armchairlawyer wrote: ↑Wed Apr 06, 2022 8:48 am Friend and adviser: how Jimmy Savile fixed it for the royals
A new Netflix film, Jimmy Savile: A British Horror Story, reveals intimate letters between Prince Charles and Savile over 20 years, including a PR guide. Alice Jones reports

The Prince of Wales sought advice from Jimmy Savile shortly after the Duke of York made ill-advised comments about the Lockerbie bombing, according to newly unearthed letters.
Savile, the late BBC presenter now known for his prolific sex offending, wrote a media relations “handbook” for Charles, 73, who went on to “incorporate” some of the advice in a memo that was shown to the Queen and Duke of Edinburgh.
According to letters spanning a period of 20 years, Savile, the former Top of the Pops host, appeared to take on a role as unofficial adviser to the future king. Details of the correspondence are revealed in a new Netflix documentary, Jimmy Savile: A British Horror Story. The director, Rowan Deacon, gained access to dozens of letters in which the prince regularly sought guidance from the presenter.
Jimmy Savile gave royals advice on dealing with media
On January 14, 1987, the Prince of Wales sent Jimmy Savile a letter. “Perhaps I am wrong,” he wrote from Sandringham in his spidery script, “but you are the bloke who knows what’s going on. What I really need is a list of suggestions from you. I so want to get to parts of the country that others don’t get to reach.”
It was not a one-off request. The prince and the presenter corresponded for 20 years, between 1986 and 2006, with Savile apparently acting as unofficial adviser to the heir to the throne. The depth and intimacy of their correspondence is revealed in a new Netflix documentary, Jimmy Savile: A British Horror Story, which uses archive clips to explore how Savile did what he did, grooming a nation into believing he was a talented broadcaster and tireless philanthropist when, off-camera, he was a serial sexual abuser and paedophile. After Savile’s death in 2011, aged 84, the police investigated about 500 allegations of abuse, taking place from 1955 to 2009, the vast majority from victims aged under 18.

The makers of the documentary — the director Rowan Deacon (The Case of Sally Challen) and 72 Films — gained access to dozens of letters in which the prince regularly sought guidance from Savile on his public speeches and on family matters. Among them is an extraordinary five-page dossier titled Guidelines for Members of the Royal Family and Their Staffs, handwritten by Savile in 1989 for the prince, then aged 40, in which the broadcaster lays out his vision for how the royal family should respond to significant incidents.
The film-makers believe that the document was drawn up in the aftermath of the Duke of York’s ill-advised comments about the Lockerbie disaster in 1988. Visiting the Scottish town in the days after the atrocity, Prince Andrew said, “I suppose statistically something like this has got to happen at some stage . . . Of course it only affects the community in a very small way.”
“It reignited a discussion about how the royal family should respond to disasters,” Deacon says. “Jimmy Savile wrote this dossier, quite an in-depth document of advice, on how the Queen should behave and how members of the royal family should not be in competition with each other.”
In the document Savile suggests the hiring of “a special person with considerable experience in such matters”. It continues: “There must be an ‘incident room’ with several independent phone lines, teletext etc . . . The Queen should be informed in advance of any proposed action by family members.”

In a handwritten memo to Savile on January 27, 1989, the prince writes: “I attach a copy of my memo on disasters which incorporates your points and which I showed to my father. He showed it to HM [Her Majesty].” According to Deacon, the response from the Queen’s private secretary was “quite lukewarm, and Charles [was] frustrated by that. We know that from the exchange.”
Clarence House has not responded to our request for comment.
It was not the only time the prince asked Savile for help regarding his younger brother. “I wonder if you would ever be prepared to meet my sister-in-law, the Duchess of York?” he wrote on December 22, 1989. “Can’t help feeling that it would be extremely useful to her if you could. I feel she could do with some of your straightforward common sense!”

The prince and the royal family, like the rest of the nation, had no idea of Savile’s crimes. “He was duped, like we all were,” Deacon says. “The letters show the trust that Prince Charles put into Jimmy Savile. He was trying to appeal to the British people, trying to modernise. And he saw Jimmy Savile as his conduit to that. In hindsight, that was catastrophic.”
About ten minutes into Jimmy Savile: A British Horror Story there is a news clip of Savile, wearing top hat and morning suit, on his way to collect an OBE in 1972 with his grinning mother in tow. “It’s the big house in old whitish stone, Don,” he says to his driver, playing up to the cameras. “We mustn’t keep HRH waiting, as it happens.” Moments later his motorhome glides through the gates of Buckingham Palace. Watching it now, 50 years later, and ten years on from the revelations that Savile abused hundreds of women and children — some of them in that same motorhome — it is a peculiarly shocking scene and one that neatly encapsulates Savile’s unchallenged journey into the heart of the establishment.
Deacon spent a year watching 700 hours of archive footage of Savile, whose television career spanned 50 years. She set out to tell the story, not of what Savile did — his numerous crimes have been covered, notably in the 2012 ITV documentary, Exposure: The Other Side of Jimmy Savile — but how he got away with it. She discovered that Savile not only groomed the vulnerable young people he found in hospitals, prisons and television studios, he also inveigled his way into society, making connections at the highest level of politics and royalty.
The documentary features clips of him joking with Margaret Thatcher when she was prime minister (“I thought you were going to fix my getting into No 10,” she says. “I’ve already done so,” Savile replies), driving a laughing Duke of Edinburgh around in his Rolls-Royce as the royal security detail looks on, bemused, and meeting the Pope. His “national treasure” status was cemented in fawning interviews with Michael Parkinson, a This Is Your Life special and Savile turning the lights off at the end of the final episode of Top of the Pops in 2006. There are appearances on Celebrity Big Brother and Have I Got News for You where Savile makes light of his private life, hiding his depravity in plain sight. “What do you do in the caravan?” Ian Hislop asks in an episode of the topical quiz from 1999. “Anybody I can lay me hands on,” Savile says.
The documentary represents an “honest engagement” with the trust people put in Savile, Deacon says. “There’s been a temptation with the story to write him off as pure evil, that there’s nothing more to be said. Actually there’s a lot more to be said about how people are deceived and how people beyond the victims are groomed.”
Among them, the royal family, for whom the appeal of Savile at the height of his fame in the 1980s would appear clear. In one clip Savile boasts that his weekly reach is “about 40 million”, thanks to his various television and radio shows. In Dan Davies’s 2014 biography, In Plain Sight: The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile, the presenter describes himself as a kind of court jester. “I have a freshness of approach which they obviously find to their liking,” he said.
“You are so good at understanding what makes people operate and you’re wonderfully sceptical and practical!” the Prince of Wales writes in a memo in 1990, asking Savile to “cast an eye” over a draft of his work. “Let me know how you think we can best appeal to people on this score?”
Around the same time, the prince also asked Savile for advice on his charitable work, on “useful morale-boosting visits to worthwhile groups, places, projects”. Savile had recently raised £10 million for the National Spinal Injuries Centre at Stoke Mandeville Hospital, which was opened by the Prince and Princess of Wales in 1983. Christine Checkley, who was a patient at the hospital as a child, recalls Savile bringing the princess on frequent visits to her ward. “She said to me, ‘What do you do with yourself all day?’ And Jim said, ‘Oh, they watch porn.’ And I said, ‘If only I had the time’. . . She looked down and she started to giggle.” Between 1965 and 1988, Savile abused 63 people at the hospital, including child patients, staff and fundraisers.

Elsewhere in the documentary, Savile boasts about his close relationship with Thatcher. “It said in the magazine the other day that the only person she listens to is Jimmy Savile.” He was a frequent visitor to Chequers while she was prime minister and she lobbied hard for him to be knighted in 1990, despite being warned by senior civil servants that Savile was a “strange and complex man”.
When he was knighted it came as a “relief”, he told the journalist Lynn Barber in an interview, because of the “nasty rumours” about him. “I’ve got the freedom to do pretty well anything now,” he says in another interview. “You don’t know. You are constrained by certain things, I’m not in your world, I’m not constrained pretty well by anything.” For Savile, his title and his connections with the great, the good and the powerful offered him a veneer of respectability and protection — although his protectors were not aware of it themselves. An anonymous letter sent to the police in 1998 that accused Savile of being a “committed paedophile” said: “He thinks he’s untouchable because of the people he mixes with.”
“The consequence of that was that it gave him a seal of approval in the eyes of the British public,” Deacon says. “It consolidated our trust in him. We’re not suggesting for one moment that Thatcher or Prince Charles knew what he was really up to. Nonetheless, that seal of approval meant that the weight of his respect and trust was a planet compared to the tiny voices of these women that popped up every now and again.”
Against the sheer heft of Savile’s popularity and apparent legitimacy, the voices of his many victims were drowned out. Women came forward several times over the years but police inquiries fizzled out, newspaper stories and documentaries were pulled until after his death. When Savile died the Prince of Wales led tributes and Savile’s body lay “in state” in a gold coffin in the Queens Hotel in Leeds.
The film ends on the powerful testimony of one woman, Sam Brown, who was repeatedly molested by Savile during church services at Stoke Mandeville Hospital, aged 11. He would put his hands up her skirt and in her mouth to prevent her crying out as she waited to take the collection plate round the congregation at Mass. “I can remember looking at the back of people’s heads, like a little sea of people’s heads, and I’m thinking, ‘Why can’t you see me?’ As if everybody’s heads were turned against me,” she says. “I think in one way it confirmed to me that I wasn’t to be seen.”
Jimmy Savile: A British Horror Story is on Netflix from April 6


The letters
Prince Charles to Savile, Sandringham, January 14, 1987. Letter. Handwritten
Perhaps I am wrong, but you are the bloke who knows what’s going on. What I really need is a list of suggestions from you. I so want to get to parts of the country that others don’t get to reach.
Prince Charles to Savile, January 2, 1989. Memorandum. Handwritten
I can’t remember if I’ve written you a note recently, on the subject of you suggesting useful morale-boosting visits etc to worthwhile groups, places, projects and so on that don’t get enough attention. I have a dreadful feeling that the office doesn’t consult you before each programme meeting.

Savile to Prince Charles. Undated as enclosed in Charles’s letter of January 27, 1989, below. Handwritten. [NB the Lockerbie disaster occurred on December 21, 1988]
Guidelines for Members of the Royal Family and Their Staffs
A special person with considerable experience in such matters [must be hired]. There must be an “incident room” with several independent phone lines, teletext etc.
The Queen should be informed in advance of any proposed action by family members.
Prince Charles to Savile, January 27, 1989. Memorandum. Handwritten
I attach a copy of my memo on disasters which incorporates your points and which I showed to my father. He showed it to HM [Her Majesty].
Prince Charles to Savile, December 22, 1989. Memorandum. Handwritten
I wonder if you would ever be prepared to meet my sister-in-law — the Duchess of York? Can’t help feeling that it would be extremely useful to her if you could. I feel she could do with some of your straightforward common sense!
Prince Charles to Savile, April 16, 1990. Memorandum. Handwritten
You are so good at understanding what makes people operate and you’re wonderfully sceptical and practical! Can you cast an eye over this draft and let me know how you think we can best appeal to people on this score?
Prince Charles to Savile, Highgrove House, July 4, 1991. Letter. Typed
Dear Jimmy, I can’t tell you how grateful I am for the most useful assistance you . . . provided for my speech in the Guildhall the other day. It was really good of you to take the trouble to put together those splendid notes and [you] provided me with considerable food for thought. Whether you think the final result is in any way worthwhile, is of course another matter . . . But in case it might interest you, I enclose a copy of my speech. With renewed and heartfelt thanks, Charles

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/frie ... -sgpzqlknd