Stop this insane inquiry before it costs us £120m

MORE than a month has passed since it was revealed that detectives had failed to find a shred of evidence to suggest that there was a VIP paedophile and murder ring operating in the Seventies and eighties.

These lurid allegations have been at the centre of an outrageous attempt by nonce Finder General Tom Watson to smear leading Conservatives, notably Leon Brittan, as child molesters and worse.

Another Labour MP, Simon danczuk, accused Brittan, during his time as Home Secretary, of covering up a secret dossier that would have proved the existence of a child abuse conspiracy at Westminster.

danczuk’s claims, added to the hysteria which surrounded Jimmy Savile, prompted the Government to set up a full-scale public inquiry into historical sex abuse in high places. Since then, the case against Brittan has collapsed in spectacular style. Yet, just as I predicted last week, Watson has flatly refused to apologise.

Surprisingly, criticism of Labour’s deputy Leader has been strangely muted at Westminster this week, save for the redoubtable nicholas Soames and London’s mayor Boris Johnson. Call Me dave has said that Watson should ‘ examine his conscience’, but that’s been about it.

Some hope. When it comes to smearing Tories, Watson hasn’t got a conscience.

You might have expected at least some mention of Watson’s deranged witch-hunt against Brittan to surface during Wednesday’s Prime Minister’s Questions. But no. nothing, zilch. Has the order to keep stumm gone out to Conservative MPs. And if so, why? At the risk of sounding l i ke a conspiracy theorist myself, could it be because Home Secretary Theresa May still has some questions of her own to answer?

First , it was her personal appointment as Met Commissioner, Bernard Hyphen-Howe, who decided disgracefully to wait until nine months after Brittan died to release the news that there was no substance to the rape allegations against him — even though the Yard knew months before his death in January that he had no case to answer.

Second, and equally important, despite the discrediting of the allegations of a VIP abuse ring, the expensive Goddard Inquiry set up by May is still grinding ahead. This is the public inquiry into ‘historic’ child sex abuse in high places, which the Home Secretary ordered when the Paedos In High Places panic was in full Corporal Jones mode.

even Tory MP Zac Goldsmith, now his party’s candidate for London mayor, got swept up in the hysteria, on the basis of an alleged photo of Brittan and a boy in a sauna, which has never materialised.

We’ve also had a major Scotland Yard VIP murder i nvestigation, without any evidence that anyone has actually been murdered.

nothing credible has ever been unearthed to support any of these allegations. So why on earth is this public i nquiry continuing — especially as several of its potential ‘star’ witnesses have been exposed as fantasists?

If you weren’t aware of Goddard, that’s because it hasn’t started yet. It’s still hiring staff, including a chief prosecutor. Goodness knows when it will eventually get under way. And even when it does, the most optimistic view is that it will run to at least 2020 at the earliest.

This knee-jerk inquiry was a fiasco before it started. Judge Lowell Goddard was parachuted in from new Zealand after both the first and second choices for presiding judge were deemed unsuitable because of their links to former Tory ministers.

Baroness Butler-Sloss was forced to resign a week after she was appointed because her late brother Sir Michael Havers had been Attorney General under Mrs Thatcher in the eighties. Then her replacement, Fiona Woolf, stood down because of concerns about her links to Leon Brittan.

But as there is no evidence to support claims of a murderous establishment paedo r i ng in the eighties and Leon Brittan has been exonerated, these resignations were entirely unnecessary.

So we are lumbered with a judge from new Zealand, who is being paid almost £500,000 a year in salary and living allowances, presiding over an inquiry which has already had the rug pulled from under its primary purpose.

OK, so her brief also includes investigating the failure of the BBC, the NHS and other public bodies to stop Jimmy Savile; abuse by Church of england priests; the role of the police; and anyone else suspected of being involved in ‘historic’ sex crimes.

But there are myriad other inquiries into Savile in existence — three at the BBC alone — and none of them has achieved much. And pervert priests, like the poor, have always and will always be with us.

None of these expensive public i nquiries ever achieves a great deal. each one assures us ‘lessons will be learned’ — which they never are. And so the circus moves on to the next one.

The only people who get anything out of them are lawyers and wellremunerated expert witnesses.

Theresa May has budgeted £17.9 million for Goddard for 2015/16 alone, including £565 a day for panel members and a psychologist on £450 a day. We’re already half way through that accounting period and the show hasn’t even got on the road yet.

And lawyers are like builders who turn up, rest their ladders against the wall, suck air through their teeth and spend months explaining why the job’s much bigger than they first anticipated. When the bill comes in, i t’s always at l east double the original estimate.

The Saville Inquiry into Bloody Sunday — not to be confused with the Savile Inquiry — cost the thick end of £200 million and ran for 12 years.

The Iraq war has spawned three inquiries: the Hutton Whitewash, the Butler Report and Chilcot, which after six years still hasn’t been published and has dragged on longer than the war itself.

So, at a conservative estimate, reckon on Goddard running for at least five or six years and presenting us with a final bill somewhere in the region of £120 million, plus VAT and one for yourself.

Theresa May should call a halt to this farce right now, and to hell with the political fall-out.

She should cut our losses before the whole thing gets completely out of hand, pay off the learned judge and send her back to new Zealand with the thanks of a grateful nation.

otherwise, who knows how long we will have to spend Waiting For Goddard? And in the unlikely event that this inquiry does ever get round to naming a few guilty men, you can guarantee that, like Jimmy Savile, they will all be dead.

THIRTY million quid later and the last two Sun journalists have been cleared of doing their job. never mind Goddard, isn’t it time we had an inquiry into the culture, practices and ethics of the police and the CPS?