A Dame’s old days with Wilf the ‘scallywag’

One of the guest editors of the Today programme next week is the distinguished columnist and foreign correspondent Dame Ann Leslie.

So will she take the opportunity to put in a good word for her old friend at Oxford, the former BBC producer Wilfred De’Ath, who was recently arrested and charged with molesting a 14-year-old girl, now a famous actress, in 1965?

“Wilf, as we used to call him, has always been a scallywag, he always gets away with things,” she tells me. “I hope he gets off. This witch hunt is absurd, ridiculous. It’s like Salem.

“As L P Hartley said, the past is another country, they did things differently in those days. Yes, it’s true I had a crush on him. It seems quite bizarre now. He was frightfully stylish in an odd way.

“He had a sort of seedy glamour about him. I’d been at a convent boarding school since the age of four.

“I went to the theatre with him when he wrote reviews. I remember he had one of those pens that light up in the dark.

“One of the things about Wilf was his shamelessness. I met him recently at an Oldie lunch with Melvyn Bragg, who was also at Oxford. I remembered him and he remembered me. No, I won’t be sticking up for him on the Today programme but in my view he is innocent until proved guilty.”