Poison runs through every aspect of the grooming gang horror. Every element stirs up a particular political bile, from those pathetically vulnerable girls and their vile exploiters, to those well-chosen cases weaponised by the Tories and Faragists with no record of concern for the general plight of children in care.
It’s odd that the Tories should wade in so strenuously when they were in power for the vast majority of this sorry saga, provoking a stream of inquiries, which they mostly ignored. Labour thought the seven years and £187m of Alexis Jay’s second inquiry quite enough. So did she, echoing Keir Starmer’s preference for “action not words”, and for avoiding yet more of the analysis paralysis of the Grenfell years, the infected blood scandal and ongoing Covid inquiries, which satisfy few.
