February 3, 2022 - 4:00pm

Earlier today, Boris Johnson’s key aide Munira Mirza resigned over his accusation that Keir Starmer had failed to prosecute Jimmy Savile. She is the latest to express outrage about this “scurrilous slur”. 

The claim has been widely ‘debunked’ by ‘fact checkers’. As the fact check normally goes: it was true that Savile was questioned by police and then released without charge, in 2009. But while Starmer was head of the CPS at the time, he wasn’t directly involved in that decision, so Johnson’s allegation is ‘FALSE’.  Yet in what is effectively a debate about executive culpability, it both is and it isn’t. 

Starmer senses the wind is in his sails. So, he returned to the fray to announce that the PM was “parroting the conspiracy theories of violent fascists to try and score cheap political points”. It seems as though the Prime Minister agrees: just a few hours ago, he apologised for the remarks.

Starmer is indeed in the crosshairs of conspiracy theories which include that he failed to prosecute Jimmy Savile while in charge of the CPS. In and of itself, that allegation is not entirely invented, but of course, the dark internet versions do also often go on to announce his links to Jeffrey Epstein, often via something called the ’Trilateral Commission’, an international free-trading organisation founded by a Rockerfeller, that has become the lodestar of much modern conspiracy narratives. 

Starmer finds himself magnetised into a network of villains who are even accused of being involved in Satanic paedophile cults. The Clintons and their connections to the supposed Pizzagate are the alphas of this wave; QAnon threw many more names on that stack; Epstein’s real-life pederasty has allowed the tentacles to spread further (and his vague proximity to Starmer is a decent enough hook). Effectively, this is just a low-wattage Anglicisation of Pizzagate. 

Sir Keir makes an unlikely antichrist, but every generation gets the Satanic paedophile cultist it deserves. Yet it also couldn’t have happened to anyone more deserving. In a kind of Mandela Effect moment, Boris has remembered the right guy, but the wrong crime. It was the fallout from Savile that led Starmer’s CPS into a ‘believe all victims’ mentality.

Almost immediately, in the febrile post-Savile moment, this led to the Carl Beech case. Beech was the serial fantasist, whose patently absurd claims about a paedophile ring of prominent Tory politicians wasted many hundreds of hours of police time. Sir Leon Brittan went to his grave, unaware that the allegations against him were to be dropped — and had been spread by a man who was himself a paedophile. 

Starmer might have known nothing about Savile in 2009, but in thought, word and letter, he set the tone for a figure like Beech to emerge. Now that he is starring in his own conspiracy, perhaps he will remember to believe all his own alleged victims.


Gavin Haynes is a journalist and former editor-at-large at Vice.

@gavhaynes