It was on 18th November 1997 when things started to go wrong for Gary Glitter. He took his laptop to PC World at Cribbs Causeway near Bristol to be repaired for a software fault, telling the technician not to look at the files. Well, you’re the technician, what would you have done? You’d have had a look at the files, wouldn’t you? And he did. When Glitter returned to the store the following day, to collect his laptop, Inspector Knacker was waiting for him, having discovered the laptop was full of child pornography. Eventually, Glitter gets sent down, his career in ruins. You can read his grim story here. Today, Glitter has been released from prison at the age of 78. Predictably and understandably, there’s a certain amount of outcry from the public, since he is only halfway through his sentence and for once, I share the anger of the permanently angry Daily Mail reader. He should have stayed in nick forever.
Glitter will be tagged and monitored by both the Probation Service and the Police and given that he’s nearly 79, I doubt very much that he’s capable of doing a great deal on the perversion front. It will have been determined that he is no longer a threat to anyone. I’m not going to argue with their expertise because my feelings about him are based more upon anger and emotion than anything else. When you interfere with children, as he did, I don’t think once you’ve been prosecuted you should see the natural light of day ever again.
The thing about Glitter is that he is a paedophile. He can’t be an ex-paedophile because that’s not possible. I am heterosexual and my sexual preference will always be for women. That cannot change because I am what I am, like you are what you are. I am loathe to define what is normal and what isn’t normal because here we enter a minefield, but I would say that consensual sex between adults would be defined as that. Wanting to have sex with children, some aged between eight and ten, well, that’s not normal.
I saw Gary Glitter perform live at the Bristol Colston Hall in the early 1970s and it was an unforgettable night. He was at the very peak of his popularity and his performance, if not his singing, was brilliant. After the brush with superstardom declined, he slipped into obscurity, only to re-emerge later on the lucrative and growing nostalgia circuit. Had he not taken his laptop in PC World, who knows what would have happened to his career given the proliferation of heritage acts? He might even have ended up playing the Sunday afternoon legends slot at Glastonbury or Jools Holland’s New Year Hootenanny, but his paedophilia got in the way. Thank goodness the tech guy checked Glitter’s files. I hope he got a healthy bonus.
You don’t need me to go on a rant about the wrongs of paedophilia but there aren’t many worse crimes, are there? An abused child will carry around those scars for life. I don’t know why a pervert like Glitter shouldn’t be banged up for life, either.
Now he’s free, I don’t want to hear about him at all, at least not until notice of his death is served on a waiting nation. In some ways, I hope he grows to be very old in the hope that he will understand his filthy perversions cost his a good life. But we know he won’t because he is what he is. If only there was a hell for him to go to.
