On remorse

Saying it again

I hadn’t intended posting so soon after my first attempt earlier this week, but it seems some things need to be said before going any further.

On 22 March this year I issued a public statement ahead of a Channel 5 programme about the events that led to my court appearance in 2024. Important parts of that statement were not reported.

So please let me be clear about one thing above all else: my deep regret and remorse for the crimes I committed were expressed in court, and then in the March statement, and I repeat them here without qualification. In pleading guilty at the earliest opportunity, I took full responsibility for my reprehensible actions. Indecent images of children represent innocent victims. I am repelled by such images, and my sincere and profound apologies to every person affected do not diminish with time.

That is the foundation. Nothing I say here, or anywhere, is designed to soften it.

Part of the reason for starting this blog is to address something I am often asked about: serious mental illness, and what it can do to a person.

I have been open about my struggle with persistent mental illness over twenty-five years. What is less well understood — including, until too late, by me — is the severity of that condition. For a long time it was managed. Then it wasn’t. The downward spiral that followed led to an appalling outcome, and the wreckage of that outcome is something I live with every day.

Mental illness can never be an excuse for criminality. I want to be unambiguous about that. But there is a difference between an excuse and an explanation, and that difference matters — not to diminish accountability, but to make any genuine understanding possible. When a serious mental disorder erodes judgement, distorts perception, and strips away the capacity to make sound decisions, it does not remove moral responsibility. What it does is make certain catastrophic failures of behaviour more comprehensible than they might otherwise appear. That comprehension is not comfort. It is simply the truth.

I intend writing at more length about this, and about the wider failure of society to treat mental illness with the seriousness it demands — the gap between the language of concern and the reality of provision, the stigma that keeps people silent, the institutions that respond to mental illness with punishment rather than understanding. I believe that case needs to be made, and I intend to keep making it.

Not to ‘rehabilitate’ myself. That is a preposterous notion. I don’t need people to point that out. But because the silence around serious mental illness is lethal, and I am in a position — a difficult, exposed, and in some ways uniquely qualified position — to break it.