What kind of idiot tries to stand in the way of a national child abuse panic? I do

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[/audioplayer]As essay titles go, ‘On losing an argument with Tim Loughton MP’ may fail to catch the imagination; but there we are: I don’t need to be re-elected.

You know before you start when you’re on a losing wicket, and I had fully expected to lose this argument, which was on live television with Adam Boulton. But I thought the attempt might be interesting. I’d been inspired by a thoroughly sensible contribution to the subject on the Today programme, by Peter Bottomley MP.

The subject was whether we really needed an ‘overarching’ public inquiry to fill the gaps left by allegedly deficient previous inquiries into allegations of the (historic) sexual abuse of children by public figures. The Home Secretary was about to announce such an inquiry, but I had an impotent proposal to make: that we might at least press the equivalent of a ‘pause’ button while media and political excitement died down, and resume discussion more calmly in four weeks’ time.

It was the Monday after a weekend’s frenzy of slurs and whispers following the alleged loss by the Home Office (a loss reported by a previous inquiry in 2013) of a ‘dossier’ which the late Geoffrey Dickens MP had apparently handed the then Home Secretary, Leon Brittan, in the 1980s, containing allegations about child abuse perpetrated by leading figures in public life.

Mr Dickens was a lovely man, regarded affectionately at Westminster, but a sometimes preposterous figure, who once called a press conference and told surprised journalists he was about to telephone his wife with the news he was leaving her, having fallen for a lady he met at afternoon tea dances in Soho. In the 1990s I sent his widow the draft of a chapter on her late husband for my book Great Parliamentary Scandals, to check my facts.