UNITED KINGDOM
Belfast Telegraph
BY JOAN SMITH – 04 NOVEMBER 2014
How could this happen? Almost four months ago the Government announced a wide-ranging inquiry into explosive allegations of historical child abuse. Since then two chairs have been appointed; both have resigned and the inquiry hasn’t even started work.
On Friday the embarrassment spread to David Cameron when he backed Fiona Woolf, the current Lord Mayor of London, only hours before her resignation as head of the inquiry was announced.
She lost the confidence of victims when it was revealed that she is a friend of the former Home Secretary Lord Brittan, who was at the Home Office in the 1980s when, it is alleged, a dossier on child abuse compiled by a Conservative MP went missing. It emerged last week that a letter setting out her contacts with Brittan went through seven drafts.
The inquiry needs to be exceptionally wide-ranging, shining a light into just about every area of the Establishment. Yet the Home Office seems not to have realised that the usual approach – announcing an inquiry and picking one of the great and the good to chair it – would be entirely inappropriate in this instance.
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