Danczuk, Littlejohn & 'Waiting for Goddard'!

 The cost of endless public inquires

IT has been estimated that the coming overarching inquiry into historic child sexual abuse presided over by Judge Lowell Goddard from New Zealand, will last for between five and eight years having cost perhaps £120 million.  By the time it reports many of the victims may well be dead. 

Yet, none of this discourages campaigning and ambitious politicians like Tom Watson or Simon Danczuk.  In some ways their behaviour delayed the start of the inquiries, by forcing first Baroness Butler-Sloss and later Fiona Woolf to stand down as presiding judges.

One victim from Lancashire who suffered at the hands of Cyril Smith told me that he had been approached by a local media outlet to try to get him to complain about the appointment of Baroness Butler-Sloss, but that when he had failed to play the role of 'Mr. Angry' the journalist lost interest.

Today, the journalist Richard Littlejohn in the Daily Mail writes:

'More than a month has past since it was revealed that detectives had failed to find a shred of evidence to suggest that there was a VIP paedophile and murder ring operating in the Seventies and Eighties....  Nothing credible has been unearthed to support any of these allegations.  So why on earth is this public inquiry continuing – especially as several of its potential “star” witnesses have been exposed as fantasists?'

Simon Danczuk and Matthew Baker are now claiming that they were sceptical about one of the recently exposed romancers Mr. Fay claims about Elm Guest House. 

Meanwhile, Richard Littlejohn claims 'the lurid allegations [paedo rings and murder] have been at the centre of an outrageous attempt by Nonce Finder General Tom Watson to smear leading Conservatives, notably Leon Brittan, as child molesters and worse.' 

But now we know that there has been a major Scotland Yard VIP murder investigation without any proof that anyone has been murdered. 

And yet, as Littlejohn says the 'Labour M.P., Simon Danczuk, accused Brittan, during his time as Home Secretary, of covering up a secret dossier that would have proved the existence of a child abuse conspiracy at Westminster.'

Littlejohn continues:

'Danczuk's claims, added to the hysteria which surrounded Jimmy Savile, prompted the Government to set up a full-scale public inquiry into historical sex abuse in high places.  (Yet) [s]ince then, the case against Brittan has collapsed in spectacular style.'

Clearly Richard Littlejohn believes the Home Secretary Theresa May was bounced into setting up the current costly Goddard Inquiry by the tub-thumping of Simon Danczuk and Tom Watson, when he writes:

'This is the public inquiry into “historic” child sex abuse in high places, which the Home Secretary ordered when the Paedos In High Places panic was in full Corporal Jones mode.'

That was after Simon Danczuk MP and his aide Matthew Baker had published their piece of flowery flannel documented in a book entitled 'Smile for the Camera'.  In a review in Northern Voices No.15, Les May describes the book as 'a series of assertions and opinions by the authors'.  Mr. May writes: 

'There's gossip, second and third hand stories originating in bars; supposedly verbatim accounts of conversations which took place thirty years ago; accounts which we are led to believe are the authentic voices of men who had unpleasant encounters with Cyril yet which have a strange sameness about them; few definite dates; a garbled chronology; the same story apparently told more than once; misquotation of documents; a seeming absence of proper methodology; and no indication of how many abused men they interviewed.'

Despite this lonely criticism from people in Rochdale who have for years closely followed the case of Cyril Smith and Simon Danczuk, and published comments in the small regional publication Northern Voices, Danczuk has gone on to win the Contrarian award and plaudits nationally for his impact on public debate mostly owing to the book that was mainly written by Baker.