poppycock” – having had a clandestine meeting with Murdoch and Brooks the day before.
From this distance in time, it is well-nigh impossible to discern with any certainty the motives for the security services passing damning information to Geoff Dickens about leading members of the Conservative Government. I doubt very much if they involved a search for justice and truth, because that has never in history been what Sovereign security services do. Far more likely is that MI was genuinely concerned to protect Britain’s secrets from its enemies.
In which case, a diffusely confusing light is, once again, thrown upon the Westland Helicopters affair in early 1986 – a Defence and Home Security issue in which the two main players involved were Defence Secretary Michael Heseltine….and the Trade and Industry Secretary Leon Brittan. Long associated with Elm House paedophile allegations, Brittan was felt by informed sources at the time to have used intelligence officers to smear Heseltine…who then wound up on a spurious ‘list’ of people connected to…yes, Jeffrey Epstein.
There is no doubt in my mind today that the Heseltine ‘connection’ to Epstein was entirely false. As for all the other players in this stranger-than-fiction account of Smiley’s People, who knows where the truth lies on motive, innocence, guilt, perversion and media manipulation. Dead and buried, I’d imagine. One used to call this sort of thing a web of deceit. Now, of course it’s a world wide web of deceit.
The one thing I suspect we can say without fear of contradiction (except of course in the Sun and the Sunday Times) is that the sooner we remove the influence of Rupert Murdoch and his fellow slimeballs from British culture, the quicker that culture can begin a recovery from its descent into the sewers.
The Slog 