April 27 2017

After a five-month review, the chairman of the discredited independent inquiry into child sexual abuse has dithered and finally decided to maintain a separate and bizarre strand of investigation into my late father, Lord Janner. This is another shocking decision following a catalogue of misjudgements and catastrophic failures.

My beloved father, a person of the highest repute, who devoted himself to a lifetime of public service, was wholly innocent of any wrongdoing and he was never convicted of any offence. Yet he and he alone is the only individual singled out with a separate strand. Why him? Why has the chairman, Alexis Jay, not picked on someone convicted of an offence? Why is he not placed in the Westminster strand that covers dead politicians? Why, when he is not an institution, and the inquiry is specifically tasked to investigate institutional failings?

The answer is plain as a pikestaff. The inquiry was set up in the wake of the mass hysteria following the Jimmy Savile scandal and the false allegations against the late Lord Brittan [one of the three chairmen who resigned did so because she knew Lord Brittan]. After the collapse of Operation Midland, the only politician left in the high-profile line of fire was my late father. He is seen as low-hanging fruit. An easy target for the lynch mob.

Yet the allegations against him have never been tested in cross-examination. And the inquiry has unjustly refused us the right to cross-examine the complainants. So we will face day after day of untested false allegations. It will turn into a macabre proxy criminal trial while my late father lies in his grave unable to answer back.

I believe that they are false allegations, which is why my family want their evidence tested in the civil proceedings that have been launched against his estate.

My late father was not in the country when the most serious offences were said to have taken place between August 16 and 19, 1987 [when he was in Australia, as evidenced in his passport, which we possess and provided to the inquiry]. It is inconceivable that the alleged offending, if true, would have stopped in the late 1980s given the nature of paedophile offending.

Tony Butler, the retired deputy chief constable at Leicestershire police, said in 1991 that 400 witnesses were spoken to by his force and none mentioned our late father. There is not a single mention of him in any social service record, yet complainants make allegations against others. He told the BBC in 2015 that the reason there was no arrest in 1991 was “from what I can recall of the evidence, and from looking at papers now, I don’t see there was a justification to arrest Greville Janner”. All the allegations relate to Leicester. Nowhere else. My late father vigorously denied the 1991 allegations in parliament and in the Kirkwood report.

As Sir Richard Henriques observed in his report on Operation Midland: “Prominent people . . . are more vulnerable to false complaints than others . . . They are vulnerable to compensation seekers, attention seekers, and those with mental health problems. The internet provides the information and detail to support a false allegation. Entertainers are particularly vulnerable to false allegations meeting, as they do, literally thousands of attention seeking fans who provoke a degree of familiarity which may be exaggerated or misconstrued in their recollection many years later. Deceased persons are particularly vulnerable as allegations cannot be answered.”

So Professor Jay’s weak decision will bring further ridicule and undermine the integrity of the inquiry.

Sadly, it comes as no surprise, given the shambolic track record of the inquiry. Professor Jay is its fourth chairman. Numerous barristers have walked out or resigned. The inquiry has lost the support of countless genuine victims. The Shirley Oaks Survivors Association said that it had become a stage managed event and described Professor Jay as “an uninspiring leader”. Professor Jay is not competent to chair the inquiry because she is not a lawyer and unqualified to make difficult complex quasi legal decisions. She is simply out of her depth. In March, the inquiry leaked the private information of 90 people who had signed up to an “inquiry victims and survivors forum”. This was a serious betrayal of trust and a breach of the Data Protection Act 1988.

The inquiry will fail because it is unmanageable and too vast and will not tell us anything we don’t already know. It veers between a bloated expensive irrelevance and a vindictive witch-hunt which will be condemned by history. https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/daniel-janner-qc-my-fight-to-defend-my-fathers-name-against-the-inquiry-into-child-sexual-abuse-5cb0gkhxm   https://archive.is/ooxpl

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FEB 1st 2017   https://archive.is/kamqn