Charles Shaar Murray: Is Jonathan King a monster, or is he being monstered?

'Even in a business where sexual self-indulgence is a given, preying on the young is unacceptable'

Public monster Number One: the space in the media landscape currently occupied by Jonathan King, renders him, in effect, the missing link between Osama bin Laden and Gary Glitter. The tabloids are howling. "Evil Lust Of Pop Beast King", screams the front page of The Sun. Following revelations of decades of cruising adolescent boys on the pretext of "market research" and enticing them into sexual activities, King has been sentenced to seven years' imprisonment.

It is not beyond the bounds of probability that there are many other moguls and celebs of a Certain Age, both within and without the pop world, who are quaking in their Guccis (or Nikes) on the general principle of "there but for the grace of God – or Rebekah Wade – go I".

There are innumerable reasons to dislike – nay, to despise – Jonathan King. He's ugly. He's arrogant. He's posh. He's a Tory. He's a relentless banaliser who has garnered profit from the mass production of crap novelty records, fourth-rate columns and fifth-rate TV shows. And he's sexually attracted to adolescents, upon whom he exercised the full weight of the kind of coercion available to the wealthy and powerful in order to obtain sexual experiences that would never have been available to him had he been forced to rely solely on his own native powers of attraction.

All of which is unpleasant in the extreme, but is it unique? Is he a monster, or simply being monstered? Does the entertainment business look after its own to the extent that the powerful can get away with almost anything until they finally overstep the mark?

Jonathan King is certainly not the only wealthy, powerful guy to be a "chicken-hawk" (one sexually drawn to partners below the legal age of consent). How come he got away with it for so long? Did no one know, or did no one care?

Let's state the obvious. Gay men are by no means always attracted to kids. Not all male celebs who are attracted to kids are gay. For many years, before Elton John came out, many of us in the rock-journo fraternity were well aware that he was gay. He made no secret of it as such: indeed Sir Elt (as he then wasn't) would frequently joke about it during interviews.

However, Elton was – and is – a gay man attracted to other gay men, not to children. None of us would have thought of outing him, on the grounds that (a) it was his business and his decision and (b) he was harming no one. The important governing principle, according to the post-60s consensus, was that of consent. Elton was an adult having entirely consensual relationships with other adults. No one who was not a committed homophobe could possibly have objected.

Over on Planet Het, the Seventies saw entire regiments of spectacularly gorgeous, teenage girls lining up in Los Angeles for the privilege of exchanging sexual favours with cute British rock stars. Certainly, the sexual escapades of Led Zeppelin mastermind Jimmy Page during this period have become the stuff of legend.

Why, then, did mass public odium not descend on Page's flowingly-tressed head? The first, and most obvious, reason is that Page was heterosexual. The second is that he didn't need to resort to coercion or subterfuge: "groupies" (as they were then known) sought him out by the dozen because he was physically desirable (at the height of his pre-Raphaelite good looks), reputed to be exceedingly sexually adept, and artistically admirable.

Page was not a predator; simply a man who took what was freely on offer. Whether he should have chosen to avail himself of these opportunities is a different question and one which might well receive a different answer now than the one it received in the Seventies but one distinction between Page and King is clear: he was sleeping with his fans, even though some of them were a little on the young side, rather than cruising for strangers to lie to and lure into bed.

What of other gay Sixties pop moguls? One who was not only drawn to young men but frequently paid them was the late Kit Lambert, former co-manager of The Who. Lambert was, however, considered to have treated his tricks decently and, however unsavoury such activities might seem to some, none of his young "friends" ever considered themselves to have been lured anywhere under false pretences, or traumatised by his behaviour.

Were it not for the fact that King's situation derives entirely from choices which he himself made, and practices which were repeated over decades, we might conclude that he was simply unlucky. Were he not gay, had his "partners" been drawn to him out of physical attraction or admiration of his work, had he a Michael Barrymore-sized reservoir of public affection to cushion him from the full weight of orchestrated odium or had he simply treated his prey better, he might not currently be the Number One poster boy in the Hall of Shame.

As it is, he has inadvertently demonstrated that, even for the wealthy and powerful and even in a business where sexual self-indulgence is a given, preying on the young and helpless is still unacceptable. His friends may miss him while he is "away". Popular culture certainly won't.