The flat was thickly carpeted, and fusty. I admired his trinkets. I wrote that they blinded me. I noted he appeared to live on sweets. He recited his patter for the Dictaphone. I had heard it all before: pit boy, youngest of seven, then a terrible mining accident, then a glance at a Rolls Royce that changed everything. “And I was filled with a great joy because from where I was standing to where that kid was driving [the Rolls Royce] was only 25 feet. It was there. It wasn’t far to go. It had to be possible.” The patter was his first defence, because it was indecipherable, like smoke. Here is an example: “I don’t do anything for any reason. I do it because I do it. I do what I do and always have done. Just don’t offend nobody. So there.”

We spent a lot of time discussing why he didn’t marry. “You get trapped,” he told me. “You never get anywhere, and you are quite happy to wake up, open your gob, stick food in, close your gob and then die and leave everybody everything. I don’t want to get used to that kind of life because the life I’ve got is much better than that.”

He also said, “I fell in love with them all. I fall in love every day, even now.” He said he had 60 million friends, which, of course, means he had none. “I owe them nothing,” he said, “they owe me nothing.” He had enablers though, among whom I now count myself.

I have since read Dan Davies’s superb In Plain Sight, in which he recounts following Savile for years, trying to understand him. (No one would publish it in Savile’s lifetime.) Davies says that policemen came to the flat each week to drink coffee. Of all the institutions that protected Savile, the police, the NHS, and the BBC were the guiltiest because they knew. They received letters from his victims.  One 12-year-old, raped in a hospital day room, wrote a note to doctors on the page of a bible after a nurse told her to keep quiet.

The BBC is no longer protecting him, but they are still selling him. No crime is exempt from the possibilities of mediocre art. They have commissioned a drama called The Reckoning starring Steve Coogan, whose best work until now has been the DJ Alan Partridge. Coogan is an uneasy man who has used prostitutes, but he is not stupid, and his inhabiting Savile is obviously an act of self-exploration and, perhaps, self-hating vanity. Some of Savile’s victims were invited to the set to meet Coogan in costume. The Reckoning’s writer, Neil McKay, who also dramatised Fred West in Appropriate Adult, said: “They wanted to do it, they’re fully prepared, so it will be interesting.”

I think they would do better to dramatise the experience of his victims. But this is not the way. A gaudy male is more interesting than a female victim: in this sense The Reckoning is, though obliviously, an extension of Savile’s real life.  It is a tribute to his tactics of deception; his trust that women will be ignored. Why not dramatise how the 2011 Newsnight expose by Merion Jones and Liz MacKean was spiked because the evidence was, in the words of Newsnight’s editor, “just the women”?

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There is already a definitive BBC portrait of Savile on film, by Toby Jones in season 4 of Sherlock, though he is called something else. He played a philanthropist — Savile raised £40 million — haunting hospitals to watch people die. Savile told Joan Bakewell he had to rush away from a broadcast: “I should make the hospital by one a.m. They don’t start dying till two.” He told the Daily Mail in 1972: “I find I’ve got an aptitude for dead people. When I’m holding somebody that has just died, I’m filled with a tremendous love and envy. They’ve left behind their problems; they’ve made the journey. If somebody were to tell me tonight, I wouldn’t wake up in the morning, it would fill me with tremendous joy. Sometimes I can’t wait.”

Our interview in Roundhay Park was transactional, and we both knew it. He was charming: not for me, because I am sure I did not exist for him, but for the readers of my story. He told unfunny jokes, philosophised and flirted courteously, as if I expected it. He said he still had my Jim‘ll Fix It letter from 1979: “But you didn’t enclose a stamped addressed envelope, you cheapskate.” I told him he had met my mother at Leeds in the Sixties: “I know, I’ve still got her earring.” Of course, I was, at 31, far too old for him. He dropped women at 18.

In a profile of Liz MacKean by Poppy Sebag Montefiore, a senior executive described MacKean as, “a very ordinary journalist. She wasn’t ambitious or sharp-elbowed. She didn’t fill the screen.” Sebag Montefiore said: “I put it to him that MacKean’s talents for listening to sources were one of the qualities that made her extraordinary. He considered this for a moment and said: ‘Listening wasn’t a quality we gave much credit to back then’.” Savile filled the screen. I give him that.

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I did sense his dislike of adult women. He mocked and traduced them, pretending to be a twittering widow talking about her husband’s coffin: “My Harry, he loved pine and we gave him the pine box.” Or an old woman desiring a younger man: “He’s a bit of all right, that bus driver, ooh.” It was parody.

I knew he had a secret. That was obvious. In his ludicrous red tracksuit, he was wrapped like a parcel. I thought he was gay, and liked adult men, which was tough in Leeds in the Thirties. I wondered if the loathing he incited was about class. He sensed this and he talked for a long time about his deprived childhood. It incited my pity.

Psychopaths are hard to read. Even so, I know now, reading my original copy, that he told me a tale that didn’t add up. He told me he loved, “the freedom of the world outside. Up in the dales sauntering along you don’t need anyone else.” So why raise £40 million for charity? I wonder if, in that obvious contradiction, lies his sanctification: the one that seems so bitter now. We assumed perhaps that it was love. I wrote, “Jimmy needs people to be delighted to see him and I suspect it is gratitude that drives him — for the recovery from the accident and for the miracle of his wealth.”

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He did give me clues, but they were impossible to read amid the smoke. For instance: fame “was just a means to an end”. As I left, he said that if I pinched his jewellery, he would kill me. “I’m ruthless,” he said. I now think it is entirely plausible that he killed people. “Tied them up, put them down in the boiler house until I was ready for them,” he said of the Teddy Boys at his Manchester club in the Fifties. “They’d plead to get out. Nobody ever used to get out of my place … I was judge, jury and executioner.” One man told Davies he saw Savile take a man’s eye out in a street fight.

The newspaper I worked for wasn’t interested in a portrait of ageing isolation and tepid misogyny, which is the best material I had. So, I wrote him up as a national treasure, though wistful. “He needs to be needed,” I concluded. The opposite was true. I couldn’t wait to get away. That should have told me something.

There were deep-rooted problems here, of which the street-fighting was merely a symptom. Economically, this was a world that had been hit by waves of de-industrialisation, most notoriously during Margaret Thatcher’s premiership, and then, after a period of stabilisation, in the late 1990s. As more and more manufacturing industry was moved to the Far East, so jobs were lost at home. In the eight years between Labour’s election victories in 1997 and 2005, manufacturing output fell from 16.8% of the UK’s economy to just 11.8%, and the impact was felt most acutely in those old towns of the Industrial Revolution in Lancashire and Yorkshire. There weren’t big, dramatic closures that attracted national attention as in the 1980s, just a steady erosion of employment as plants with dozens, rather than thousands, of workers were shut down; places like the Ondura rubber-compound factory in Keighley, or Hillcross Pharmaceuticals in Burnley.

Running alongside this were racial tensions that had again been building for many years. Back in 1989, there had been violent clashes when a meeting in Dewsbury of the British National Party (BNP) was met by an anti-racist rally, with dozens of arrests. The problems, however, were more complicated than the simple antagonism implied by that conflict. In many places, there was rivalry and sporadic fighting between Hindus and Muslims, often sparked by developments in India, as well as conflicts between British Asians and white youths, and between all these groups and the police. Even before the riots in Oldham in May 2001, police statistics showed that there were more racist attacks in the area by Asians on whites than by whites on Asians.

Which is not to say that the BNP weren’t a factor, alongside — according to Labour home secretary David Blunkett — “the Socialist Workers Party and hangers-on who made matters worse and played directly into the hands of the far-Right”. Indeed, it was the presence of the BNP that gave the riots a national significance far beyond the immediate unrest.

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The party had been founded in 1982, but had amounted to very little until veteran neo-Nazi John Tyndall was voted out as leader in 1999, replaced by the less extreme figure of Nick Griffin. A 40-year-old who’d studied law at Cambridge, Griffin began to reposition the BNP, seeking to create a more electorally acceptable image, emphasising culture rather than race, talking about Europe and crime as well as immigration. His approach soon began to pay dividends.

The 2001 riots raised the party’s profile, and at the general election that June, Griffin stood in Oldham West and Royton, coming third with 16.4% of the vote. The following year, a milestone was reached when three BNP councillors were elected in Burnley. They gave their first press conference on a derelict piece of waste ground surrounded by boarded-up houses in Burnley Wood, and the deprivation of the area was clearly a major factor in the party’s growth. So too was a feeling that the political establishment had failed to remedy the situation. “I only voted for the BNP because Labour isn’t doing anything around here for whites,” said one resident. “Someone has to step in and make sure the whites get their fair share,” agreed another. “I’m disgusted with my Labour candidate. Where the hell was he when we needed him?”

In 2003 a further seven councillors were elected in Burnley — at one point the BNP was (albeit briefly) the official opposition on the council — and there were other successes elsewhere. The national media began paying serious attention.

Two television programmes in 2004 added fuel to the fire. In July, the BBC screened The Secret Agent, a documentary containing undercover footage of BNP members. One boasted of having committed a violent assault during the Bradford riots, another of pushing dog excrement through an Asian business’s letterbox. A third fantasised about machine-gunning Muslims. Nick Griffin also featured, calling Islam a “vicious, wicked faith”. Despite the party’s claims to democratic legitimacy and its new focus on bread-and-butter issues, the violence and racism beneath were still very much in evidence.

The second programme was Channel 4’s Edge of the City, which included the stories of young girls in Bradford who had been systematically abused by gangs of men. One of them, a thirteen-year-old, was said to have had more than a hundred sexual partners. Worse, these cases appeared to be just the tip of an iceberg, with a host of similar instances, widespread pattern of offending. In recent months, one man had been convicted, and others charged. Comparable accounts were also being heard elsewhere, and over the next decade there would be convictions of what became known as street grooming gangs in Aylesbury, Banbury, Bristol, Derby, Halifax, Huddersfield, Newcastle, Oxford, Peterborough, Rochdale, Rotherham and Telford.

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It was a horrific story, to which was added a racial dimension. The victims were predominantly white, the abusers predominantly of Asian heritage.

Edge of the City was scheduled to be broadcast in May 2004, but was postponed for three months at the request of the police, deeply worried that its revelations might provoke a new spate of race riots. “The broadcast will increase community tension across Bradford with the consequent risk that it will provoke public disorder,” said Colin Cramphorn, the chief constable of West Yorkshire.

And behind that was the fear that, with elections to the European Parliament due in June, the documentary might — in the words of Lee Jasper of the National Assembly Against Racism — “inadvertently act as a recruiting sergeant for the BNP”.

Why would the stories of the grooming gangs benefit the BNP? Simply because so few of those in positions of authority seemed interested in talking about the scandal. It had taken years for the abuse to be uncovered and still there seemed a reluctance to act. There were exceptions, of course, social workers and police officers who expressed concern, but all too often they found their seniors unwilling to pursue the issue.

There were also some mainstream politicians prepared to speak up, most notably Ann Cryer, Labour MP for Keighley, who had conducted her own enquiry even before Edge of the City. Hers was a lonely voice. “There must have been councillors and MPs all over the country who knew what was going on but were terrified,” she said in later years, as the scale of the abuse was uncovered; “terrified of being labelled a racist”. Denis MacShane was the former Labour MP for Rotherham, where there were an estimated 1,400 victims over a sixteen-year period, and he regretted he had not done more, but as a “Guardian-reading liberal leftie”, he was just following the prevailing orthodoxy: “I think there was a culture of not wanting to rock the multicultural community boat.”

The result was that the BNP — who inevitably talked a great deal of the grooming gangs — had a virtually clear field, posing as the defenders of white girls.

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Despite the non-screening of Edge of the City, the party won 4.8% of the national vote in those 2004 European elections. That was less than the Greens and didn’t result in any seats, but it still meant that over 800,000 people had voted for a far-Right party, the largest number since 1979, and twenty times more than the BNP had achieved at the last general election. And there were marked regional variations: support was low in Southern England, Wales and Scotland, but strong in Yorkshire and the Humber (8%). Next time round, in 2009, came the breakthrough, with two MEPs elected.

Later that year, Nick Griffin was invited onto BBC One’s Question Time, a controversial decision that many feared would legitimise the party, though the electorate seemed to have done that already. Certainly the public interest was there: the episode gave the show its highest ever audience figure of 7.9 million viewers. It proved, though, to be the BNP’s high-water mark. Griffin’s attempts at respectability provoked splits in the ranks, while anti-fascist groups raised the level of their campaigning, and the public exposure tended to repel rather than attract new support.

While the electoral threat of the BNP faded rapidly, the damage had been done. In particular there were two consequences of these events. First, the twin fears of appearing racist and of igniting racial violence worse yet than the 2001 riots had left thousands of children vulnerable to appalling crimes. The impression given was that the lives of these girls — many of whom had been in care homes and young offenders’ institutions — were not seen as being significant enough when weighing up political and policing priorities.

Second, much of the public felt betrayed by an establishment that was complacent at best, perhaps even complicit in those crimes.

By the time the full horrors were revealed, the story had also broken of Jimmy Savile’s long history of abuse, again aided by silence in official quarters, which only served to underscore the point. As with the grooming gangs, far too many had turned a blind eye, including — in Savile’s case — the BBC and the NHS, on whose property abuse had been perpetrated. It was hard to have any faith in institutions that had failed so badly.

And it was that sense of betrayal that was the real legacy of the 2001 riots. The looting was bad, but would be eclipsed by the nationwide spate of riots that erupted in August 2011, in which five people were killed. In any event, damage to property can be remedied. The loss of trust was harder to restore, and it fed into a much wider feeling of disillusionment with politicians, the police and the media.

In the wake of the banking crisis, the MPs’ expenses scandal and the revelations of tabloid phone-hacking, this was perhaps the greatest charge of all to be laid at the door of the governing classes: that fear of civil unrest had trumped a primary duty to protect vulnerable children, that silence had been seen as preferable to rocking that “multicultural community boat”.

Alwyn Turner’s All in It Together: England in the Early 21st Century is available now.

Demons, as they are presented in myth and legend, aren’t opposed to this or that human value, but to value as such. Hell resounds with the yelps, sniggers, chortles and guffaws of those who mock the preposterous idea that human existence could have any meaning or worth. Like Shakespeare’s Iago, the devils itch to puncture this moral pomposity and show up human beings for the miserable waste of space that they are.

Evil, in other words, is a form of cynicism. What it finds intolerable isn’t this or that piece of the world, but Creation itself. Its mission is to return things to pure nothingness, and it reaps the kind of delight from this destructiveness that we see dimly reflected in a small child smashing up a toy. Destruction is an inverted form of creation, which brings into being a new entity known as nothingness. Since God has cornered the act of creation, the devil can only imitate this creativity by trying to break up God’s handiwork; but this means, to Satan’s eternal chagrin, that evil is dependent on good, and is always belated in relation to it.

There’s a long tradition for which evil is a kind of lack or absence. It may look frighteningly real, but it really springs from an incapacity for life.

The evil are the living dead, botched simulacra of authentic human existence. One such simulacrum walked among us fairly recently, known as Jimmy Savile. This isn’t necessarily to say that Savile was evil, but he was certainly a hole in the air. The point of the wig, shades, cigar, tracksuit and other appurtenances was to disguise the fact that there was nobody behind them. His eyes were dead and his geniality entirely bogus. He was devoid of talent, believed in nothing and had no relationships with other people because he was unable to love — which is to say, unable to be alive. He happened, however, to be a Roman Catholic by birth, and his charitable activities were probably an attempt to persuade St Peter that they sufficiently outweighed his crimes to allow him to squeeze into heaven.

When evil people feel agonised by the sickening void inside themselves, they try to fill it by annihilating others. Only in the act of destruction can they feel alive. Only by spreading their own nothingness around themselves can they hope to escape from it. Yet one can also view this from another perspective.

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One reason why the evil detest human life is because it is messy. Evil is unnerved by the untidy and unfinished. Materiality is shapeless, mercurial stuff which seeps all over the place. The evil, however, are purists and disciples of order who find chaos unbearable, and who are therefore deeply hostile to the human body. Hitler couldn’t stand being touched. If he demonised Jews, it was partly because they signified this chaotic nothingness or non-being, which needed to be purged for the purity and orderliness of the German race to shine forth like some luminous work of art. And since the need for purity is absolute, this meant that not even a tiny scrap of nothingness was to be left around, which meant in turn that every Jew on earth had to be liquidated.

Hitler, then, was engaged in the impossible project of trying to destroy nothingness. This, to do violence to language, was the constructive aspect of his project. The destructive side of the Nazis was the orgiastic way they revelled in nothingness and meaninglessness for their own sake. They, too, were in thrall to the death drive, which seduces us into delighting in destruction as an end in itself. As Primo Levi points out, one of the most chilling aspects of the Nazi concentration camps is that they were unnecessary. In fact, from the Nazis’s viewpoint they were in some ways counterproductive, disposing of men and women whose talents could have been harnessed to their war effort and tying down personnel and resources which might have been used elsewhere.

You might claim that it suited the Nazis to create a bugbear — an alien Other against which the nation would be united in its antagonism. But you do not need to kill six million people to create a bugbear. There was a crazed excess about the project which betrays the fact that the rationality driving it was by no means simply an instrumental one. This is one way in which the Nazi extermination differs from, say, Stalin’s slaughter of the kulaks and others, which was practically, politically motivated. This needless to say, is not to claim that Stalin’s behaviour was less morally atrocious than Hitler’s. The former murdered far more people than the latter.

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Perhaps the camps were driven by practical reason in the sense that you needed to kill every last Jew in order to ensure that a Germany cleansed of despicable weakness would triumph in its wars. This was one motive for supposedly purifying the race. But it was also an end in itself. Evil has the mystery of things that are motiveless. This is one reason why it is sometimes seen as glamorous, compared to the prim world of virtue. In fact, virtue is also a matter of doing things for their own sake, rather than for profit and reward, and thus has an unnerving resemblance to evil. The devil, one should recall, was once an angel. Evil may appear full of energy and exoticism, but that is just outward show.

In reality it is flat, kitschy, sham and superficial, an incapacity for living at any depth. It is Jimmy Savile’s tracksuit, not Dracula’s gown, the spectacles of Adolf Eichmann rather than the lethal eyes of the Medusa. The evil are those who are deficient in the art of living — an art which Aristotle believed you had to get good at by constant practice if you were truly to become a person. There is no reason for doing this, any more than there is reason for burying little children on Saddleworth Moor.

Vice became exciting when virtue grew boring. For Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, virtue is all about abundance of life. By the time we arrive at the philosophy of John Locke in the late 17th century, virtue is now a thoroughly bourgeois affair — a matter of thrift, prudence, chastity, temperance, honesty, sobriety and a number of other qualities for which one feels more admiration than affection. No wonder, then, that with the rise of the middle classes evil finally comes into own, as Milton’s magnificently rebellious Satan overshadows his stiff-necked bureaucrat of a God. Dickens’s heroes have all the virtues, but his villains have all the life. One would rather knock back a glass of whisky with Fagan than share an orange juice with Oliver Twist. How to make goodness interesting becomes an exacting artistic problem. A few centuries later, “wicked” would come to mean “great”, and Gothic would be all the rage in university English departments.

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In Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, the saintly monk Father Zosima declares that the Satanic “demand that there be no God of life, that God destroy himself and all his creation. And they shall burn everlastingly in the flames of their own hatred, and long for death and non-being. But death shall not be granted them.” The evil can’t die because they are kept alive by their own loathing and self-torment. Only their misery can assure them that they still exist. This is what is traditionally meant by hell. It is the kingdom of the mad, absurd, surreal, farcical, disgusting and excremental — of all, in short, that pounds meaning and value to pieces. If only the evil could let themselves go, they might recognise that there is a more fertile kind of nothingness than destruction, namely the act of self-dispossession. Only in this way might they be open to genuine life.

Yet this demands a courage which is found wanting in one of the great literary figures of our own time, William Golding’s Pincher Martin. Marooned on his rock in the Atlantic Ocean, dead but unable to accept the fact, Martin’s giant, lobster-like claws grip one another to protect the dark centre of his identity against the flashes of black lighting which batter relentlessly against them, seeking to unlock his self-defence and penetrate his inner being so that he might be saved. Martin, however, who regards himself as too precious to die, turns his face to the sky and shouts “I shit on your heaven!” The novel ends without the reader ever learning who is the victor in this contest. We shall never know whether heaven could take this insult on the chin, smash Martin’s defences to pieces and thus allow him to be reborn.

“The children now love luxury,” it says: “They have bad manners, contempt for authority. They show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room.”

Normally this passage is used to score a point off conservatives who express reservations about some new cultural trend. Ha, they say, you people are always moaning about decline, but old curmudgeons have been doing so since the dawn of Western civilisation. Chill out, grandpa.

We might call this the Elvis Hips Fallacy, after the way in which cultural commentators tend to dismiss those who object to, say, hypersexualised music videos marketed at children and adolescents, because old squares grumbled about Elvis’s dancing corrupting youth in the 1950s.

Everyone sniggers at the TV company bosses who supposedly ordered that Elvis not be filmed from the waist down, or the retired colonels who complained to the Daily Telegraph about hysterical teenage girls and Beatlemania. Sir Lawrence Byrne, the judge who heard the Lady Chatterley trial and made that famous remark about wives and servants, will forever be remembered as an archetype of stuffy repression.

Yet while the more absurd and archaic concerns of the time have become part of popular folklore, most of the warnings made by less excitable social conservatives have proved largely accurate. It is hard to deny that the emergence of mass youth culture, as represented in its early phase by Elvis and The Beatles, and sexually explicit books such as Lady Chatterley’s Lover, did a great deal to transform sexual attitudes and habits. Looking at our high rates of, say, abortion or divorce, you don’t have to agree with anti-abortion or family campaigners to accept that their predictions were more accurate than those of well-meaning reformers.

Drawing attention to these kind of matters is sometimes referred to dismissively as “moral panic”, a phrase popularised by the sociologist Stanley Cohen to describe a period of excessive mass concern over some supposed social problem. Obviously the term has its uses, and there are undoubtedly times when collective preoccupation with a particular problem reaches a wildly disproportionate level. This was certainly true of the high-profile media campaigns focused on “satanic ritual child abuse”, or the supposedly deleterious effects of children playing Dungeons & Dragons.

More recently, it appears that a great deal of British activism, rhetoric and commentary in support of the Black Lives Matter movement fits the definition of a moral panic. There has been apocalyptic coverage in the news and on social media, and endless self-interested corporate auto-flagellation, suggesting that Britain is a seething hotbed of white supremacism. The data, meanwhile, suggests that Britons are increasingly relaxed about immigration and intermarriage, and shows that British police barely ever kill anyone, never mind targeting black people specifically. Even in the US, polling reveals that large numbers of respondents wildly overestimate the prevalence of fatal police violence against unarmed black civilians.

All the same, moral panic is such an easily understood and politically useful concept that it inevitably suffers from concept creep — to the point where it functions as a thought-terminating cliché whenever anyone expresses any reservation. Inevitably, it is also used pejoratively to delegitimise conservative arguments, acting as a kind of mental roadblock.

Status positioning is in play too. For people whose self-image is based on their membership of the sophisticated, educated classes, it no doubt feels a bit below the salt to care about any issue that might exercise the indignation of the Daily Mail. We saw this last year with the Netflix film Cuties, which featured 11 and 12-year-old children dancing like strippers and having graphic conversations about sex. One British film critic gave it a glowing review, calling it a “provocative powder-keg” which “pissed off all the right people”, a take that was defended on Twitter by other members of the film critics’ guild.

In the US, The New Yorker also praised the film, framing their opinion as defiance of what they suggested was a cynical and puritanical assault by sinister reactionary forces. They claimed that it was a “remarkable first feature” and intimated that those who criticised the film were “scandal-mongers” linked to the “far-right”. Many critics seemed willing to embrace and praise something which was at best very dubious, rather than risk their reputation for sophistication, or allow that their cultural enemies might have even a smidgen of a point.

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This curious episode came to mind again recently, after it emerged that a musician who sings about Satanism and takes his stage name from a multiple murderer might be a bad person. Numerous women have made serious allegations against Marilyn Manson (real name Brian Warner), including various forms of sexual assault and coercion. In his heyday in the nineties and early noughties, Manson was the focus of considerable criticism over the aggressively dark and nihilistic tone of his performances and his confrontational taboo-breaking persona. He was not the first, nor the last, pop culture figure to be the subject of such objections, and nor was he alone in being defended by cultural gatekeepers who were totally uninterested in moral concerns being expressed by the wrong sort of person.

The accusation of fomenting a moral panic is frequently levelled against conservatives who make a stand against taboo-breaking. Mary Whitehouse, the widely derided but courageous and in many ways prophetic morality campaigner, was constantly accused of doing so because of her objections to swearing, violence and sex on TV.

Whitehouse’s long battle with the BBC was also indicative of the class dynamics at work. She was a suburban housewife from the self-consciously upright provincial middle class — the same background as that other hate-figure of the progressive intelligentsia, Mrs Thatcher. Whitehouse’s bete noire Hugh Greene, liberalising Director General of the BBC from 1960 to 1969, was an archetypal liberal elite figure, born into a well-off upper-middle-class family and educated at private school and Oxford (his brother was the novelist Graham). Mrs Whitehouse knew a simple truth, which Greene either didn’t know or didn’t care about, namely that the prosperous, well-educated and well-connected are insulated from the damaging consequences of radical social experimentation in a way that others are not.

For example, being left to raise three children by an unreliable partner is bad for any woman, but an intelligent, well-educated woman with strong support networks is much better placed to make the best of such a situation than a woman with few qualifications and little social capital. Similarly, middle-class students who develop serious drug problems do not always escape their addictions and the attendant dangers, but they have a much better chance of doing so than those lower down the income scale.

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We almost all rely to a greater or lesser extent on the norms of our surrounding society to give us “scripts” for our behaviour. The lifestyles and behaviours celebrated in popular culture are a key part of those scripts, so it is entirely reasonable for people to be concerned about the values promoted in TV, film or music. It’s easy to cry moral panic over these concerns — about, say, sexual content or bad language or the portrayal of married families as hotbeds of misery and abuse — but they come from a deep and honest, if inchoate, sense that good and enduring norms are under attack. The taboos that exist in a society act as philosophical signposts. They tell us what is sacred, what we ought to value and work for.

For a long time now, transgression, liberation and novelty have been valorised in the arts above all else. Épater la bourgeoisie, as the radical French poets of the late 19th century had it: scandalise the respectable people. And pushing boundaries has its place. JMW Turner is now firmly domesticated in the popular imagination, but caused great controversy in the second half of his career when he abandoned normal figurative painting. Prints by Monet and Manet adorn many a conservative living room, and yet in their day the Impressionists were widely perceived as avant garde radicals. Nevertheless, what we have not seen until relatively recently is sustained public advocacy by artists for moral and social transgression as an end in itself, and widespread approval for that stance from institutions, critics and the media.

The problem with a society that valorises transgression for its own sake is that it provides highly effective cover for people who want to do genuinely bad things, rather than just shock. This was certainly true of numerous figures from the world of music and entertainment who have been exposed as serial exploiters of women, if not outright abusers. Keith Richards of The Rolling Stones notoriously told the judge at a 1967 drugs trial that “we are not old men. We are not worried about petty morals”. To which one is tempted to reply that petty morals might have kept a lot of young women – and young men – safe from the dubious attentions of rock stars, DJs and producers in the years following the sexual revolution.

We might think of Nancy Spungen, girlfriend of Sex Pistols bassist Sid Vicious. When the Sex Pistols used the f-word on TV in 1976, it no doubt provided a thrill of vicarious rebellion for plenty of viewers. But Vicious lived up — or rather down — to his stage name in private life, at the very least badly beating Spungen more than once, and quite possibly stabbing her to death in a drug-fuelled haze. Rock ‘n’ roll, man. So edgy.

Some people ventured to suggest that the Marilyn Manson revelations were not perhaps the most surprising news they had ever heard, and were in turn chided for having a “round up the usual suspects” approach to oddballs and weirdos.

Don’t judge a book by its cover, as the saying goes. Lots of performers have grotesque or edgy stage personas but are perfectly charming and pleasant in private life, and lots of respectable people turn out to be murderers and child abusers. Well, up to a point, Lord Copper.

Suggested reading

Can the EU survive the death of liberalism?

By Larry Siedentop

No-one is suggesting that we should invariably judge by appearances, or by initial impressions. But we do need to confront the reality that wrongdoers and predators will exploit our celebration of boundary-breaking, our reluctance to be seen as boring or conventional or part of a moral panic, to get away with their crimes. And often these individuals will be hiding in plain sight — think of Jimmy Savile, or Gary Glitter. Sometimes floorboards that look fine turn out to be rotten; that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t tread carefully on the ones that actually look like they’re falling to bits.

Deriding people’s intuitions and instincts about dangerous people and corrosive trends, by labelling their expression as a moral panic, amounts to little more than the avoidance of serious discussion. Fundamentally, we need boundaries for ordered liberty that do not simply leave people at the mercy of their own impulses and weaknesses. We regulate gambling and alcohol sales and restrict the amount of paracetamol you can buy at one time; on the same principle, it seems quite sensible to think that we can and should take an interest in the cultural climate in which individuals form their habits and desires and manners, and their expectations of how they should interact with others.

As any parent knows, you can relax much more easily, and allow your children much more freedom, when they are playing in a carefully fenced park. It’s not moral panic to get upset if you see someone breaking down the fence.