Jimmy Savile accused in ITV documentary

Jimmy Savile caused concern with behaviour on visits to Prince Charles
Former royal aide says TV presenter would greet young female assistants at St James's Palace by 'rubbing lips up their arms'

A former senior royal aide has revealed that Jimmy Savile's behaviour when he visited Prince Charles's official home at St James' Palace was a cause for "concern and suspicion".

Dickie Arbiter, who handled media relations for the Prince and Princess of Wales while spokesman for the Queen between 1988 and 2000, said the suspected paedophile TV presenter used to rub his lips up the arms of Prince Charles's young female assistants as a greeting.

Savile is understood to have visited Prince Charles's official London residence several times in the late 1980s when he was acting as a kind of marriage counsellor between Charles and Princess Diana. A spokesman for the Prince of Wales confirmed the prince and Savile formed a relationship in the late 1970s after coming together through their work with wheelchair sports charities. Charles led tributes to Savile when he died a year ago.

"He would walk into the office and do the rounds of the young ladies taking their hands and rubbing his lips all the way up their arms if they were wearing short sleeves," Arbiter said of Savile. "If it was summer [and their arms were bare] his bottom lip would curl out and he would run it up their arms. This was at St James's Palace. The women were in their mid to late 20s doing typing and secretarial work."

Arbiter did not raise his concerns formally and there is no suggestion Savile committed any crimes while on royal premises or when he was with Prince Charles on numerous occasions from the 1970s onwards. But the concern over his behaviour expressed by a senior aide will raise questions over how Savile, who is now under investigation in relation to child abuse involving 300 potential victims, managed to develop such a long-standing relationship with the heir to the throne.

Asked about Savile's behaviour with the royal assistants or whether Prince Charles had taken any action to find out if anyone in his family or staff might have suffered any abuse or have any information relating to the criminal investigation into Savile's alleged paedophilia, a spokesman for the prince said: "We have no record of anyone making a complaint."

"The prince first met Savile through their shared interest in supporting disability charities [the prince became patron of the British Wheelchair Sports Foundation in the late 1970s] and it was primarily because of this connection that they maintained a relationship in the years that followed," the spokesman said.

Arbiter said he thought the women might have thought Savile's greeting was "rather funny", but he said it was a cause for concern and he struggled to understand why Savile was granted such access to the royal family.

"I looked at him as a court jester and told him so," said Arbiter. "I remember calling him an old reprobate and he said 'not so much of the old'."

Concern about Savile's behaviour at the palace emerged as Sir Roger Jones, former chairman of the BBC's corporate charity Children In Need, said he had been so uncomfortable about Savile that he did not allow him to have any association with the cause. Jones, a BBC governor from 1997 to 2002, said he had "no evidence" that Savile was up to anything but "we all recognised he was a pretty creepy sort of character".

"When I was with Children In Need, we took the decision that we didn't want him anywhere near to the charity," he told the BBC.

Prince Charles met Savile on numerous occasions. In 1999 he accepted an invitation to a private meal at Savile's Glencoe home which was this week daubed with graffiti reading "Jimmy the beast". Savile asked three local women to dress up in pinafores emblazoned with the letters HRH and Charles subsequently sent the television presenter a Christmas card with the note: "Jimmy, with affectionate greetings from Charles. Give my love to your ladies in Scotland."

Charles reportedly sent him a box of cigars and a pair of gold cufflinks on his 80th birthday with a note that read: "Nobody will ever know what you have done for this country Jimmy. This is to go some way in thanking you for that."

Savile used to boast of his royal connections, made sure to be photographed with Charles on numerous occasions and ingratiated himself once telling the Daily Mail the prince was "the nicest man you will ever meet".

"Royalty are surrounded by people who don't know how to deal with it," Savile said in an interview. "I have a freshness of approach which they obviously find to their liking. I think I get invited because I have a natural, good fun way of going on and we have a laugh. They don't get too many laughs."

The day after the meal in Glencoe Savile persuaded Charles to join him for a photo opportunity at his local post office where he went to pick up his pension money.

"The post office photo opportunity was definitely [down to] him [Savile]," said Coleen Harris, Prince Charles's press secretary. "You always think that other people are getting more out of these things [than the prince] but on the whole it is for a good reason, for the charities and it is a positive thing."

She added: "Personally I always thought he was slightly eccentric, but beyond that I had no idea. He was a slightly odd bloke, but not in a cruel way."

Arbiter said that despite Savile's unusual behaviour with the royal administrative staff there was no evidence of any other cause for suspicion.

"There was a limit to what he could get away with in the royal household," he said.

He also said palace advisers felt the prince's charities might benefit from a connection with Savile, at the time one of the country's most famous TV stars.

Perhaps Savile's most unlikely role was that of personal counsel to Prince Charles in the late 1980s at a time when the royal family was in deep trouble. The marriages of Charles and Diana and Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson were disintegrating. Around new year 1990 Charles asked Savile to help the Duchess of York with what Savile later said was keeping her profile down.

Princess Diana was recorded telling James Gilbey on the so-called "squidgygate tape": "Jimmy Savile rang me up yesterday, and he said: 'I'm just ringing up, my girl, to tell you that His Nibs [Prince 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.'"

Is it me, or is there a very welcome cessation of Grope stories today? There actually seems to be Important News in the papers...

Savile 'took teenagers to hospital'
Press Association – 4 hours ago

AFP - Tue, Oct 30, 2012
'Chance to catch Savile was missed'
Press Association - 17 hours ago

Jimmy Savile would regularly take teenage girls to a private hospital block alone, a former porter has claimed.
Terry Pratt said the late Jim'll Fix It star was regularly handed a key to the nurses' accommodation building at Leeds General Infirmary during the late 1980s. The ex-worker told the BBC that Savile would arrive with the girls in the early hours of the morning and then leave before dawn.
Scotland Yard has launched an investigation into the television and radio star's activities, and he is now believed to have been of the UK's most prolific abusers, with about 300 possible victims.
Mr Pratt said he became suspicious when Savile began arriving in the middle of the night with different girls who seemed "star-struck" and were "not streetwise".
He added that the celebrity, who was a volunteer and fundraiser for the hospital, would make several late-night visits a month where he would ask for the key to the accommodation block, spend a few hours there and then leave at 5am.
Detectives are following 400 lines of inquiry as part of the investigation while the BBC has launched an inquiry into the culture and practices at the corporation in the era of Savile's alleged sexual abuse. It is also looking at the decision-making process that saw a Newsnight investigation into Savile's activities shelved.
Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg has said "heads will need to roll" at the BBC if it is discovered that abuse was ignored.
"Serious questions need to be asked and if after we find out what's happened, it's clear that people have turned a blind eye or, worse still, connived with it, then of course they're going to have to be held to account and - if that turns out to be the case - heads will need to roll of course," he told ITV's The Agenda.
Earlier this week it emerged that Savile was barred from any involvement with the BBC's Children In Need charity. Sir Roger Jones, a former chairman of the charity, said he had been uncomfortable about allowing Savile to have any association with their work. Although he had "no evidence" that Savile was up to anything, he said he behaved strangely, adding: "I think we all recognised he was a pretty creepy sort of character."
Britain's most senior police officer said if allegations about Jimmy Savile had been linked while he was alive, they would have exposed "a pattern of behaviour". Metropolitan Police Commissioner Bernard Hogan-Howe said police and other organisations had not connected a number of separate claims made about Savile's allegedly predatory actions.

Mirror News UK News Jimmy Savile child abuse
By Ben Rossington, 1 Nov 2012 02:00
“I'm doing them a big favour”: Jimmy Savile's sick boast about sex with disabled hospital patients
Jimmy Savile bragged about using disabled patients for sex at a hospital where many saw him as a charity hero.

The vile pervert claimed he was “doing them a big favour” by having his way with them, according to a former record company promoter.

The man, who insists on remaining anonymous, met the DJ in 1972.

Within half an hour twisted Savile was telling him shocking and disgusting stories about his ­activities at Stoke Mandeville Hospital.

The promoter said: “I was 24 and barely knew him.

"Savile just came out and told me he was having sex with girls in ­wheelchairs and ­paraplegics.

He said, ‘They wouldn’t get any sex if it wasn’t for me.’

“He never mentioned whether they were unwilling or underage but I was horrified.”

One former Director of Nursing at Stoke Mandeville, Christine ­McFarlane, told ITV News last night: “Whatever Jimmy wanted he could get.”

She said staff felt “there was a fine balance to not upsetting Jimmy to the point he was likely to walk away or try to take his money away”.

Savile also had access to girls for years at Broadmoor, where, it was claimed yesterday, he was even appointed head of a task force to run the high-security hospital.

Yesterday former staff nurse Bob Allen said: “He was a ­psychopath.”

Another ex-Broadmoor nurse, Richard Harrison, told Channel 4 news: “We considered him as a man with a severe ­personality disorder and a liking for children.”

And former Leeds General Infirmary porter Terry Pratt said Savile would arrive there with girls in the early hours of the morning and leave before dawn.

The DJ would be given a key and take the ­“starstruck” girls to empty nurses’ flats.

Savile Estate Frozen Amid Sex Abuse Claims
Sky News – 1 hour 14 minutes ago

Savile 'Molested' Woman Live On TV
Sky video 2:23 | 0 views
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/video/savile-molested-woman-live-tv-045600376.html

Savile Estate Frozen Amid Sex Abuse Claims

Press Association - Tue, Oct 30, 2012
The estate of Jimmy Savile has been frozen in response to the mounting sexual abuse claims against the late television and radio star.
NatWest Bank, which is acting as the Jim'll Fix It presenter's will executor and trustee, said the distribution of his assets had been put on hold because of the allegations.
Savile's estate is reportedly worth £4.3m.
NatWest said in a statement: "Given the claims raised, distribution of the estate has been put on hold."
Savile's will, written in 2006, bequeaths his savings and other assets to 26 separate beneficiaries, according to the Financial Times.
The newspaper said it had obtained a copy of the document which instructs that £20,000 in cash was to be shared between 20 of the celebrity's friends, family and neighbours.
It says a further £600,000 was to be put into a trust fund, with the interest shared between eight people.
The remainder - just under £3.7 million before expenses - was to be held by NatWest on behalf of The Jimmy Savile Charitable Trust, according to the FT.
Savile's intended individual beneficiaries include the trustees of both his charities and existing and former employees of Leeds General Infirmary and Broadmoor Hospital, the newspaper added.
Police are investigating claims that the star, who died in October last year, sexually assaulted individuals at both NHS sites.
Savile's estate was previously put on hold in July after a woman claimed to be his illegitimate daughter, the FT said.
It is believed the latest freeze may be in anticipation of legal claims for damages by Savile's alleged victims.
Scotland Yard is leading a national investigation into the television and radio star's activities. He is now believed to have been one of the UK's most prolific abusers, with about 300 possible victims.
Detectives are following 400 lines of inquiry as part of the investigation while the BBC has launched an inquiry into the culture and practices at the corporation in the era of Savile's alleged sexual abuse.
It is also looking at the decision-making process that saw a Newsnight investigation into Savile's activities shelved.