Home secretary Theresa May continues to surprise her sceptics, with an assured announcement of two reviews, looking into how public bodies undertook their duty of care to protect children from sexual abuse, and whether any legal gaps in child protection remain. These could put back on track a totally legitimate concern to root out and punish paedophiles, especially those in high places, which was in danger of spilling over into a witch hunt.

Her Hillsborough-style inquiry will rightly embrace all parts of our national life – not just the poor benighted Home Office, which has received such a good kicking in recent days.

My only reservation would concern the frankly rather emptily populist decision to put the chief executive of the NSPCC in charge of the inquiry into how the Home Office handled abuse allegations. Far more sensible, but, I admit, not so sexy publicity wise, would be to invite a boring lawyer to review what were, after all, legal or quasi-legal decisions, not social worker stuff.

The government needed to act decisively, because the rush to judgment among certain politicians and sections of the press was becoming unbearable.

I was a Home Office minister when Geoffrey Dickens brought in his dossier, amid a welter of press publicity. He was received courteously by then home secretary, Leon Brittan, and his documents were passed to officials for appropriate action. Brittan then wrote to him, detailing what he had done, and Dickens did not express any dissatisfaction with what the home secretary said or wrote. Indeed, three years later Dickens put in Hansard his thanks to the Home Office for its efforts.

Quite how this innocuous tale became the scandalous allegations and innuendos we have been hearing in recent days beggars belief. There is no evidence whatsoever that Dickens was remotely dismayed by the way his dossier was treated, so why are so many other people anxious to be more Catholic than the Pope?

Brittan is a decent man, and a dedicated public servant, who always carried out his duties with total integrity. In all my years in politics, I met no one I respected, or liked, more. He has been gravely ill recently, and does not deserve the opprobrium he has received.

People who never saw the Dickens document, or spoke to anyone who did, have suggested this was a thorough exposé of paedophile activities by public figures that was then subjected to an establishment cover-up. Not a scintilla of evidence has been adduced to prove any of this, but that has not prevented some appalling comments.

Personally I abhor paedophiles, and can remember how disgusted I was, while at the Home Office, that some on the left so enthusiastically embraced the libertarian rubbish spewed out by the Paedophile Information Exchange to justify sexual activities with children, some of them barely out of the cradle. And I remain proud to have been a party to getting their activities made illegal.

If any evidence of paedophile activity had crossed my desk while I was a Home Office minister, or those of any of my ministerial colleagues, I am totally certain effective action would have been taken. But it didn't cross our desks.

Now that proper investigations have been announced, is it too much to hope that poor Leon will be left in peace, and those charged with these inquiries be allowed to get on with them in a calm and rational atmosphere, as far away as possible from the lynch mob mentality into which we have been sinking in recent days.

That would be nice, wouldn't it, but I'm not holding my breath.