We said when Sir Keir Starmer announced a full statutory inquiry into historical crimes committed against girls and women by grooming gangs that it was long overdue. That was four months ago.
Since then, the government has failed to find a chair for the inquiry, while four victims have resigned from the advisory group set up by the inquiry, some of them calling it a “cover-up” and describing it as a “toxic environment”.
Sir Keir struggled to defend his record in the House of Commons against a determined and justified assault from Kemi Badenoch, the Conservative leader. The prime minister announced that Louise Casey, his all-purpose troubleshooter, would be brought in to “support” the inquiry.
This is a feeble response. Baroness Casey is already reviewing policy on social care for the prime minister – a huge subject in its own right – and if she is not going to act as chair, we need to know who will. For many of the victims, nothing less than a judge-led inquiry can now live up to the legal principle that justice must be seen to be being done.
As Ms Badenoch pointed out, the only candidate still in the running for the leadership of the inquiry was Jim Gamble, a former police officer who, given that several police forces are accused of covering up child sexual abuse, did not have the confidence of the leading representatives of the victims. Within minutes of Prime Minister’s Questions, Mr Gamble had also withdrawn.
The Conservative leader also called for the sacking of Jess Phillips, the safeguarding minister who is responsible for setting up the inquiry. It cannot be denied that Ms Phillips must take her share of the blame for failing to deliver the kind of inquiry that the victims deserve, with the speed that they have the right to expect.
But we are not convinced that replacing Ms Phillips will lead to a better or more timely inquiry. The prime minister stood by her, saying that she and Lady Casey, between them, have “decades” of experience of standing up for the rights of girls and women. No one can doubt Ms Phillips’s sincerity, but her job is made harder by her failure to retain the confidence of the victims’ representatives, and it is not clear that drafting Lady Casey in an ill-defined support role is going to solve that problem.
Sir Keir and Ms Phillips now face two political realities. One is that the prime minister will have to take a personal interest in setting up a credible inquiry. The other is that if Ms Phillips cannot help that to happen, she will have to be moved. Everything hinges on finding the right person to lead the inquiry – and quickly.
The prime minister made the reasonable point, under pressure from the leader of the opposition, that the inquiry is not the only means of securing justice for the victims of grooming gangs. The criminal justice system has put many more of the perpetrators of these terrible crimes behind bars since Sir Keir, as director of public prosecutions, changed the rules to insist that police, social workers and prosecutors should, as the default, believe girls and women when they say they have been abused.
Since he became prime minister, Sir Keir has claimed that 1,200 closed cases have been reopened to try to ensure that justice is done. He has done many of the right things – but unless he can set up a credible inquiry with the urgency that the issue deserves, Ms Badenoch will continue, rightly, to harry him.
The Conservative leader descended into party politics when she reminded the prime minister that he had once dismissed calls for a public inquiry as a “far-right bandwagon”. That was at a time when Elon Musk was posting ill-informed conspiracy theories on the internet. But Ms Badenoch is right to say that Sir Keir was slow to agree to an inquiry into the legitimate concerns of victims that had not been met by previous inquiries.
The problem is that the government was slow to act, and acted slowly. Justice delayed is justice denied: the victims of grooming gangs deserve prompt answers to their questions about why the authorities failed them.
