NOW THE SEXUAL ABUSE INQUIRY DEVOURS ITS OWN

TO GEORGES DANTON is attributed the remark that ‘The Revolution, like Saturn, devours its own children’. Danton was the President of the Committee of Public Safety set up by the French revolutionaries of 1789, but who five years later lost his head to the guillotine — along with his colleague on the committee, the great prosecutor Maximilien Robespierre.

I was reminded of this by the fate of Ben Emmerson QC, the Robespierre of the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse.

Last week, Emmerson faced an allegation of sexual abuse himself — a charge he vehemently denies. According to BBC2’s Newsnight, Emmerson, who had led the inquiry’s investigations into historic abuse, has been accused of pushing a much younger female colleague against the side of a lift in the inquiry’s own offices, and of ‘groping her’.

An inquiry spokesman denied it had received a complaint of sexual assault at all and Mr Emmerson’s lawyers issued a furious rebuttal, saying ‘He categorically denies any allegation of sexual assautl or bullying or any other misconduct at the inquiry. Any such allegations are completely false.’ The alleged victim has also refused to comment on the allegations and her lawyers refused to comment on Newsnight.

I guess this eminent barrister — whose sudden departure in September from the increasingly farcical inquiry has not been satisfactorily explained — is feeling unjustly treated. But then, in his role as the inquiry’s chief counsel, Emmerson had not been notably respectful to the rights of those accused.

He suggested that the inquiry would make ‘findings of fact’ in relation to the allegations against the late Lord Janner and what he termed ‘other individuals allegedly associated with him in his offending’.

Despite those words, Greville Janner had never been tried in his lifetime, still less found guilty. Yet the inquiry under Emmerson’s guidance told Janner’s son Daniel that any lawyers he employed to defend his father posthumously would not be allowed to crossexamine those claiming the late Labour peer had abused them.

This approach might have seemed fine to Emmerson, knowing that in the wake of the revelations about the late Jimmy Savile the public would have scant sympathy for the rights of important men accused — falsely or not — of abusing the young.

Now the obsession with sexual exploitation in high places has engulfed the abuse inquiry’s own chief counsel. Still, he’s kept his head, if not his job.