Pihole cannot resolve hosts

I have self-resolved:

Firstly I ran the suggested edit from Problem with FTL and dnsmasq after pihole -up (Ubuntu 16.04.5 LTS) - #9 by DL6ER

And then I ran the chown updates described in Pi-hole no web interface access and lighttpd.service failed to start - #34 by dieterg which allowed me to restart lighttpd.