UNITED KINGDOM
Mail on Sunday
By Exclusive Interview By Simon Walters, Political Editor For The Mail On Sunday
Justice Lowell Goddard clearly doesn’t believe in the old adage that bad news comes in threes.
If she did she would have run a mile when she was asked to take charge of the independent inquiry into historic child sex abuse.
The first two women picked by Home Secretary Theresa May, Baroness Elizabeth Butler-Sloss and Dame Fiona Woolf, had to stand down over their links with the Establishment.
But as Justice Goddard sits in her office in Millbank Tower, Westminster, she shrugs off the suggestion that the job is cursed.
‘It was unfortunate for the people concerned but not a poisoned chalice.’
Elegant New Zealander Goddard, 66, is descended on her father’s side from Renata Kawepo, chief of the Ngati Kahungunu Ki Heretaunga Maori iwi (tribe) in the mid-1800s.
Her forefather’s first name translates as Leonard Returns By Night, a quaint fusion of English and Maori. Although only one-sixteenth Maori, it shows in Goddard’s tall, athletic frame.
She was made a Dame last year, but talk of the Establishment is batted away. It doesn’t exist where she comes from, she maintains.
‘New Zealand is a classless society. We aren’t concerned who people’s great-grandfather was, it’s what they do themselves that’s important.
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