UNITED KINGDOM
Telegraph
CHARLES MOORE
5 AUGUST 2016
It is over two years ago that Theresa May, then the home secretary, announced that she would set up the great child abuse inquiry.
First, it was to be the Butler-Sloss Inquiry, but Lady Butler-Sloss resigned almost immediately because some objected to the fact that her brother had been Attorney General in the Eighties (“establishment cover-up”).
Then, for a few weeks, it was the Woolf Inquiry, but Fiona Woolf resigned because she admitted to having dinner with Lord Brittan, against whom lurid child abuse allegations had been made (“establishment conspiracy”).
A desperate Mrs May then looked to the other side of the world, and found Justice Lowell Goddard in New Zealand.
From February last year, it became the Goddard Inquiry. At the time, Dame Lowell warned that an inquiry “which does not have achievable goals cannot deliver”, but she still took the job.
On Thursday, Dame Lowell resigned, speaking of the inquiry’s “legacy of failure” and adding that “with hindsight it would have been better to have started completely afresh”.
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