This failing sex-abuse inquiry is built on sand
Like the house in the Gospel parable, the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (Iicsa) is built on sand. So if it continues on its present foundations, it is certain to fall. You cannot have a law-based inquiry which mixes the following: individual accusations against bodies or persons, a “Truth Project” in which anyone can send in his or her uncorroborated experiences of child sexual abuse, and an investigation into all state and nonstate institutional mishandlings of child abuse in living memory.
Two years on, the subsidence in the foundations laid by the then home secretary, Theresa May, is widely visible. The inquiry is on its fourth chairman, Alexis Jay. She is a childabuse expert but, not being a lawyer, has little knowledge of how such an inquiry should be conducted. Her counsel, Ben Emmerson QC, who is adversarial rather than inquisitorial, and therefore unsuitable for an inquiry’s evidence-sifting task, is out. His unhappy team has broken under the strain. Although there is £1,700 a day to be had by whoever replaces Mr Emmerson, no appropriately qualified lawyer would want the work, because the task is both unprofessional and impossible. At the same time, the inquiry’s “strand” looking into claims against the late Lord Janner is tottering because the one-sided rules (in which, essentially, Lord Janner’s side has no clear rights) are unworkable.
Meanwhile, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir Bernard HoganHowe, has announced that he will leave his job early. We do not know why, but the report by Sir Richard Henriques on the police conduct of Operation Midland is due very shortly. It was the fantasist claims against Lord Brittan, Lord Bramall and others, fanned in Parliament by Labour’s deputy leader, Tom Watson, which drove Midland forward and gave impetus to the Iicsa. They have turned out to be crazy.
The situation is not easy, because Mrs May is our new Prime Minister. Yet, when everything else in politics fails, honesty is the best policy. If she were now to say that the child abuse issues are vital but the structure is wrong, suspend proceedings and call in an expert in inquiries to work out which bits can be salvaged, she would get more credit now than when forced to do the same thing later. Today, by coincidence, is the day in the Anglican calendar consecrated to George Bell, the wartime Bishop of Chichester. A place in that calendar is the nearest thing the Church of England gets to recognising post-Reformation saints. Yet poor Bell is the victim of the Church he served so bravely, posthumously condemned for child abuse on the basis of one person’s inadequately tested claims about alleged events 65 years ago.
Bell’s many admirers are holding a special service at 4pm today at St Michael Cornhill. Huge injustice has been done to many victims of child abuse. Now huge injustice is being done to many people falsely accused. It is a commonplace of British conversation just now that the choice facing Americans in their presidential election is unenviable. Nevertheless the balance, at least among people I meet, is clearly in favour of Mrs Clinton. Without warming to her, most find it hard to understand why so many Americans object to her so fiercely.
To imagine American feelings, then, suppose that Cherie Blair were now the leader of the Labour Party. I suggest that most people would feel at least two things. The first would be that Mrs Blair’s leadership today harked back to an era which ought by now to have finished: 2016 is not 1997. The second would be that there was something borderline corrupt and anti-democratic about the rise of the spouse of a former leader even when – as is the case with Mrs Clinton and Mrs Blair – they are able in their own right.
These are both good objections. They don’t make Donald Trump right, but they make his popularity more comprehensible. My mobile phone suffers from predictive text. The other day I mistyped a word – I think it may been “beyond” – and up came the suggestion of “Beyoncé”.
Why? Since I had never in my life typed that name, what put it in the mind of my iPhone? I can’t make it suggest Adele or even Shakespeare. Is this human product placement? Does Beyoncé have a deal with Apple?
I suppose we shall know who is winning the cyber-wars when I try to type, say, “putty” or “putain” and get “Putin” proposed instead. Yesterday at the South of England Agricultural Show at Ardingly was a golden, harvest festival sort of day, attracting record crowds. As this year’s president, I handed over the prizes for the “Student Assignment Competition”.
It was interesting that the two winners at the most advanced level both related to wine and both trained at Plumpton College. English wine has moved fast from being a joke to being a world-beater, at least in fizz. For the first time, in a London restaurant last week, I noticed “Sussex” on the wine list as an equivalent designation to Champagne.
I was informed that French champagne houses are now so concerned by their failure to beat the competition that they are joining it, buying up land for wine-growing in Kent. Another Brexit effect?