‘So, how many days have you had off,’ I asked... 24 hours later she was gone
ON Wednesday last week, I put some questions to the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA), the ill-starred £100million behemoth that has lost no fewer than three chairwomen in two years – without having heard a single piece of evidence.
I had been briefed by well-placed sources that Dame Lowell Goddard, the New Zealand judge appointed only a year ago by then-Home Secretary Theresa May, had been spending an awful lot of time in the Southern Hemisphere. It was also being said that she was out of her depth – ‘overwhelmed and drowning’ – as one unkind soul put it: unsure of the facts of the myriad of cases she was investigating, and equipped with only a ‘blurry’ understanding of her role in UK law.
So I sent her a list of questions addressing these issues, including ‘how many days has Dame Lowell worked since she was appointed, and how many days has she taken as leave?’ Just 24 hours later, Dame Lowell, along with her £500,000 pay package, had gone and the first daily newspaper report appeared revealing that on top of 30 days’ leave, she had spent 44 days in Australasia, supposedly ‘working’ – yet held only two meetings with her Antipodean counterparts, the Royal Commission looking into sexual abuse in Australia.
We can say that beyond her £360,000 salary, £110,000 rent allowance, £12,000 utilities stipend, chauffeur-driven car and businessclass flights to New Zealand, she was not greedy for more. Her expenses claims, the inquiry spokeswoman told me, amounted to £120.65.
But make no mistake: Dame Lowell did not resign voluntarily, and has given no plausible reason for doing so. Fatally, she had lost the confidence of other members of her inquiry panel, and her senior staff. By the beginning of last week, this had spread to the Home Office.
Look closely at Home Secretary Amber Rudd’s words when she accepted the judge’s resignation: ‘With regret, I agree that this is the right decision.’ This was not a resignation in the usual sense at all. Dame Lowell was fired.
However, it is impossible not to feel some sympathy for her. It is a truth that if publicity is given to allegations that a famous person once committed acts of sexual abuse, many others will pile in with similar claims. Some may be genuine, but the multi-millionpound industry run by lawyers seeking damages for abuse ‘survivors’ has established a strong financial motive for those prepared to lie. And where police, politicians, and, yes, public inquiries have made clear that their bias is towards ‘believing the victims’, there is little risk of such perjury being exposed.
Mrs May announced the formation of IICSA on the day after Leon Brittan was (we now know falsely) accused of rape. The febrile claims of a ‘VIP paedophile ring’ embracing not only sexual depravity but multiple child murders, peddled by the nowdefunct website Exaro and, disgracefully, the BBC, followed swiftly in its wake. By the time Dame Lowell took over, the flood of publicity had given rise to an allegations tsunami. The openended remit Mrs May gave IICSA effectively meant nothing could be ruled off limits – while the current rate of new allegations being forwarded to the inquiry team is running at more than 100 a day.
The inquiry is tasked with investigating a bewildering range of diverse institutions from the churches to the NHS. Its scope is simply too vast and amorphous for any chair, no matter how talented, to stand a realistic chance of producing useful conclusions.
But it isn’t just a tighter focus that IICSA needs. Last week this newspaper revealed that the man who, for many years, was the main and only source of claims against the late Labour politician Greville Janner, also made false allegations of sexual abuse against the woman in charge of his children’s home – claims that were dismissed.
From this, there are two lessons for IICSA: one specific, one general. As well as the large institutions the inquiry is set to investigate there has been, until now, just one individual: Janner, who is dead and cannot answer back. The inquiry has, nevertheless, insisted it will make ‘findings of fact’ about him. This inquiry strand should be dropped.
The second lesson is more significant. The loudest voices raised after Dame Lowell’s resignation came from victims and survivor groups. They have an essential role in IICSA’s future, but they cannot be allowed to dictate its form or proceedings, and what the inquiry needs most of all is a degree of what, to them, is anathema – a modicum of scepticism, that accepts that sometimes, for a variety of reasons, supposed survivors of sexual abuse tell lies.