The abuse inquiry: a travesty?

“It would be funny if it were not so disgustingly sad,” said Libby Purves in The Times. The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) has now lost its third chairwoman. The first two, the well-respected lawyers Elizabeth Butler-sloss and Fiona Woolf, were forced out over absurd fears that they might be part of an “establishment cover-up”. Last week their replacement, the New Zealand judge Dame Lowell Goddard, resigned “in what looks suspiciously like a huff”. It had recently been revealed that, since her appointment in February last year, she had spent 44 working days in Australia or New Zealand, and another 30 days outside the UK on annual leave. She now “flounces off” to spend more time with her family and many racehorses, “with a whiny statement about how she had always sensed a ‘legacy of failure’” – though that didn’t stop her drawing her £360,000 salary, and some £140,000 in benefits.

Her departure was no surprise, said Dominic Lawson in The Sunday Times. Word from inside the inquiry was that, when she deigned to turn up, Goddard was “useless”. At a preliminary hearing, she seemed all at sea regarding a straightforward legal matter, admitting that she was unsure of “local law”. She left because the four members of her inquiry panel had “completely lost confidence in her”. But even a better-qualified candidate would have struggled with “mission impossible”. The inquiry was set up in 2014, amid claims – since shown to be baseless – of a paedophile conspiracy at the heart of Westminster. The then home secretary, Theresa May, gave it “an almost impossibly extensive remit”: to examine how every single British institution, public and private, had failed to protect children from abuse, within living memory. It is already pursuing 13 different investigations, said Richard Pendlebury in the Daily Mail – into churches, schools, councils, Westminster politicians. It won’t even hear from witnesses until next year. At the moment it is trawling for evidence; there are 100,000 files in its archive, and another 26,000 boxes of material held around the country.

The work mustn’t stop now, said The Guardian. “The hard preliminaries have been done, the programme set.” The inquiry is “ready and able to continue while a suitable person is identified to chair it and be its public face”. I very much doubt it, said Charles Moore in The Daily Telegraph. “Few suitable candidates will put themselves forward to be fourth time lucky” – because the job cannot be done. The IICSA is too big. “Its rules are unfair, some contrary to proper legal procedure”: it seems that the inquiry is allowed to make “findings of fact”, naming offenders, though the accused will not be allowed to cross-examine the accusers. It ought to be wound down, or at least limited in its remit. But that won’t happen. First, because admitting defeat would be a PR disaster. And second, because May, “who started it all, is now the Prime Minister”.