Fiona Woolf finally resigned as chairman of the government’s sex abuse inquiry last night after days of intense pressure over her links to Leon Brittan.
But she refused to apologise to abuse victims for failing to make her connections to the Tory peer clear.
Mrs Woolf, a solicitor and Lord Mayor of London, quit hours after victims’ groups said she was unsuitable to run the inquiry, which would be ‘a dead duck in the water’ if she remained.
She maintained claims of her links to Lord Brittan were mere ‘perceptions’ and appeared to blame the Press for her downfall.
She attacked ‘negative comment and innuendo’ about her connections to the former Tory Home Secretary, who is at the centre of allegations of an Establishment cover-up of sex abuse claims in the 1980s.
Mrs Woolf’s departure is a humiliation for Home Secretary Theresa May after the previous chair of the inquiry, Baroness Butler-Sloss, also had to quit because her late brother Sir Michael Havers was attorney general in the 1980s.
It leaves plans for the inquiry in disarray, with Mrs May now beginning a desperate search for a third chairman in only four months since the inquiry was announced. (more...)
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