LITTLEJOHN
THE Independent Inquiry into Child Sex Abuse finally got under way yesterday, a mere six and a half years after selfappointed Nonce Finder General Tom Watson set the ball rolling.
In the wake of the Jimmy Savile scandal, Watson seized the opportunity to smear senior Conservatives as paedophiles and worse.
Hiding behind parliamentary privilege, he claimed a child sex ring dating back to the 1980s reached all the way to No 10.
Watson alleged that there had been a high-level cover-up to protect top Tories guilty of abusing children.
At the height of the hysteria, the then Home Secretary, Theresa May, decided to set up a full- scale, far-reaching public inquiry into Paedos In High Places, encompassing not just Westminster, but also the Church, the NHS and the BBC.
Yet even before the inquiry started hiring staff, most of the allegations had already been shown to be without any foundation whatsoever.
By then, though, the reputations of men such as former Prime Minister Edward Heath, former Home Secretary Leon Brittan, and the ex-head of the Armed Forces, Lord Bramall, had been comprehensively trashed.
Most of those accused were Conservatives, the majority of them already deceased. Labour peer Greville Janner found himself in the frame, too, for ‘crimes’ allegedly committed 50 years earlier. He was ruled unfit to stand trial, and a civil case against his estate collapsed when his so- called ‘victims’ withdrew their complaints.
I’m not going to revisit the gory details, but in this, as in every other case, no evidence of guilt was uncovered by police.
The Met knew several months before Brittan died that he was innocent of a rape allegation made against him by a mentally-ill Labour activist known only as ‘Jane’.
Disgracefully, however, Mother Theresa’s tame Plod, Bernard Hyphen- Howe, waited a further nine months after Brittan’s death to confirm there was no substance to it.
Everyone was considered guilty until proven innocent — from Grocer Heath to blameless disc jockeys and Tv personalities.
The Old Bill resorted to appealing for ‘ victims’ to come forward, promising they would be believed — whether or not there was any hard evidence. British justice was turned on its head. Homes were raided and ransacked by police, families harassed and lives ruined on the word of fantasists, liars and golddiggers, encouraged by politicallymotivated smearmongers like Watson and indulged by careerist coppers like Hyphen-Howe.
ASHOME Secretary, Theresa May could have put a stop to this lunacy. Instead, she chose to legitimise it, by announcing the public inquiry which lumbered into action yesterday.
From the off, this inquiry has been compromised and dogged by controversy. Since it was set up, it has lost three chairmen and any number of senior counsel for a variety of reasons.
At one stage, Mrs May parachuted in a judge from New Zealand, Dame Lowell Goddard, paying her £500,000 a year. She lasted about ten minutes before heading home.
Goddard’s resignation, in August 2016, came almost a year after I called on Mrs May, in this column, to abandon the inquiry, which would cost us a small fortune and was destined to end in tears.
Here’s an edited taste of what I wrote back then: ‘This knee-jerk inquiry was a fiasco before it started. Goodness knows when it will eventually get under way. The most optimistic view is that it will run to at least 2020 at the earliest.
‘At a conservative estimate, reckon on it 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 cut our losses before the whole thing gets completely out of hand.’
(Naturally, I never expected her to take any notice of me. If she valued my advice, we’d already be free of the Eu, without having to pay them £ 39 billion for the privilege, or getting our knickers in a twist about the ludicrous ‘Irish backstop’.) Needless to say, May ploughed on with typical bovine obstinacy, regardless of how much it will cost. My early estimates now seem way off beam. The inquiry has already racked up bills of £60 million and it’s only just begun in earnest.
Panel members are on £565 a day, there’s a resident psychologist on £450 a day. For the Rumpoles, it’s always trebles all round.
Yesterday, there were 13 — that’s right, thirteen — different barristers on parade. And that was just Day One.
As for this winding up in 2020, dream on. That’s only nine months away. These interminable blabfests have a habit of lasting for ever, and then some. This one could run and run to the Year 2525, if Man is still alive.
But the real scandal isn’t even the amount of time and taxpayers’ money this circus will consume. The first month of ‘evidence’ will consist of little more than rehashing a series of allegations which have already been proven false. And no cross- examination of witnesses will be allowed.
SOTHE families of those falsely accused will have to suffer all over again. The inquiry has even written to Leon Brittan’s widow warning that she is likely to be ‘upset’ by the re-examination of allegations against her late husband.
This is monstrous. Why the hell should Lady Brittan have to listen to this filth? She’s already received £ 100,000 damages from the Met for the way in which they mishandled the investigation and put her through unnecessary distress. Why drag it up all over again? If we must have an inquiry, then why not have one into the behaviour and motivation of Tom Watson and his cohorts in that bogus ‘news’ agency, which did so much to disseminate these false stories.
Let Hyphen-Howe explain why he spent millions of pounds investigating lurid allegations made by unreliable witnesses, promising that they would be believed regardless. He even set up a high-profile vIP murder inquiry without any evidence that anyone had actually been murdered. The Yard seemed to be taking its marching orders direct from Watson.
Let Hyphen-Howe explain, too, why the Met carried out its investigations in such a heavy-handed fashion. And why he was unwilling to clear Leon Brittan’s name, when he knew he was innocent, and apologise to his widow.
Let Mother Theresa explain why she authorised this carnival of muck- r a k i n g, when the justification for it had already evaporated.
After six and a half years, nothing credible has ever been unearthed to support any of these allegations. So why should we expect any to emerge now?
These are the kind of questions that surely need to be addressed.
Yet today, the new slimline Watson is being acclaimed as the ‘moderate’ face of Labour and spoken of as the next leader of his party. Presumably, that would put him in pole position to become Labour’s next Prime Minister.
Hyphen-Howe has been elevated to the House of Lords, and fancies himself as a minor Tv personality, while the men falsely accused during this deranged witch-hunt — and their families — are being put through the wringer all over again.
Meanwhile, Jimmy Savile remains dead.
If we must have an inquiry, why not one into the behaviour of Tom Watson?