Lost at sea

“What had she done?” I ask.

“Shoplifting,” says Tam.

There is a silence.

“People have their own little guilt trips,” says Tam. “They look around. ‘Who’s a beast? Who’s a pedo?’ Now it’s on my record for the rest of my life. If I want to go into business, I have to state that I was done for lewd and libidinous. Gross indecency. People think, ‘Oh my God! He must have been crawling about in a nursery.’”

“Can I ask about the boys who live here?” I say. “What do they do?”

“They clean up,” he replies, a little sharply. “They feed the dogs. They take them for walks. They help me with my property business. They are eighteen years of age, and I don’t have a relationship with them. You can interview them until the cows come home. Maybe I just like nice people floating about. We don’t have orgies. There’s no swinging from the chandeliers. Even if there was,” he adds, “it would be legal.”

Tam believes he was targeted because of his fame, because he was a celebrity Svengali. He blames his arrest, then, on the pop business. And now he is out of it. He has become a property millionaire, with forty flats in Edinburgh’s West End.

“I do get myself upset,” he says. “I’ve given away all the Roller albums to charity. I want to forget it all. I’ve had two heart attacks. And now the same thing is happening with Jonathan. A foxhunt. Everyone wants to see the death of the fox. They would never have gone after us if we were heterosexual. But if you’re a poof, my God.”

I change the subject.

“Do you think you have emotionally scarred any of the boys for life?” I ask.

“Oh my God,” he says. “I hope not.”

•   •   •

IN MID-OCTOBER 2001, I have coffee with Jonathan King’s brothers Andy. He’s just visited Jonathan in Belmarsh for the first time.

“How is Jonathan doing?” I ask.

“Great,” says Andy. “He seems really cheerful. Talking ten to a dozen.”

“Really?” I ask.

“He’s wearing pink pajamas as a silent protest,” Andy tells me. “He says it’s aesthetically reminiscent of the way gays were treated under the Nazis.”

On November 20, things take a turn for the better for Jonathan. He is acquitted of buggery and indecent assault in the second trial—the witness admits on the stand that he was sixteen and not fifteen. The Crown Prosecution Service a

The next morning, Jonathan is sentenced to seven years. Judge Paget says that the case is a tragedy. This otherwise honorable man, he says, this successful celebrity, used and abused his fame and success to attract impressionable teenagers. But there was no violence, no threats used.

Jonathan smiles and nods as he is sentenced. One journalist says that he looks smug; another says that he looks pale and beaten. His name is placed indefinitely on the sex offenders’ list. The police say he may have abused hundreds of boys over the past thirty years.

POSTSCRIPT

Jonathan King wrote to me throughout his prison sentence, and sent me Christmas cards, etc. I wasn’t the only one. The Observer’s Ly

“The very qualities—the relentless cheeriness, bumptiousness and optimism—which made him seem quite irritating on the outside seem absolutely heroic in prison,” she wrote.

Just before Christmas 2001, a few weeks after the Guardian published my story about the case, I received a telephone call from the former Radio 1 DJ Chris De

He turned up with a boy. He introduced him as one of the boys he’d just been in prison for, and he said he brought him along to prove they were still friends. The boy had the flu, and throughout the interview he sat on the bed, sniffing, and looking bored and ill.

I asked Chris De

“That’s possible,” he said. “He did steal some of the things I did.”

“Like what?” I asked.

“I would make fu

Chris De

“But Jonathan’s humor always had a streak of cruelty,” De

“What did the boys in the car think of it?” I asked.

“I don’t think they liked it,” he said. “It was fu

Chris De

“Sadly,” he said, “they grow up. They disappear. The person you were attracted to has gone. He doesn’t exist anymore. You can never have a lasting relationship with them. It’s very sad.”

In August 2005, Chris De

Dear Jon,

I was abused by King’s mate Chris De

Dear Jonathan, I see your old mate Chris De

You are no doubt aware that your ex employer the Sun has published a piece linking you to De