Question for Theresa May: what's so great about Great and Good?

When, as a teenager, I was first politically aware, the then government – that of the great showman, Harold Macmillan - was dominated by Old Etonians.

Shortly before the last election I was invited to join neighbours to meet the Conservative candidate for Richmond, Zac Goldsmith, himself an OE. I asked him why the quota of Etonians at the top of the Tory party was roughly as it had been in those far-off Supermac days.

He waffled a great deal (he has subsequently proved a good constituency MP and parliamentarian) and said words to the effect that the OEs so happened to be the best people for key roles in running the country.

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One doesn’t have to be an off-the-wall Leftie to believe that talent is actually spread more evenly through Britain and is not just the preserve of men sent to Britain’s most advantaged school. Yet the coalition government was duly elected and Old Etonians got their hands on the spoils.

OEs, of course, are only the tip of the Establishment iceberg. Britain is still (largely) run by a cabal of interconnected people from very similar (privileged) backgrounds. For the most part people shrug their shoulders and say it’s just the way it is: God is in heaven, OEs are in the cabinet and all is right with the world.

Occasionally, however, an event hits the headlines that reveals just how narrow is the pool of people from whom our leaders are mainly drawn. One such – the failure to find an uncontaminated chairperson for the inquiry into historic child abuse – has thrown more egg in Home Secretary Theresa May’s face than any Home Office crisis since she became Secretary of State. She is Teflon-coated no longer.

Twice her nominees, first Lady Butler-Sloss and now Mrs Fiona Woolf, have had to bow out when their closeness was revealed to those running the country at the time of the abuses.

Lady Butler-Sloss is the sister of the late Sir Michael Havers, attorney-general in the 1980s, and Mrs Woolf is a friend of Lord (then Leon) Brittan, who was Home Secretary at the relevant time. Mrs Woolf stood down when it emerged that the Home Office had edited letters in order to distance her from Lord Brittan.

Those responsible for these appointments, not least Mrs May who is to make a statement in the Commons this afternoon, are now running about like headless chickens. Is there anyone with sufficient ‘Great and Good’ credentials who is not on first name terms with the people in charge of the country when thousands of children were being subjected to gross abuse? It seems unlikely.

The problem with the magic circle is not so much its members’ familiarity with each other, rather the assumption that these largely honourable people, in public life to do public service, will (in a paternalistic way) get things right.

The truth is that they are frequently out-of-touch with the realities over which they preside.

I was first struck by this when reporting in the early 1970s from Belfast. Willie Whitelaw (and few were ever as ‘honourable’ as he) was the Secretary of State for the province. But he and his officials had no feel for the mood of the streets. The best of intentions formulated in Whitehall foundered on the reality of the Falls and Shankill Roads.

As a journalist, I have skirted the margins of the Establishment, and observed how – just as any other group of people who feel thoroughly at home with one another – the Great and the Good cling together socially and professionally. The well-connected English (and it is usually the English, though Mrs Woolf, the Lord Mayor of London, is from the genteel Scottish capital of Edinburgh) have long presided in a benign, out-of-touch way over what was once the Empire now reduced to the country.

So how does one identify and appoint people who are totally free from the suggestion that they are over-connected insiders? First we need a more effective filter than the over-cosy collusion behind the scenes in Whitehall. This has already been agreed.

When the Home Office does find a candidate prepared to take on the child abuse inquiry, he or she will go before the Commons Home Affairs Select Committee for a pre-appointment confirmatory hearing. Such Commons committees, comprised of feisty backbenchers unconcerned with office, have greatly strengthened the democratic process: remember how Rupert Murdoch’s backside was held to the fire.

If MPs with interest in and knowledge of the issues are added to the committee – and the names of Labour members Simon Danezuk and John Mann have been advanced in this context – such panels should instil confidence in those (in this case the victims) most closely concerned with the inquiry. Many admirable backbenchers stand well outside the inner ring of those who run the nation: there are people in the Commons who do not dine with former Home Secretaries and are not related to past Cabinet ministers. They would add informed knowledge to the process.

In democratic terms Britain evolves slowly, but even the honours system (still too often a process of handing out gongs to those at the top) has been opened up to nominations from relevant organisations and those who know the value of contributions to the life of their communities made by unheralded citizens. When the key person for a sensitive post is being sought, those who know the field and the many good people within it should be included in the decision-taking.

The job of chairing this inquiry is a tough one, combining the need for both knowledge of child abuse and the law and impartiality. Two possibly suitable people, Baroness (Helena) Kennedy and Lady Justice Hallett, have already said ‘no thanks’. The commitment may last three years, a mighty chunk out of anyone’s life.

The task of finding the right person is so fraught that Dominic Grieve, until recently attorney-general, has even suggested that the search might have to go abroad to a Commonwealth country with a similar justice system.

However, not all foreign practices work: in the US, nominees for high office occasionally step aside because of the intensity of the scrutiny they have to undergo: but much of this scrutiny is unfair and politically partisan, something any new British system would have to avoid.