Tom Harwood: Does the buck stop at the top for the Jimmy Savile case?

A huge amount of consternation has frothed up this week over the Prime Minister’s decision to attack Sir Keir Starmer’s record as Director of Public Prosecutions from 2008 to 2013.

Using Parliamentary Privilege the Prime Minister said that Starmer was “a former director of public prosecutions, who spent more time prosecuting journalists and failing to prosecute Jimmy Savile”.

Now that comment has caused a torrent of criticism, from the Speaker of the Commons, to MPs of all parties, as well as most media organisations.

But is there something more to it? I think it is important to take a moment to explore.

Now of course the first thing to say is that Sir Keir Starmer was not personally involved in the Crown Prosecution Service’s failures over Jimmy Saville, he was not the reviewing lawyer for that case.

However, he was head of the CPS at the time.Let’s look at the timeline.

Now, Surrey Police first received an allegation of Savile’s history of sexual assault in 2007, the year before Starmer became Director of Public Prosecutions in 2008.

However Savile was first interviewed under caution in 2009. While Starmer led the CPS.Savile was not arrested, and no prosecution was brought despite four complaints.

The process of course involved a CPS reviewing lawyer. Now again, Keir Starmer was not individually involved.

But he did head the organisation.In fact years later he commissioned a review into the whole affair, which found that both police and prosecutors did not take allegations seriously.

As reported by the BBC back in 2013, Director of Public Prosecutions Keir Starmer apologised, accepting the review.

Starmer said he wanted the case to be "a watershed moment". Now the question here is where does the buck stop?

Was Sir Keir right to apologise for failings within the organisation he headed, even if those failings were not his own?

Just as Boris Johnson apologised for the party in Downing Street the night before the funeral of Prince Philip, despite the Prime Minister being fifty miles away at chequers at the time.

The same people who thought it unquestionably right that Boris apologised for a failing of his staff on this occasion appear to have entertained a double standard.Does the buck stop at the top of an organisation or not?

I can’t help but think that the reaction to this story has been a little overhyped, a little hysterical, with some outlets going out of their way to fail to understand why it is that this might have been brought up.

Very regularly, we expect CEOs, leaders of all kinds to take responsibility for all actions of their organisations.

Yet in this one case the media consensus is peculiarly that it is now absolutely wrong to do so.All I ask for is a little consistency.

Does the buck stop at the top or not?

Ultimately perhaps the Prime Minister might have avoided all of this by simply saying quote “the organisation the honourable gentleman led failed to prosecute Jimmy Saville”, end quote, rather than leaving it open to interpretation that Starmer himself was personally involved in the case.As it stands this is become an almighty an unnecessary mess.