Just whispers about Wilby

A former editor of the New Statesman and Independent on Sunday was revealed as a paedophile. It hasn't really made the headlines or roused the columnists to rage.

Previously: Live! Sold out! Unimaginable misery!
The tyranny of live blogging turns even stories of unimaginable suffering and horror into an exercise in entertainment.

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On Friday 18 August 2023, Essex Live reported that Peter Wilby, 78, of Loughton in Essex had been sentenced for accessing images of child sexual abuse over a period of decades. He was found to be in possession of more than 100 explicit images of children dating from between 2013 and 2022, but later confessed to the National Crime Agency (NCA) that he had been acquiring similar images since the late-1990s.

Wilby received a 10-month jail sentence — suspended for two years — and a 10-year sexual harm prevention order. He has been placed on the sex offenders register for five years. The statement from Adam Sprague, Operations Manager at the NCA, explains why I am covering this story in a media newsletter:

The material accessed by Wilby and recovered from his computer showed real children being cruelly and sexually abused. He was viewing this content while working as the editor of prominent national news outlets, a role in which he was entrusted to form the news agenda for the British public. A trust which he has greatly betrayed. 

Wilby started out as a reporter for The Observer in 1968 before becoming the paper’s Education Correspondent. He moved to the New Statesman in 1975 to take up the same role before spending 9 years at The Sunday Times. He joined The Independent on Sunday when it launched in 1990 and became its editor in 1995.

From 1998 to 2005, Wilby was a highly combative and controversial editor of The New Statesman. After stepping down from that role, he continued to write a column for the magazine as well as contributing to The Guardian. His last published work for the Statesman appeared in November 2022, after he was charged.

The day after Essex Live broke the news, the New Statesman published the following statement on its website (initially behind the paywall):

On 18 August it was reported that Peter Wilby, a former editor of the New Statesman, was convicted after he admitted viewing images of child sexual abuse. He was given a ten-month prison sentence, suspended for two years, at Chelmsford Crown Court.

The New Statesman staff and management had no knowledge of Wilby’s arrest or charges before they were reported yesterday, and are shocked and appalled to learn of these horrifying crimes.  

Wilby, 78, was New Statesman editor from 1998 to 2005, and remained a contributor.

Press Gazette, which shares a parent company with the Statesman, has published a news story on Wilby’s sentencing, which is based on agency copy and does not quote anyone from the New Statesman.

Over the years, Wilby used his bully pulpits at national publications to write about abuse and abusers in articles that take on a different tone with the revelation of his crimes. In 2006, he wrote in The Times Educational Supplement:

Teachers’ unions advise members to avoid ever being alone with a pupil.

Only close relatives (and not always they) dare show a child physical affection. Scouts and other youth organisations struggle to recruit volunteers. And I doubt that, if I were now 17, a young, single teacher would invite me to dine alone at her home. Since I had never previously dined out, I suppose that would be my loss.

It is right that we now abhor child abuse and no longer tolerate abuse of authority for even low-level sexual gratification. But do we need to go so far? Can’t we forbid the sex but still allow intimate relations between teachers and pupils, adults and children? Even as I write that sentence, I realise that “intimate relations” is itself ambiguous and that, no, we probably can’t have our cake and eat it.

We live in a highly eroticised culture. Sex screams at us from advertising, television, cinema, music, magazines, websites. We have pushed the boundaries of what is sexually permissible - what we do, who we do it with and how we talk about it - to limits that would have astonished our grandparents. We have turned almost everything and everybody into a potential object of erotic attention.

That, I think, explains why we feel the need to be so firm about where the limits do lie, even if that entails hypocrisy. Children are off limits, despite the marketing of sexually explicit material and sexually provocative clothing, even to pre-teens. If you are a teacher, pupils of any age are off-limits. If you are a boss, your subordinates are increasingly off-limits.

The line “we have pushed the boundaries of what is sexually permissible” particularly sticks out even as Wilby goes through the motions of saying the ‘right’ things.

He went further in 2008, writing about the recent release of Gary Glitter from prison in Vietnam for The Guardian:

… either Gadd - who has been found guilty only of downloading child pornography under British law - is locked up for life, or he is left to the mercy of what the Telegraph columnist Simon Heffer calls "most rational people [who] would find it quite acceptable if he were to be taken out and shot in the back of the head".

But pervs" play an important role in defining the boundary between the respectable folk who read and produce redtop papers and what sociologists call "the other". The Sun may publish revealing pictures of women just above the age of consent, as well as of flat-chested models, sometimes dressed as young schoolgirls. Anybody who objects is roundly denounced as "politically correct". But to assure us they are not encouraging paedophilia, the redtops must denounce, even more vehemently, anybody who lays a finger on anyone aged 15 years 364 days or less. This explains why Glitter's name can never appear without being shepherded by such words as brute, evil, foul, depraved, monster, scum and, specially brought out by the Sun's Lorraine Kelly for the occasion,"toxic effluent".

Because nobody wants to be accused of even a smidgen of sympathy for paedophiles, it is hard, from what we are told of his misdemeanours, to defend Gadd or argue that people like him deserve human rights.

Since I never liked the look (still less the music) of Glitter anyway, I'm not even going to try. But popular hatred, once aroused, can be hard to control.   

Wilby returned to the topic in 2012, again in The Guardian:

… Confronted with evidence of children being violated, even reputable newspapers, broadcasters and journalists often lose all sense of judgment and proportion.

… Child abuse is a reality and, in the past, the full extent of it was often swept under the carpet. The guilty still at liberty far outnumber the innocent behind bars. In nearly all the instances I list above, children were abused, sometimes in large numbers. They suffered terrible trauma, and the effects were often lifelong. To point out that journalists – along with politicians and professionals such as social workers – strayed into wild fantasies is not to defend or trivialise abuse. Nor does questioning some convictions denote "support" for paedophilia, any more than questioning the Birmingham Six convictions denoted "support" for IRA bombers.

… while those who allege abuse should be heard, accepting what they say as self-evidently true is not better than dismissing it as childish fantasy. It is just another form of not listening, and relying instead on prejudices and preconceptions. It also leads to a new set of victims. Abused children may suffer mental illness and suicidal thoughts. But so may those falsely accused. Precisely because child abuse has become the most odious of crimes, allegations should be made only after the most rigorous testing of evidence.

Two years later, Wilby chuckled in his New Statesman First Thoughts column:

Unearthing journalists’ faulty predictions and poor judgements is always enjoyable. To my delight, I once discovered that the Sun, in a fawning interview in 1973, described Gary Glitter (later imprisoned for sexual offences against children) as “the rock’n’roll daddy who makes little girls ask to see more of his hairy chest”. So before anybody else finds out, I will reveal that, during my editorship, the NS ran an article under the headline “Max Clifford is a nice chap shock”. We reported that Clifford, who has just been convicted of sexually abusing four girls, was a man of “private modesty . . . committed to public service” whose “personal life has been a paragon of virtue”. Since this was in 2000, we don’t even have the excuse that it was the 1970s.

What Wilby wrote under his own byline is swamped by the stories he will have had influence over as an editor at a national newspaper and opinion-forming magazine. As editor of the New Statesman, he published a cover feature on ‘the Jewish lobby’ with a Star of David piercing a Union Flag and illustrated a feature on Labour’s attitude to women in the party with a woman showing her knickers.

Wilby himself made a connection between the personal behaviour of editors and how their publications work when he wrote for The New Statesman in 2021 about Roy Greenslade’s pro-IRA views:

But his opinions did not float in a vacuum. From the early 1970s, he lived with a fellow journalist from an Irish republican family. They married in 1984. In the 1970s and 1980s, the couple spent several holidays with Doherty and his wife in Donegal, a border county where many IRA members were based. From 1989, the Greenslades owned a Georgian mansion in Donegal, with 14-acre grounds. Their social life was embedded in militant republicanism.

This is not one of those tedious complaints that a story has not been addressed at all when it manifestly has — the BBC, Times, Guardian, and Southend Echo have all run stories as well as the previously mentioned coverage — but about the limited scale, breadth, and intensity of attention. Had Wilby not been a journalist and particularly one whose career touched a large number of publications, his conviction as a person of power and influence would be catnip to columnists.

There is at least one column in the works about Wilby: David Aaronovitch, now on Substack since his defenestration as a Times columnist, wrote in a preview of his upcoming posts sent out today:

… plus the case of the man I worked with off and on over 30 years who turned out to be a consumer of the worst kind of porn. 

That’s unforgivably lax language from a man who has plied his trade as a professional writer for so many years. Wilby was not convicted of possessing pornography but images of child sexual abuse, some of them of the most serious kind.

There have been little more than whispers about Wilby because the British press has an instinct to circle the wagons and silence the stories that make it look worst. Wilby has avoided prison and the usual voices that would howl at the injustice and demand real punishment are conspicuously silent.

In May 2019, Wilby was interviewed by the NUJ’s Journalist magazine:

How would you like to be remembered?
I shall be flattered if I am remembered at all.

He should be remembered for what he is rather than what he pretended to be.

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