Cleugh's inquiry evidence about me

Cleugh, in giving evidence to the inquiry, was asked at one point "Did you consider that Mr West's interventions were malicious?"

I'm not going to repeat his reply here, but you can read it in the transcript. (Each page of the PDF is divided into 4 separate numbered pages. Cleugh's reply starts at line 3 of page 12 of these numbered pages. The specific point I want to address is on lines 16-20, his description of a blog comment he claims was made here.

Now, when I saw this, I was very surprised. I didn't remember any such comment. But I thought OK, there are a quarter of a million words in the blog and it has been running for nearly 10 years. I might have forgotten it. So I did a websearch of the blog, using a variety of search terms to see if I could find it. No sign of it.

I keep a separate record of all the comments, whether or not they are published. As those of you who have commented here know, I have a moderation system here for comments, they don't appear on the blog immediately. When a comment is made, I get an email notification containing the comment and I then decide if it can be published. Maybe it might have been briefly published and then deleted? So I searched through the comments. Nothing there either. No comment even remotely resembling the one Cleugh describes has ever been submitted to the blog, much less published.

It might be that the comment was made elsewhere (perhaps on Facebook?) on a part of the web over which I have no control rather than on the blog and Cleugh has got it mixed up in his memory. But then I'd expect a wider websearch to find it. But I still come up with nothing.

Had such a comment been published it would have been ample justification to take a screenshot, pass it to the school solicitors and get a stiffly-worded solicitor's letter to me. But interestingly Cleugh has made no reference to upsetting comments on my blog in his written statement to the Inquiry, and he hasn't provided a screenshot of the comment in any of the exhibits to his statement. In fact his statement makes no reference to me at all.

If I had received an email requesting that a comment of that kind be taken down, then I would have readily agreed to do so. In fact when an issue arose about comments about Mrs Gumley Mason at St Augustine's Priory School, I wrote to the chair of Trustees offering to remove on request any offensive comment that was brought to my attention. No such request was ever made.

Anyway, I provided the Inquiry last year with a complete copy of all the blog articles about St Benedict's (including comments) as an exhibit to my own statement. They can easily conduct their own searches on it and decide the truth of the matter.

(Note: if you read the comment on the IICSA website and then quote the words of it in a comment here, I won't publish it. The comment has not appeared here and that's how it is going to stay.)