BY DANIEL JUPP
Once again the BBC finds itself mired in a sex scandal. This time it’s that paragon of virtue, Huw Edwards. That’s going to hurt a lot. Someone with an agenda against the BBC, like Murdoch, could not have chosen a better target. Squeaky clean Edwards was the safest pair of hands in the building. Now the public are asking, ‘if Huw Edwards is a pervert then is anyone at the BBC not a pervert?’
Should we really be surprised? For this is after all an institution that covered for notorious child rapist Jimmy Savile for decades, and whose London headquarters is (still) fronted by a sculpture from an artist whose diary entries revealed him as another child rapist who had abused his own children and even raped the family dog.
It’s almost as if there is a pattern?
We’ve now been told that essentially this was a private matter, and that Edwards was the victim, not the creator, of his downfall. Only this response raises more issues than it resolves. The police have already claimed that no offence has taken place. Do they categorically know that no pictures were exchanged prior to the boy turning 18? It seems like if any investigation of this alleged crime took place, it was a remarkably swift one.
What about the wider issues?
This is a public figure who has lectured, on air and to adults and children, on moral issues and the nature of truth, while on the public dime. Isn’t that moral loftiness contradicted by what seems like a private habit of soliciting teens for sexual activity? Edwards is married and has five children. The last time I checked the average wife and the average marriage vows object to trawling dating apps for teenage online sex partners.
Doesn’t that say something about the man’s reliability and truthfulness, his morality?
It’s interesting the way these questions are legitimate ones, for people like the BBC, when they pertain to an adult porn actress making claims against Donald Trump, but don’t apply when the mother of a teenage boy makes claims against one of their own newsreaders. What is in the public interest to broadcast about a populist figure, is a deeply private and hurtful non-story (only of interest to ‘cruel trolls’ and ‘online haters’) when it applies to one of their own?
The invocation of mental health issues is also a very modern spin, and is only ever applied to certain groups, namely very rich liberals or the very criminal ethnic minorities these liberals favour. A working-class white criminal is never excused or even praised as a person ‘struggling bravely with mental health issues’. A George Floyd type thug is excused in this manner, as are (invariably) rich white liberals happy to bathe in their moral relativism.
Claims of mental struggle are a tactic to elicit sympathy where sympathy isn’t actually deserved. And claims of being ‘hounded by internet trolls’ or the tabloid media are usually the same.
Such defences are rendered obviously hypocritical and selective by the oceans of hate-filled commentary easily found from mainstream media figures towards political outsiders, legitimate political ideas they don’t like, groups they don’t favour like the white working class, and leaders and public figures whose politics they detest. After all, a significant proportion of what was rumoured about Edwards was CONFIRMED by his wife’s gaslighting statement last week.
Figures like Trump, Orban or Meloni are regularly doused by the mainstream media in buckets of abuse and slander on the basis of things already confirmed as false.
As a society, as a media, we cannot tip endless quantities of hate onto some heads for things they didn’t do (like Russian collusion or ‘insurrection’) whilst simultaneously demanding that our ‘private’ sleazy sex acts with teens aren’t commented on. That’s not fair and the licence-fee-paying public see right through that misdirection play.
Edwards will have read out on air thousands of anti Trump stories or spins that were not true. He will have done the same about Nigel Farage or any prominent non-liberal. He is part of a media class that has betrayed the truth many times. Alas, the truth is that much of the mainstream media is compromised and sleazy, filthy and corrupt, in a lot more ways than simply one newsreader with a taste for young boys.
Looking at the defence of Huw Edwards’ behaviour pushed by his media friends, I can honestly say that no matter how depressed I’ve been, it’s never occurred to me that the best way to cheer myself up is to show my arse to a teenage boy on a webcam or scour dating apps for boys around 17 to wank with.
But that’s just me?
I thought society was much better when people who had been exposed as sleazy perverts betraying their wife and five children had the good grace to be ashamed of themselves rather than feeling sorry for themselves and claiming to be the victims deserving of compassion because, after all, who hasn’t paid teenage boys £35,000 to wank with them?
But that’s just me?
Cynically, I can’t help objecting to this scandal financially as well as morally. In this cost of living crisis we live through, my wife is furious when I spend £50 on books. If you’re going to do this sort of sleazy teen soliciting, at least negotiate a reasonable market price, Mr Edwards.
Sack him, BBC. And, to the DG, the capable Mr Davie, do a police check on all your presenter talent. It will save you lots of time and help you (and us ‘British’ named, for now at least, in your institution’s title) escape later embarrassments. No doubt you’ll find other filthy perverts hiding in plain sight who do not deserve a penny from our licence fee payments.
Daniel Jupp is the author of A Gift for Treason: The Cultural Marxist Assault on Western Civilisation, which was published in 2019. He has had previous articles published by Spiked, The Spectator and Politicalite, and is a married father of two from Essex. Daniel’s Sub Stack is available here.