To say it’s been a bad week for the Home Office is a gross understatement.
The Border Agency admitted losing track of 50,000 illegal immigrants and failing to expel 175,000 more, a second huge sham marriage trial collapsed amid claims of perjury, and the backlog of asylum claims has soared by 70 per cent.
But most egregiously, it has emerged that Home Office civil servants – with a flagrant disregard for the truth – tried to conceal the close links between Fiona Woolf, head of the public inquiry into historic allegations of child abuse, and Leon Brittan, a key witness in the probe.
Mrs Woolf was already under pressure over her friendship with the former Tory minister – who as Home Secretary in 1983 ‘lost’ a dossier detailing the abuse claims.
But after it was revealed that the Home Office had helped her rewrite a formal letter no fewer than SEVEN times with the express intention of disguising how close that friendship really was, her position was untenable.
At best this was dissembling, at worst downright lying. Mrs Woolf – whose predecessor Lady Butler-Sloss also quit over concerns about her establishment links – has rightly resigned.
But shouldn’t the Home Office officials who colluded with her in this debacle also be identified?
They have let down Home Secretary Theresa May with their dishonesty and arrogance and deceived the public. Shouldn’t they be punished?
While everyone else in modern Britain is held accountable for their actions, for too long incompetent and dishonest civil servants have hidden behind anonymity. (more...)
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