The funniest thing I've seen on BBC TV for years was last night's Newsnight interview with Harriet Harman, in which Laura Kuenssberg grilled the MP over her time as Legal Officer to the National Council for Civil Liberties, a period in which, apparently, one organisation affiliated to the NCCL was the Paedophile Information Exchange.
The interview was funny in the first place because if anyone in public life strikes me as a sex-free zone it is the hapless Ms Harman; I cannot think of anyone less likely to have got into bed, as it were, with the furtive gentlemen of the PIE. Or indeed with anyone else (but she is happily married to Jack Dromey, so that's obviously a failure of imagination on my part).
It was also funny because no matter how hard Kuenssberg pushed her, Harman would not admit that the affiliation was a mistake. No one seems to have told her about holes and not digging.
Thirdly if you had to pick anyone to represent the self-righteous tendency of the Left I think Harman would be a pretty strong selection; and to see her default political anschauung so utterly disabled by a piece of crass stupidity in the 1970s was as nice an example of things going-around and then coming-around as you could hope to see. The wheels of justice grinding slow, but exceedingly small.
Actually I can just about see how PIE might have got under the NCCL's radar. I remember once being in the office of one of Ms Harman's fellow travellers amongst Left-wing lawyers, and there on the shelves was a memoir published by a PIE luminary, if that's the word, devoted to the joys and possibilities of adult/child sexual relationships. "What the flip (I paraphrase) is this?", I asked, appalled. "Oh, they were trying to see if there was any way there could be a human rights angle on paedophilia", my friend said casually. Whose rights would those be, I wondered, shaking my head. The child's? Or the adult's?
But then these were the 1970s, and even a decade later a close family member of mine recalls being asked to sit on a sub-committee of the Haldane Society of Socialist Lawyers - a similar organisation to NCCL with considerable membership crossover - devoted to exploring the possibility of abolishing the police. This in about 1989.
Fruitcakes then, and fruitcakes still.
