Call us on this number to see if you are eligible

I am honestly expecting to see a series of adverts "PPI" like adverts (or the "accident compensation" adverts) on TV in the new few months.

"Have you been abused by someone famous? Well – you might be eligible for compensation! Call us now on this toll-free number, and we’ll give you an answer in minutes!!"

We are told there will be proper, serious investigations by all sorts of people, but as long as people keep talking to the press first and the authorities second, and as long as the press continue to report rumour, gossip and accusations are solid fact, then the people being paid to do the proper, serious investigations might as well just kick back and relax, because no matter what they find, no one is going to listen to them.

The phrase "witch hunt" has never been more apt – but even at their worst, the witch trials at least had the decency to let the accused come to their own trials, even if the trials were just a farce and a joke.

And for all my boasting that "trial by media" doesn’t happen in the UK, that’s pretty much all we have now. The press will print what they like with no thought to reasonableness or truthfulness or actually bothering to check the facts, and by the time they are done an official report could be brought down from Mount Sinai on STONE TABLETS and everyone would say it was a whitewash and a cover-up.

My only consolation is that this is happening because he is dead, and that if they decide to pursue this against someone who is still alive, the press will have to go back to being the normal level of shits they are, instead of the extra-special super-shits they are being at the moment.