UNITED KINGDOM
The Independent
Editorial
How hard can it be to find someone to chair an inquiry who does not have any potentially embarrassing connections or conflicts of interest? Harder than you might think. It has taken Theresa May, the Home Secretary, two months to find a replacement for Baroness Butler-Sloss as chair of the independent inquiry into historical child sex abuse. Lady Butler-Sloss stepped down shortly after her appointment because of the outcry about her brother, Lord Havers, who was Attorney General at the time of some of the events.
Now Ms May has come up with another name. Fiona Woolf, the Lord Mayor of the City of London. She seems a safe choice. Her Who’s Who entry is rather uninformative, apart from listing one of her recreations as “furniture history”. It took The Times less than 24 hours, however, to find a connection with Lord Brittan, the former Home Secretary: they both sit on the Advisory Council of TheCityUK, which represents the financial services industry. This is awkward because the Home Office under Lord Brittan is accused of failing to act on a dossier containing allegations against senior politicians, a dossier that has since been lost.
This link is probably irrelevant, but it does invite questions about whether the net could not have been cast wider than the usual pool of quangocrats. Is Ms May really saying that there is no one in the whole of country who could lead this inquiry who has no connection with anyone whose actions may be scrutinised? Rather than spending the time looking beyond the usual suspects, Home Office officials seem to have been ringing up the good and the grand, only to be turned down because they do not want to have to deal with the level of media interest.
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