LORD JANNER SON’S LIVING HELL
No right of reply. No sight of evidence. No respite from the child sex abuse inquiry that’s turned my life into a...
EARLIER this year, as a criminal barrister, I defended a headmaster facing charges of sexually assaulting former pupils. I was convinced this decent and caring man was innocent, and fought as hard as I could to help him clear his name. There were reasons for my belief. His accusers did not ‘come forward’ for 20 years after his alleged crimes. They were in jail for serious offences of their own, when they saw an advert in a prison newspaper from a law firm that specialises in claiming damages for the victims of such assaults. When they contacted the firm, they were told their case would be stronger if the alleged perpetrator had first been convicted in a criminal court.
Thankfully, the jury found my client not guilty. But he and his family had endured two years under a black cloud of lies. When the verdict was announced, he and his wife and children stood in a group hug, sobbing.
I tell this story because I know, together with my sisters, Marion and Laura, our children and our children’s children, what this hell feels like. For more than two years, since my dying father, the former Labour MP and peer Greville Janner, was also accused of being a paedophile, we have shared it.
We had to watch as this once brilliant, loving and energetic man disintegrated in front of us. That was painful enough. But at the same time, he was facing a poisonous web of bogus claims, which made it ten times worse.
His death last December brought a little relief: at least his suffering was over, and with it, the ‘trial of the facts’ he was facing in a criminal court – on accusations which a judge had ruled he was incapable of defending, because of his dementia. But the Government’s ill-fated Independent Inquiry on Child Sexual Abuse, the £100million albatross bequeathed by Theresa May from her time as Home Secretary, rolls on. Officially at least, it remains determined to make ‘findings of fact’ about my father.
I have the deepest sympathy for genuine victims of child sexual abuse. They need help, and also justice. But I am certain that this flawed, skewed inquiry cannot provide it.
My family’s treatment has been appalling. For example, we asked to see the documents on which the inquiry intends to base its investigation of my father’s case, but it has refused us any disclosure. Meanwhile, his accusers were given everything. This one-sided approach makes it impossible to refute the allegations.
On June 2, our lawyers sent the inquiry a 19-page confidential letter, explaining why we consider the allegations are false. The inquiry team sent copies to the accusers and their lawyers, and yet at the same time told
Ius any dealings they have with us must be kept strictly confidential.
I have repeatedly asked to meet the inquiry solicitor handling my father’s case but each time he has turned me down – without giving reasons.
So how can I be so sure my father was not a paedophile? The answer starts with this newspaper, and its brilliant investigation of ‘Tony’, who for many years was the only person to accuse him. The Mail on Sunday revealed that Tony falsely accused the female head of the children’s home where he was once a resident, claiming she seduced him, after she caught him sexually assaulting a six-year-old girl. Unaccountably, the police who recently claimed my father should have been charged 25 years ago always knew these inconvenient facts, but chose not to mention them.
The most serious allegations of all, that my father repeatedly raped another boy with sadistic violence during three days at a London hotel from August 16 to August 19, 1987, cannot be true. We can show this because we have his passport. He left England for Singapore on August 12, arrived in Australia on August 13, and stayed until August 20. Yet this claim formed one of the charges he was facing when he died, and is still being taken seriously by the inquiry. TS flaws do not end here. An investigation of this kind means the chair must make legal decisions and rulings covering, for example, whether evidence is admissible and how it is to be presented, and issues about media coverage and the law of contempt. That is why an Appeal Court judge, Lord Justice Leveson, was appointed to chair the phone hacking inquiry.
The sex abuse inquiry’s recently departed third chairwoman, the New Zealand judge Lowell Goddard, had trouble with this – at one stage in a preliminary hearing, she had to ask ‘what the local law is’. But her successor, social work professor Alexis Jay, is not a lawyer at all.
Meanwhile, in baffling circumstances, the inquiry has lost the one senior lawyer it did have, leading counsel Ben Emmerson QC. This is now a legal Titanic, sailing towards the pack ice without a qualified captain.
Mr Emmerson imagined he could limit oral hearings on each of its 13 ‘strands’ to two months, though some cover huge institutions over decades. There is no way of pulling this off.
It’s time for total rethink. It is possible that with a smaller, more tightly focused remit, led by a senior judge, something may be salvaged from the wreckage. The tragedy is that by launching this behemoth, the Government raised false hopes among genuine victims. As so often, they will be the ultimate losers.