UNITED KINGDOM
The Mail on Sunday
By David Rose for The Mail on Sunday
The head of the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse has admitted that the sensational alleged sex scandal involving the inquiry’s own top lawyers came close to forcing its collapse – an outcome which, she says, would have been welcomed by the powerful institutions which regard it as a menace.
In an exclusive interview with The Mail on Sunday, inquiry chairman Professor Alexis Jay said: ‘Strong vested interests would like to see this inquiry implode.
‘There are institutions which would prefer to see us fail, because we are such a threat.’
She presented an uncompromising defence of the controversial inquiry’s conduct, pledging it would deliver the first of a series of major reports next year.
Established by then-Home Secretary Theresa May in 2014, the inquiry has a staff of 220 lawyers and investigators combing through thousands of documents and is holding hearings under 13 separate headings, including the Catholic and Anglican churches, schools, councils and children’s homes. Last year, it spent more than £20 million. It is set to end with a final overarching report and recommendations early in the next decade.
Prof Jay said the furore surrounding claims – which have been refuted – that the inquiry’s former chief counsel, Ben Emmerson QC, sexually assaulted a colleague in a lift, put the inquiry in serious jeopardy and ‘for a brief period it felt like every other day there was a different kind of crisis’. What stung most were unfounded claims that she herself had covered up the internal scandal, by allowing Mr Emmerson to leave without being called to account.
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