The Times Companion to 2017: The best writing from The Times. Ian Brunskill

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СКАЧАТЬ rafts then scuttled home to make more quick profits before the winter ends the crossing season.

      The stink of fuel knocks the breath out of me as the survivors of the second rescue stagger on board, their skin coming off in strips. The medics rush to treat a few who have stopped breathing. One pregnant woman grabs my arm and, pointing at a raw strip of flesh, screams. Another woman writhes on her back on the floor, screaming too. A third points to her shredded calf. Then it hits me: these are chemical burns from boat fuel.

      “Get their clothes off and shower them now,” a voice shouts. We strip most of the 90 men, women and children and hose them down. I carry semi-conscious women to the showers. “We need to support a woman in the hospital to sit upright so she can breathe,” says Irene, grabbing me. I end up, covered in blood and faeces, cradling Lovett to keep her breathing.

      I hold the hand of her pregnant sister, Joy, who dies on the bed beside us. Her body is packed in ice and placed in the bow. Lovett and the little boy are airlifted to hospital by the Italian coastguard, who won’t take Joy’s body.

      Tuesday, October 4

      The soft sobs of the Nigerian woman who lost her two boys, aged four and five, the day before are heard on deck. With nearly 420 migrants on board, including toddlers and a corpse, Dignity sails back to Italy. We are posted in shifts as guards to defuse any arguments, spot medical problems and regulate the endless queue for the toilet.

      In French, Arabic and English, the men on deck, fleeing Ivory Coast, Mali, Nigeria and Sierra Leone, tell their stories. In the evening I check on the Nigerian girls from Monday’s horrific sinking. They giggle at photos of my stupid cat and tell me about their favourite sugar-cane recipes.

      Peace, who is spattered with torture scars, asks: “Do white people in Europe like black people? I’m afraid. We’re always treated like animals.” At night, while on watch on the men’s deck upstairs, I listen to Michael, 17, from Nigeria, talking of “making [his] mother proud” in Italy. “Do you think they will let me study? I want to be a doctor.”

      Wednesday, October 5

      Overnight the Italian coastguard again refused to take Joy. Her corpse is beginning to smell. In the morning we dock and the ship goes quiet. Everyone is split into groups depending on their injuries and their ages. They go ashore for medical checkups and registration.

      The UN says that more than 80 per cent of Nigerian girls landed in Italy are trafficked into prostitution. I warn the girls to keep together and stay in the reception centres. Hope is mortified that she has only a blanket to wear. I wash and dry my pyjamas to give to her.

      Hours later, as I leave the boat, I hear my name called. The girls are still being processed. Hope, wearing my pyjamas, is grinning. We hug and they board buses, promising to stick together.

      Thursday, October 6

      More than 10,000 people were pulled from the water in 48 hours this week. We have no idea where people have gone or if Lovett and the others made it. I add as friends the few who have Facebook. Kougan, 23, from Cameroon, who kept me company on night watch, pops up on Messenger: “I very grateful to become your friend Bella, take care for ur self.”

‘TANTRUMS AND SHOCKING RACISM’ OF INQUIRY’S DYSFUNCTIONAL DAME

       Andrew Norfolk, Sean O’Neill

      OCTOBER 14 2016

      ON A SUMMER afternoon this year Dame Lowell Goddard stood at the doorway of her Westminster office and shouted in anger. Unless she got her own way, she is said to have declared, “I’m going to pack my bags, go back to New Zealand and take this inquiry down with me.”

      A visitor to the headquarters of the national child sex abuse inquiry might have been shocked, not least because the threat was made by the judge paid £500,000 a year to lead an investigation forecast to run for a decade at a cost of £100 million.

      Dame Lowell’s staff, however, barely flinched. They were used to her tantrums, and worse. Multiple senior sources have told The Times that the judge peppered her 16 months at the helm of Britain’s biggest public inquiry with racist remarks and expletive-ridden outbursts. Insiders say that Dame Lowell, 67, also appeared to have memory lapses and failed to grasp legal concepts.

      She allegedly said that Britain had so many paedophiles “because it has so many Asian men” — a comment that left colleagues stunned. “I was so shocked to see the number of ethnic people,” she is said to have told a colleague, while she allegedly commented that she had to travel 50 miles from London to see a white face. Her home in the capital was a smart, taxpayer-funded flat in Knightsbridge.

      Several sources described Dame Lowell’s reluctance to question the propriety of the royal family. Discussing the Prince of Wales’s friendship with a bishop jailed last year for sex offences against young men, the judge is said to have insisted: “Prince Charles couldn’t possibly have had anything to do with that, not with his breeding.” The source added: “For someone who claimed not to understand what the establishment was, she had a reverence for it that was quite astonishing.”

      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 СКАЧАТЬ