UNITED KINGDOM
Independent
Child abuse investigation: PM confident inquiry chair Fiona Woolf will act ‘with integrity’ despite connection to former minister under scrutiny
Paul Peachey
The head of the Government’s sprawling historical child abuse inquiry is facing demands to step down after she admitted hosting dinner parties with the former minister under scrutiny over his role in an alleged Establishment cover-up.
In a letter to the Home Secretary, Theresa May, Fiona Woolf, a lawyer, said that she had hosted three dinner events for Lord and Lady Brittan and dined twice at their home since 2008.
Despite other connections with the couple, including living in the same street, she said this did not amount to a “close association” with the former minister.
But concern at her relationship with the couple is mounting, particularly as Ms Woolf was only appointed after the original choice to head the inquiry – Lady Butler-Sloss – was herself forced to step aside over Establishment and family links to Lord Brittan.
The peer faces questions about what actions he took, while serving as Home Secretary in the 1980s, after being handed a now-missing dossier by the late MP Geoffrey Dickens that included claims of the involvement of VIPs in a child sex ring. In her first public grilling since she was appointed head of the inquiry, Ms Woolf – the Lord Mayor of London, former Law Society president, and member of the RAC club – repeatedly denied that she was a member of the Establishment.
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