Theresa May's biggest blunder over the child sex abuse inquiry was launching it all, writes DOMINIC LAWSON

By Dominic Lawson for the Daily Mail

Published: 19:52 EST, 2 November 2014 | Updated: 19:53 EST, 2 November 2014

The Home Secretary Theresa May had built up a reputation as a competent administrator. That now lies in ruins. For the second time in months, her choice as chair of a ‘child sexual abuse panel inquiry’ has been forced to resign, even before starting.

The first, Baroness Butler-Sloss, quit over concern that her own brother, the late Michael Havers, had been Attorney General at the time that abuse in high places had allegedly been covered up ‘by the establishment’. Now the Home Secretary’s second choice, Fiona Woolf, has fled the scene after she had failed to demonstrate she was not tainted by association with one of Mrs May’s supposedly suspect predecessors at the Home Office, Lord [Leon] Brittan.

It is now four months since Mrs May announced the inquiry and it is still rudderless: what a debacle.

The fault may well lie with Home Office officials. Incredibly, they seem not to have even known that Butler-Sloss was Havers’s sister. This was not so much an establishment fix as abject lack of due diligence. And now the officials have been caught out ineptly trying to re-write Woolf’s letters of self-explanation. But the buck stops, rightly, with the Secretary of State. 

For the second time in months, Theresa May's choice as chair of a 'child sexual abuse panel inquiry' has been forced to resign, even before starting

Mrs May might now reflect, rather too late, that her biggest mistake was to have commissioned the inquiry in the first place. It had two causes.

First, the fall-out from the Jimmy Savile affair, in which it emerged that various public bodies had ignored evidence of the man’s inexhaustible depravity. Second, the sudden reheating of scabrous allegations by the late Geoffrey Dickens MP that there had been paedophilia at the heart of government.

As a result, Mrs May announced in July that there would be a public inquiry into ‘appalling cases of organised and persistent child sex abuse that have exposed serious failings by public bodies and important institutions’.

This was likened to the inquiries into the Hillsborough stadium disaster (in which 96 Liverpool fans were killed and hundreds injured) and Bloody Sunday, when in 1972 British paratroopers violently attacked Catholic demonstrators in Derry. These, however, were investigations into a solitary event in one place on a single day.

First Baroness Butler-Sloss (left) and then Fiona Woolf (right) were forced to resign from their positions

In contrast Mrs May’s inquiry has an impossible remit: it is charged with looking into half a century’s conduct involving schools, hospitals, children’s homes, scout clubs, police procedures, churches, broadcasting organisations, government departments . . .and all without benefit of any physical or filmed evidence.

It took Lord Saville, the chairman of the Bloody Sunday inquiry, 12 years and about £200 million in lawyers’ fees to come up with his verdict — the already widely accepted view that British soldiers had fired indiscriminately on unarmed civilians. How long do you imagine it would take Mrs May’s amorphous inquiry to get to anything approaching a conclusion? And when — or if — it does, do you imagine that it will either tell us anything we really don’t know already about the nature of official attitudes to child abuse in the 1970s and 1980s, or satisfy those who were its victims?

That there are real victims is not in question and the police are already busy investigating hundreds of specific complaints; but this whole area is also bedeviled by fantasists and the conspiracy theorists who feed off them. I am afraid that Geoffrey Dickens was quite close to being an example of the latter.

As Charles Moore — who was a Westminster lobby correspondent at the time and knew Dickens — wrote when Mrs May launched her inquiry: ‘Dickens made claims about the satanic and the occult that were, to put it politely, far-fetched. In 1986 he named in the House a consultant anaesthetist who, he said, had raped an eight-year-old girl. The Department of Public Prosecutions had already decided against prosecution . . . but after Dickens had named the consultant the Sun newspaper paid for him to be prosecuted privately.

‘The anaesthetist was acquitted. The innocent man says today that Dickens never spoke to him or sought any evidence from him before making his false accusation.’

Mrs May’s inquiry has an impossible remit: it is charged with looking into half a century’s conduct involving schools, hospitals, children’s homes, scout clubs, police procedures, churches, broadcasting organisations, government departments, and all without benefit of any physical or filmed evidence

The Home Secretary with whom this publicity-mad Tory MP had lodged a bundle of other accusations was Leon Brittan; and in the style of the late Geoffrey Dickens, last week the Labour MP Jim Hood used parliamentary privilege to link the 75-year-old Brittan to allegations of child abuse, with the implication that the Tory Minister had buried Dickens’s dossier because he himself had been involved in similar crimes. This was during a debate on the miners’ strike of the 1980s: Hood, who as an NUM official had been one of the strike leaders, was clearly seeking retribution against the man who had been Home Secretary at the time.

Yet a superb investigative piece by Guy Adams in the Mail two days ago showed how Lord Brittan — who is now quite frail — was himself the victim of smears that might have originated with MI5 officers angry at a shake-up he was thought to be planning for the organisation. The journalist who had originally come to this conclusion was the late Paul Foot of Private Eye magazine; and as a member of the Socialist Workers Party and a stalwart supporter of the miners’ strike, Foot was hardly Brittan’s natural ally.

The continued persecution of Lord Brittan is reminiscent of the way in which less scrupulous Left-wingers — such as the Commons Speaker’s wife Sally Bercow — tormented the former Tory Treasurer Alistair McAlpine with completely fictitious allegations of child abuse.

More recently, the Labour-supporting Sunday Mirror ran a front page with the headline ‘I supplied underage rent boys for Tory ministers’. Yet the man who gave them this ‘story’ — conveniently naming only ministers who are now dead — is a known liar and fantasist. If he were not, the police would otherwise surely have already arrested him for admission of soliciting and procurement.

I repeat that I am not denying that the sexual abuse of children had been rife in many institutions — not least boys’ boarding schools. When I read Tom Parker Bowles’ account last week of how he would not send his own children to such places, because he recalled how a master at his prep school had ogled naked boys in the showers, I felt a flash of recognition. At my prep school a senior master had done the same — and I can also remember how his hands furtively crept inside my pyjama bottoms at night in the dormitory. 

I must in honesty also record that it didn’t bother me at the time: and I don’t feel remotely scarred by it now. The truth is that there can have been few (especially girls) who have not experienced some kind of inappropriate behaviour by an adult. None of it is acceptable; but neither should public policy be determined entirely by victims’ groups, however scared of them the Home Secretary might be.

So who should Theresa May — hoping to be third time lucky — appoint to chair her floundering inquiry, if she must? Suggestion one: it doesn’t have to be a woman. Suggestion two: it doesn’t have to be a lawyer. There is, for example, the former psychiatric social worker Lord (Herbert) Laming, who produced widely-praised reports into institutional failings over the abuse and deaths of Victoria Climbie and of Baby P. But I imagine that Laming would have more sense than to volunteer for Theresa May’s twice-botched mission impossible.

Virgin Galactic, Sir Richard Branson’s hyperbolically named rocket venture, has claimed its fourth victim. In 2007, three of the project’s engineers were killed in a ground explosion: now one of the test pilots has lost his life after ‘SpaceShipTwo’ disintegrated at 45,000 ft.

Virgin Galactic, Sir Richard Branson’s hyperbolically named rocket venture, has claimed its fourth victim

Branson yesterday told the BBC: ‘Space is hard — but worth it.’ It’s true that a number of American astronauts have lost their lives, the first of them in 1967 when the crew of Apollo 1 were incinerated during a launch pad test. Yet those men — Virgil Grissom, Edward White and Roger Chaffee — are forever remembered as pioneers of manned space exploration. 

The space race might have started because America could not bear to come second to the Soviet Union. But this competition was also motivated by a common desire to learn more about what lies beyond our planet: it was about science, as well as military pre-eminence.

Virgin Galactic is not about exploring the universe. The project is simply to offer super-rich tourists five minutes of weightlessness by dropping them from the edge of space. This is bungee jumping for billionaires. I have nothing against affluent people wasting their money: but this is not worth the cost in others’ lives.