How COULD Charles have been taken in by monster Jimmy Savile?

As the BBC’s controversial Jimmy Savile drama airs tonight, how COULD our King have been so completely taken in? Charles even suggested the monster as Godfather to Harry!

There will much to think about for viewers of The Reckoning, the controversial new drama about Jimmy Savile which starts tonight, particularly those who remember the predator as one of Britain’s best-known and apparently best-loved television stars.

For some, however – should they find the time to watch – there will be particular cause for reflection.

Not only is Prince Charles one of the first names mentioned, but the screen play – starring Steve Coogan as the depraved late television presenter – features archive footage of Savile with Charles and Diana, who went so far as to view him as a confidante and advisor.

This footage is juxtaposed with highly disturbing scenes from Savile’s decades of paedophilia and necrophilia, leading viewers to one stark question, above all: how could our King have allowed himself to be taken in by such a monster?

Prince Charles appeared to admire Savile, sending him cufflinks and Cuban cigars on his birthday. According to Diana, Charles viewed Savile as ‘a sort of mentor’

Savile started out as a club manager and DJ, eventually presenting Top of The Pops. His violent past was disregarded

Diana, too, regarded Savile as a friend. When the Waleses’ marriage was in trouble, they sought his advice

Last week, the Daily Mail revealed that, so close were Charles and Savile following Prince Harry’s birth in 1984, he was included in a long list of potential godfathers.

This selection had been written down by Charles and seen by his private secretary Edward Adeane. Adeane then discussed it with Sir Alastair Aird, the Queen Mother’s comptroller, who assured Adeane that the matter would be ‘dealt with’. 

Savile didn’t make the final six.

But the King’s friendship with him continued. When Savile turned 80, Charles sent him Cuban cigars and gold cufflinks with the note, ‘Nobody will ever know what you have done for this country, Jimmy. This is to go some way to thanking you for that.’

Savile’s rise to the position of friend to the royals had been extraordinary – even before his abuse was revealed in the years following his death.

Some of those who’d known him in the past were quite clear about what sort of man he was. 

As a dance hall boss in his hometown of Leeds in the 1950s, he was regarded as a deeply sinister man with links to gangsters. 

Speaking of that time, he boasted of his use of violence, saying: ‘I was always in trouble with the law for being heavy handed, but I couldn’t care less.

‘I never threw anyone out. I tied them up and put them down in the bloody boiler house until I was ready for them at about two o’clock in the f***ing morning… I was the judge, jury and executioner.’

Later, in a 2002 interview with documentary maker Louis Theroux, he intimated he had killed someone, saying, ‘If he wants to die, he can die. He won’t be the first that I’ve put away.’

Savile is the subject of a new drama, The Reckoning, which airs on BBC1 tonight. Savile, played by Steve Coogan, is pictured in a fictional recreation of his encounter with Charles and Diana at Stoke Mandeville

Savile accompanies the Prince of Wales on a visit to the Glen Coe mountain rescue centre

Prince Philip, too, admired Savile’s work.  The two men are seen arriving at Stoke Mandeville

Taken in 1970 as Savile, with trademark cigar, presents Yorkshire Television’s Calendar news show

But once he’d become the face of BBC programmes including Top of the Pops, Clunk Click and Jim’ll Fix It, he ‘deliberately insinuated himself into influential circles and manipulated the highest in the land to give himself protection,’ according to journalist Meirion Jones.

‘What local police officer was going to bust a friend of the royals and the PM on the word of any vulnerable 14-year-old girl who claimed to have been sexually abused by him?’

Jones was head of investigations at Newsnight in 2011, the year Savile died, and it was his expose of Savile’s crimes – initially pulled by the programme’s editor Peter Rippon in December of that year – that would eventually blow the myth apart.

But while Savile’s desire for powerful allies is all too easy to comprehend, considerably less so is what the likes of Prince Charles got out of their association with Savile.

In the 2022 Netflix documentary, Jimmy Savile: A British Horror Story, correspondence stretching back over two decades between the men revealed Charles’s hope that Savile could help him appear in-touch with his young future subjects.

In one letter, from January 1987, the Prince of Wales wrote: ‘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.’

The documentary revealed that Savile even drafted an informal media relations ‘handbook’ for him, some of which was incorporated into a memo seen by the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh.

It also claimed that it was initially Lord Mountbatten, Charles’s favourite uncle, who smoothed Savile’s path into the royal circle. Could this association have been linked an account of the ‘perversion for young boys’ Mountbatten allegedly held, according to FBI files from the 1940s?

READ MORE: Richard Kay on how Savile wormed his way into the heart of Palace life

 

Savile’s relationship with Stoke Mandeville Hospital, where he abused a series of victims, including raping an eight-year-old girl, enabled him to get to know Prince Charles better.

When the hospital’s £10 million National Spinal Injuries Centre was opened in 1983 by Charles and Diana, they were lavish in their praise for the work he had done to raise the money required to build it.

When the couple’s marriage broke down, both remained close to Savile. Royal press adviser Dickie Arbiter later said Savile had even acted as a sort of marriage guidance counsellor: ‘Savile was brought in by an aide as a sort of ‘Jim’ll Fix It’ to fix the state of the marriage, but of course it didn’t work.’

Prince Andrew was called on to help in an episode of Savile’s most famous show, Jim’ll Fix It, when an eight-year-old girl asked to visit a warship.

The Naval officer Prince was her host on his minehunter, HMS Cottesmore. Princess Anne was similarly obliging on another episode of the Saturday night programme, while Prince Philip was leant on to help a fundraising drive for the National Spinal Injuries Centre at Stoke Mandeville .

Charles also asked Savile if he would meet with the Duchess of York to give her some ‘straightforward common sense’ following the photographs of her having her feet kissed by Texan lover John Bryan.

In one of the notorious ‘Squidgygate tapes’ – the recordings of conversations between Diana and John Gilbey from 1989, in which he called her the pet name ‘Squidgy’ – Diana said: ‘Jimmy Savile rang me up yesterday and he said, ‘I’m just ringing up, my girl, to tell you that His Nibs [Charles] has asked me to come and help out the redhead [the Duchess of York], and I’m just letting you know, so that you don’t find out through her or him; and I hope it’s all right by you’.’

Diana also referred to Savile’s relationship with Prince Charles as ‘sort of mentor’ in the conversations.

In a letter written the following year, Charles told Savile he was ‘so good at understanding what makes people operate and you’re wonderfully sceptical and practical.’

Charles was not alone in his admiration, of course. His own father, Prince Philip, had been something of an admirer – and it is only fair to say that Savile managed to work his malevolent con trick on much of the arts and television establishment and, for that matter, the viewers. 

Diana, Charles and Savile at Stoke Mandeville. When their marriage ran into trouble, they asked Savile for advice

Yet according to Meirion Jones, the rumours about Savile’s activities with underage girls were rife from 1990, after journalist Lynn Barber put them in print for the first time.

‘Today, I find it very difficult to believe that Charles’s PR and media advisers would not have been asking the same questions about whether it was wise for Savile to remain as Charles’s mentor,’ he wrote in the Daily Mail last year.

When he died in 2011, Charles paid tribute, saying he was ‘saddened to hear of Jimmy Savile’s death’.

What the King thinks of Savile today – or his strikingly misplaced friendship – is unknown.

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