Lord McAlpine’s interview with BBC Radio 4′s World at One made for profoundly unsettling listening. As the frail-sounding Conservative peer spoke (“I’ve got a very dicky heart,” he said), the scale of the wrongs against him became clear. Asked whether Boris Johnson was right to say that to call someone a paedophile is to “consign them to the lowest circle of hell – and while they’re still alive”, McAlpine replied:
Absolutely. I think it describes pretty much what happened to me in the first few days of this event…it gets in to your bones. It gets into, it makes you angry. And that’s extremely bad for you to be angry. And it gets into your soul. You just think there’s something wrong with the world.
Paedophiles are “quite rightly figures of public hatred”, he said, adding that “to find yourself a figure of public hatred, unjustifiably, is terrifying.”
He said that he was seeking compensation from the BBC but that his claim would be tempered by the fact that “this is the licence payer who’s going to pay this – not the people who made the programme, not the people who authorised the programme, not the people who told the lie in the first place.”
In an interview with the same programme, McAlpine’s solicitor Andrew Reid urged those who had named the peer Twitter to come forward in order to avoid prolonged legal action. He said: “What we’re basically saying to people is, look, we know – in inverted commas – who you are, we know exactly the extent of what you’ve done. It’s easier to come forward and see us and apologise and arrange to settle with us because, in the long run, this is the cheapest and best way to bring this matter to an end.”
He revealed that he had received two apologies from Guardian columnist George Monbiot (whose “abject apology” to McAlpine can be read here) but had yet to hear from Speaker’s wife Sally Bercow, who tweeted: “Why is Lord McAlpine trending? *Innocent face*”. He added that legal proceedings would be initiated against her. “She has left us with no choice.”
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