The Times Companion to 2017

by Ian Brunskill

  On the 23rd floor of Millbank Tower, where the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) has its offices, staff soon realised that they had a problem. They were supposed to be putting in place the foundations of an investigation into suspected abuse at dozens of institutions, including schools, care homes, the church, the armed forces and parliament.

  Since being launched by Theresa May in 2014, IICSA has hired more than 150 staff, opened three regional offices, started the Truth Project to allow abuse victims to give testimony anonymously, commissioned an academic study and begun a legal disclosure exercise demanding that institutions under investigation hand over millions of pages of documents.

  Yet it was so dysfunctional under Dame Lowell’s leadership that work often ground to a halt because senior staff felt “totally paralysed”, one said.

  Former colleagues, who have asked not to be named, were puzzled then increasingly troubled. One said that staff who were committed to the inquiry’s success felt trapped in “an impossible situation”. They felt they were led by someone who at times behaved “like a very angry child”.

  “The pressure was immense. She was rude and abusive to junior staff, she didn’t understand the issues and, worse than that, she used appalling terms all the time. It was almost intolerable,” the insider claimed.

  Senior staff held furtive meetings to discuss their options. It was agreed that the best hope lay in sharing their concerns with the Home Office. Mrs May, then home secretary, hired Dame Lowell. Only she could fire her.

  Whitehall’s instinct in the face of calamity is often to hide it, however. Until now, the true picture remained secret. Observers have pointed to the irony of a body established to dissect a culture of institutional secrecy, denial and cover-up becoming an exemplar of the problems it was designed to expose. The inquiry’s senior team were all complicit, said one insider. “Goddard should never have been appointed and she should have been removed so much earlier than she was. She was catastrophic.”

  Dame Lowell arrived in the UK from New Zealand after two false starts in the search for someone to lead the inquiry. Its first two chairwomen were forced to step down in quick succession over their alleged closeness to the British establishment, and the home secretary could not afford a third mistake. When the appointment was announced in February last year, it was claimed that Dame Lowell had been selected after 150 nominees were put through an exhaustive vetting process. The lead counsel, Ben Emmerson, QC, hailed a due diligence exercise of “unprecedented depth and detail”.

  Insiders tell a different story, of the Home Office’s “blind panic” after the resignation in October 2014 of the inquiry’s second chairwoman, Dame Fiona Woolf. She survived a month; her predecessor, Baroness Butler-Sloss, had lasted six days. “They were desperate. It couldn’t be a judge from England and Wales so they decided to look at the Commonwealth, but they also wanted a woman. There wasn’t much choice. Then Goddard’s name popped up. It was all signed and sealed very quickly,” a source said.

  Doubts over Dame Lowell soon emerged. She spent six weeks negotiating a pay deal that eventually included a £360,000 salary plus a £110,00 annual housing allowance, a chauffeur-driven car and four return flights a year to New Zealand with her husband, Christopher Hodson, QC. One senior source viewed such perks as “completely inappropriate for a public servant”. Dame Lowell, however, is said to have been outraged that the deal only entitled her to business-class not first-class seats.

  “We all had to tiptoe around her. It set the tone for an organisation that became secretive,” said a source who accused the judge of behaving like an “autocratic and dictatorial” monarch.

  Sources described her regular use of racist language as like “going back to the 1950s”. One described a sense of shame that no complaints were made. “You’ve got someone making racist comments who clearly has a racist attitude, and nobody says anything because we’re all bloody pussy-footing around.”

  Dame Lowell was heavily reliant on Mr Emmerson, 53, a leading human rights QC who is not renowned for his emollience or team-working skills. In early 2015, before he began working with her, he described Dame Lowell as a woman of “courage, independence and vision”. Within weeks of her arrival he is understood to have thought differently. In tandem, said one observer, their impact was “utterly toxic”, adding: “So many people were devoted to trying to make the damn thing work, to getting to the bottom of some really egregious societal problems. They all deserved so much better.”

  In public, every senior figure stayed silent, including Professor Alexis Jay, then a panel member, who won praise for her leadership of the Rotherham child abuse inquiry. She became IICSA’s fourth chairwoman after Dame Lowell abruptly stood down.

  Mr Emmerson resigned last month, 24 hours after being suspended for undisclosed reasons. His departure came two weeks after the unexplained resignation of his junior counsel, Elizabeth Prochaska, 35.

  Professor Jay, 67, and others may yet be asked to explain why they did not challenge Dame Lowell. Insiders insist they took the only course of action open to them and prayed for an intervention from Mrs May.

  Sources described many months of behind-closed-doors discussions during which panicked staff were assured their concerns were being shared with the Home Office, yet officials “sat there and did nothing”. The Times has been told that those “kept in the loop” included Mark Sedwill, the Home Office permanent secretary, and Liz Sanderson, Mrs May’s special adviser.

  Eventually the concerns entered the public domain. At a hearing in late July, the judge’s stumbling performance did not go unnoticed. When she admitted her unfamiliarity with “local law”, the inquiry was exposed to ridicule. Finally, insiders made their move. On August 4 The Times revealed she had been overseas for three months of her first year in office. Within hours, she resigned.

  The events of that final day have remained secret until now. That morning she was approached by senior colleagues and informed that her position was no longer tenable. Her response was a two-sentence resignation letter that she sent to the Home Office before leaving for lunch. Amber Rudd, the newly installed successor as home secretary, swiftly accepted it. After lunch, the judge tried to withdraw her resignation. Her reversal was not accepted, and the inquiry lost its third head. That loss should have come many months earlier, her colleagues believe.

  Dame Lowell’s lawyers denied all the allegations last night.

  MIDDLE-AGED VIRGINS: JAPAN’S BIG SECRET

  Richard Lloyd Parry

  OCTOBER 26 2016

  EVERYONE HAS AT least one bad date story, but few have the twist in the tale told by Takeshi Yokote. It was 1995 and the 21-year-old Yokote was a student at a prestigious Japanese university. His companion was a young woman from his drama club on whom Yokote was painfully keen. He was nervous in the cinema and tongue-tied over dinner. His date’s boredom and discomfort were obvious, and it was no surprise that he did not see her again. Yokote shrugged it off, returned to his studies (ancient Greek philosophy was his field) and set about looking for another girlfriend.

  Then the unexpected happened: nothing at all. There was no doubt that Yokote liked girls and he met plenty of them as a student and, latterly, as a teacher. He had no difficulty forming friendships with women and he was, and remains, a man of above average looks: neat, slim, articulate and gentlemanly. However, that awkward evening 20 years ago was not only the worst date of his life, it was the only one. At the age of 42 he has never touched or kissed, let alone been to bed with, a woman. And in Japan he is one among millions.

  A recently published survey by a government institute provides the latest evidence of what has become increasingly clear over several years — the loveless lives led by more and more young Japanese. As it does every five years, the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research polled 5,300 single people aged 18 to 34 about their sex lives, past and present, and their romantic aspirations. One of its findings was at first glance encouragi
ng: 86 per cent of men and 89 per cent of women hoped to marry. However, 70 per cent of men and 60 per cent of women in the sample were not in a relationship.

  Most striking was the answer to the question about sexual experience. The results showed that 42 per cent of single young men and 44 per cent of single young women were virgins, several percentage points higher than when the question was last posed. The survey has been criticised because it inquired only about heterosexual experience — sexually active gay men and women who took the pollster’s question at face value will have gone down in the data as chaste. Even allowing for this bias, it reveals a population of millions of adults who have no romantic attachments, no sexual experience and whose numbers have been growing for a decade.

  “It’s very common,” says Yokote. “In any crowd of people I can see them — the ones who don’t give any thought to what they wear, who look withdrawn, who look down rather than looking you in the eye. There are lots of people like me.”

  This is not a collective moral choice, by which young people are consciously “saving themselves” for a future husband or wife. It is more as if an entire generation is losing the knack of intimacy. “As a student I didn’t know what to do to take it to the next stage,” says Yokote. “I didn’t have anyone who could teach or advise me. I still don’t know now.” And apart from the personal loneliness and isolation experienced by Japan’s virgins, they are part of a demographic and economic catastrophe.

  Japan is farthest along a path, on which many developed countries also find themselves, towards inundation by the “silver tsunami”. About 1.3 million Japanese died last year, but only a million were born. The total fertility rate, the number of children the average woman will bear in a lifetime, is 1.43, far below the “replacement rate” of 2.1. Old people are living longer and longer but the bill for their pensions and medical bills falls to a shrinking number of taxpayers. If the decline in population continues the Japanese will become extinct in the next century. Long before that happens the country will be bankrupt.

  High among the reasons for this crisis is the difficulty of being a Japanese parent. Working mothers are still treated as an aberration; inadequate nursery care and lack of flexibility in the workplace often enforces a choice between career and family; many people, especially women, choose the former. However, there is something more mysterious going on: a growing distaste among the young for relationships.

  “The research is consistent,” says Masahiro Yamada, a professor of sociology at Chuo University in Tokyo. “Japanese young people are losing interest in, and a desire for, relationships and sex.”

  Yokote’s story goes some way towards illuminating the reasons. He was on the shy side as a boy, but had plenty of friends, girls among them. In his later years at school, the more confident students formed couples, although Yokote’s mild crushes never led anywhere. One thing he remembers distinctly is the poor quality of Japanese sex education, which Yamada cites as one of the causes of the problem. “It invariably emphasises the negative aspects of sex,” he says. “The risks of pregnancy and disease. Sex education in Japan means scaring people off sex.”

  After his undergraduate degree, Yokote moved to Tokyo to start a PhD; he packed it in after a few years partly because of the isolation imposed by the scholarly life. As his academic career petered out, he embarked on the life of what the Japanese call a freeter, a casual worker in low-paid, low-status jobs. He earned two million yen a year (then about £12,000), just enough to live on, but with nothing left over.

  “I got jobs working at the university: washing dishes, putting out rubbish, fetching and carrying,” he says. “There were girls around me and I badly wanted a relationship, but I felt that I just couldn’t ask them out because of my financial situation. It didn’t seem an odd life — there were lots of people around me doing the same kind of thing.”

  Fifteen years earlier, at the peak of Japan’s inflated “bubble economy”, a bright graduate such as Yokote would have been eagerly snapped up by a big Japanese company; now they were cutting recruitment to save the jobs of existing employees.

  There are other factors that have given rise to the virgin generation, according to Yamada, among them the ease and availability of internet pornography. The decline of traditional matchmakers, who used to arrange unions between young single people, has also played its part, as has the habit among young Japanese of socialising in groups, making it harder for men and women to break off as couples.

  A great deal of the problem, he believes, simply comes down to money — for restaurants, entertainment, presents and the other accoutrements of romance, but also to establish a life of self-respect and independence. Eighty per cent of single Japanese live with their parents; Yamada’s research shows that while salaries among male workers have declined, women’s expectations of income in a potential mate remain unrealistically high.

  “The physical aspect of sex is not the problem,” says Shingo Sakatsume, who more than anyone else is tackling Japan’s virginity crisis head on. “Most people, once they get to that point, can work out that for themselves. It’s the social part that is most difficult.” Sakatsume is a social worker and the founder of Virgin Academia, a correspondence course for unwilling celibates. It originated in his specialised work providing counselling on sexual matters to people with disabilities. He quickly recognised that a large number of the able-bodied also needed help.

  The year-long course is based on his textbook Virgin Breaker, which attempts to guide its students towards “graduation” from their virginity. Students follow the book, write essays based on its contents and correspond with Sakatsume by email (most are too shy to meet in person). Month by month Sakatsume attempts to build their confidence, encourages them to create opportunities to meet potential mates and guides them through the niceties of online dating. In three years, 40 people aged 20 to 42, all of them men, have taken the £400 course. Only six have successfully graduated. “It’s hard to get past the first step,” Sakatsume admits. “Some of these men get to the end of the year and they still haven’t signed up to a dating site.”

  His organisation, White Hands, also organises life classes in which naked models, male and female, pose for an audience of virgins with paints and pencils. The point is to show real human bodies to people whose only experience of them may have been the stylised and aggressive universe of online porn. Yokote went to one and was mesmerised. “Each body was different,” he said. “Each one had such beauty. I had never seen a naked woman before. It gave me the impression of such freshness and such life.”

  Inspired by the experience, Yokote has made a conscious effort to seek out more opportunities to meet women, and to open up — with a certain, hesitant success. A friend introduced him to a woman he likes very much; they meet as often as once a week. “I don’t yet have the confidence to say that we are dating,” he says, “but I am very fond of her and I want to see more of her. The first time we met, I told her that I was a virgin. I felt I could be so honest with her and it seemed very natural to talk about it.” How did she respond? “She said, ‘You could practise with me.’”

  ROYAL FAMILY ARE MORE SECRETIVE THAN MI5

  Ben Macintyre

  OCTOBER 29 2016

  A VAST SPLURGE of royal history is coming our way with the release next week of The Crown, the dramatised story of the Queen from her wedding to the present day. Spanning six seasons, in 60 episodes, it is the single biggest and most expensive bio-epic ever made.

  Yet it is an incomplete story because the royal archives remain closed to the public, accessible only to approved scholars, rigorously controlled by unaccountable royal archivists: a glaring, profoundly undemocratic anomaly in an age of supposed openness.

  MI5 now regularly reviews and releases its files to the national archives; the royal family feels no such obligation. The most prominent family in the world remains more secretive about its past than the Security Service.

  Held in the Round Tower at Windsor Castle, t
he royal archives consist of more than two million documents covering 250 years of royal history. “The Royal Household is committed to transparency,” declares the royal website, “and to making information available, where appropriate.” The royal household alone defines what is “appropriate”.

  For decades, academics have chafed against the way the archive is run, which allows only selected scholars access to certain parts of the collection, and suppresses royal history that might reflect badly on the institution of monarchy. There is no publicly accessible catalogue, so researchers can only request files already identified in the footnotes of works by “authorised” writers. Fishing without a permit in royal historical waters is strictly forbidden.

  This restricted access is justified by royalists on the grounds that this is a private archive and that the royals have a right to defend their privacy like any other family. The royal household is not defined as a public body, and therefore is not obliged to release its files under the 2000 Freedom of Information Act.

  Therein lies the central ambiguity of the Queen’s position, being at once a constitutional figure and a private person. The monarchy infused and deeply influenced British public life throughout the 20th century, most emphatically in its first half. Successive monarchs and other members of the royal family have played crucial political roles in our past.

  The history of the royals is also the history of Britain, and it belongs to the British people; what the royals regard as their history is truly ours and of overwhelming public interest. The royal household has never seen the archive that way, and the story of the sometimes stumbling royal progress through the 20th century has been heavily edited by the royals themselves.

  “I am much against destroying important letters,” wrote Queen Victoria, yet ordered her youngest daughter Beatrice to rewrite her journal, deleting “painful passages” and burning each original volume as she went. Virtually all the private papers of Edward VII were burnt on the orders of Queen Alexandra. Princess Margaret destroyed hundreds of letters collected by the Queen Mother.