The UK's establishment does not want the inquiry into child abuse in the upper echelons of the UK to find any answers, a writer at the Edinburgh International Book Festival has said.

Dan Davies, who has released an acclaimed book, In Plain Sight, on the serial sex abuser and former celebrity Jimmy Savile, said the government want the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) in England and Wales to be "spun out" like the Chilcot Inquiry into the war in Iraq.

Davies also said that he suspected that Savile may have been capable of murder and its possible the late DJ and TV personality may have murdered someone.

Davies said, in a session with chair Ruth Wishart, said: "The CSA inquiry, that's a really interesting case in point, it has taken them the best part of a year to come up with a suitable chairwoman.

"It's going to take ten years to get that done. They knew Leon Brittan [former Chancellor and MP now being linked to abuse] was very unwell, and they waited for him to die before getting a chairperson in place.

"I don't think there is any will on behalf of the political establishment to get to the bottom of what happened because it is going to be far too damaging.

"They are just going to span it out, it will be like Chilcot, it is just going to go on and on and on.

"I feel very strongly that we live in an age of inquiries where the establishment's response to serious queries is to say 'we'll have an inquiry' - the inquiry takes a year to put together, sometimes longer."

Davies commented on Savile's potential for violence in the wide-ranging discussions of the Savile scandal.

He said: "When I started to write this book, Savile was still alive and it was going to be called 'Apocalypse Now Then' - it was in part a total understanding that wherever the journey of his life was concluding it was going to be in a heart of darkness,

"I often wondered what was at that heart of darkness.

"He constantly talked about his zero tolerance attitude to trouble makers in the dancehalls, and he always said he was a man 'not to be messed with' and he made references to the Mafia and to physical violence and 'sorting out' people who had crossed him

"I often thought, yes I had heard the rumours about child abuse...but I thought what is he hiding here? The thing that really drew me to Savile was: he was the man who was the most conspicuous man in Britain, he made himself that by his hair, his tracksuit, his jewellery and so on, and he had made himself that because he had a very dark secret."

Davies said he had heard rumours of a suspicion over the death of a Bournemouth club owner, who was found floating upside down in his swimming pool.

He added: "I never found anything to pin [a murder] on him, but I think he was certainly capable of that, if not himself committing the act, then ordering the act."

A Home Office spokesman said:

"The Home Secretary established the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse to examine the extent to which state and non-state institutions in England and Wales have failed in their duty to protect children.

"As Justice Goddard has said, this is the most ambitious public inquiry ever established in England and Wales.

The inquiry has said it will report on an annual basis and the hearings will be public.