The news that a national overriding child abuse inquiry will be carried out with an 80 year old retired Judge as Chair has raised various concerns in the minds of many people. The news has generated a number of media interviews including several on Radio 4, Today programme this morning. One was a two part interview, first with a retired director of social services, David Tombs who recounted how 25 years ago he approached senior civil servants in the Department of Health to express concerns about a paedophile network which had begun to emerge after the arrest of a child abuser in his local authority area. He was advised that there was no point in digging any further because ‘there are too many of them over there’ which was said with the civil servant pointing towards Westminster. The BBC then interviewed Tim Yeo who at the time was a Junior Minister in the Thatcher and Major Governments. He expressed anger at the way in which the Civil Servants had responded and denied any sense of a culture within Parliament that might have led the Civil Servants to speak as they did.

My own memory of the 1990’s only encountered one specific reference to child abuse that I can recall. I was involved in providing financial advice to businesses and individuals for a decade from 1991 to 2o02 and in that context met many people from various walks of life. Delving into the finances of private people led to in-depth conversations on many matters that had nothing to do with the job in hand. One of these conversations was with a fast approaching retirement social worker who worked extensively within the area of child abuse. My client made it clear that child abuse was taking place in Sussex in many settings and that one of the reasons why convictions were hard to achieve was because of the networks of paedophiles within the judiciary, police and legal profession, as well as other institutions where the abuse was also taking place such as the church and teaching. We did not discuss names or even locations and the person concerned was very careful to only speak in generalities. I am grateful to have since met many people in the police and legal professions who I know have been forensic in their pursuit of abusers, and achieved the objective of putting such evil men behind bars.

I am old enough to also remember the 1970s and 1980s and in those decades my limited knowledge of child abuse was that it was perpetrated by men who traded on secretive behaviour and in settings that allowed such secrecy to be accepted as the norm. This sort of secrecy is endemic within the legal profession, the church and the Government, including the civil service. I have no personal knowledge of any paedophile behaviour in any of these settings since my own childhood and have been shocked at the exposure of individuals known to me who have been convicted of paedophile activity in recent years. However I found Tim Yeo lacking any credibility in his interview this morning. It seems inconceivable that there were not a number of paedophiles within the House of Commons and the House of Lords in the 1990s just as there will be some in 2014. That they operated in a manner to close down debate and mitigate prosecution and investigations would be consistent with the way in which many humans operate when under threat. This same dead hand of humanity closes down debate and investigation on other matters, and it is a lack of awareness of this that makes Tim Yeo appear to be desperately naïve or even dishonest. There are numerous reasons why the Civil Servants might have spoken as they did to David Tombs, and sadly the extent to which the Civil Service protects the Government from all sorts of legitimate contact with the outside world is in itself an abuse of power and privilege. That takes place today and was probably much worse in 1990.

Lady Butler-Sloss is someone who a good friend of mine knows and trusts implicitly, although I have no idea if this person is concerned about the links in this case to her Brother and his reputation. However she is 80 and in 2007 retired from the Diana and Dodi Fayed Inquests due to her age. It seems inconceivable that someone who retired from such an important case in 2007 should be appropriate to Chair a major inquiry seven years later, given that will in effect need to take on the Government itself. However it is vital that this enquiry is Chaired by someone who can be seen to have clean hands. That must almost certainly rule out any men from chairing the enquiry. If not Lady Butler-Sloss, then who. Another female Judge, someone from a business or charitable background? It must be someone who can gain the support of all victims of abuse, and in that Lady Butler-Sloss appears to have failed. Whilst one persons word is no better than another, I think this a case where the words of a senior politician such as David Cameron, actually count a great deal less than previous victims of abuse.