It is now well- known that, representing PIE, he sat on the NCCL’s gay rights sub-committee from the late 1970s until the early 1980s. His book, Paedophilia: The Radical Case (1980), was favourably reviewed by Gay News and other gay publications. This was an era in which discrimination against the gay population was so bad that some would agree to align with the unlikeliest of allies so long as they were being similarly targeted.

Many of those who promoted the rights of the “paedophile”, such as PIE founder Peter Righton, a child protection expert and social care worker, have since been convicted of sexual crimes against children.

I wanted to find out from O’Carroll, a man rarely in the media these days, whether libertarian child abuse revisionism was still alive and well. I discovered that it was. O’Carroll is unrepentant, and sees himself and the likes of Savile as victims of an ongoing moralistic witch-hunt.

“In the 1970s I thought we were going to be embarked upon a journey like the gay people,” he told me when we met in a central London wine bar. “I would have quite liked [to be labelled as] ‘kindly’ because ‘kindly’ . . . relates to the Dutch and German kinder — children. So yes, being intimate, but also being nice with it. “I would say that if someone had sexual relations which were in the realm of what I called earlier the ‘kindly’ sort then that would not be abusive. Although these days one has to be careful because anything you do, no matter how kindly it is, it’s always subject to trauma later on — secondary trauma as a result of society’s hysteria over the whole thing.”

The writer and broadcaster Francis Wheen personally experienced the effects of child sexual abuse. Additionally, he suffered the attempts by PIE and its supporters to claim that the abuse did not happen. In 1968, Charles Napier, who would subsequently become treasurer of PIE, joined the teaching staff at Wheen’s boarding preparatory school, Copthorne, in Sussex.

“Napier was much younger than most of the masters there and he was quite friendly with the children so we quite liked him at first, because he seemed more on our level and not so forbidding,” says Wheen. “He had a little room off the workshop, and he would take us in there and offer us beer and cigarettes.

“I was 11 at the time, and it was incredibly thrilling, rather naughty and exciting. The word ‘grooming’ had never entered our vocabulary at that stage. One day he plunged his hand down my gym shorts and grabbed me, and I pulled his hand off and recoiled, and he then started slightly sneering at me and said, ‘Oh Francis, come on. Don’t be a baby.’ Very clever, tried to make me feel inadequate, to have to prove my maturity by going along with it. Other boys spoke about it. I wasn’t the only one.”

Wheen says that his classmates rarely spoke of Napier’s actions, and as such he was unaware of the sheer scale of abuse prevalent at his school. “Once or twice I would be talking to another boy in the dormitory and he’d say, ‘Did Mr Napier try it on with you? Oh he did with me as well.’ I didn’t have any sense quite how many boys were being abused until years later. I wrote about it occasionally when I became a journalist, and I did tell my parents, only some years later.”