9 hours ago
‘Whitehall tried to block Rotherham grooming scandal exposé'
Whitehall officials attempted to convince Michael Gove to go to court to stop The Times from exposing the Rotherham grooming scandal, Dominic Cummings has said.
Gove, then the education secretary and who is now Lord Gove, is said to have been asked by officials to help Rotherham council stop the publication of a story about the sexual abuse and trafficking of children in the town in 2011.
Cummings, who worked as an adviser to Gove during his tenure in the education department, told Sky News that officials wanted 'a total cover-up and were on the side of the council'. He said they contacted him after the council was approached by Andrew Norfolk, then the chief reporter of The Times.
He said: 'Officials came to me in the Department of Education and said: 'There's this Times journalist who wants to write the story about these gangs. The local authority wants to judicially review it and stop The Times publishing the story'.
'So I went to Michael Gove and said: 'This council is trying to actually stop this and they're going to use judicial review. You should tell the council that far from siding with the council to stop The Times you will write to the judge and hand over a whole bunch of documents and actually blow up the council's JR [judicial review].''
Cummings added: 'Some officials wanted a total cover-up and were on the side of the council… They wanted to help the local council do the cover-up and stop The Times' reporting, but other officials, including in the DfE private office, said this is completely outrageous and we should blow it up. Gove did, the judicial review got blown up, Norfolk's stories ran.'
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In June 2012 The Times revealed that an official report into the way care agencies dealt with a murdered girl concealed key information about adults suspected of grooming and using her for sex from the age of 12.
Laura Wilson, 17, was repeatedly stabbed then thrown into a South Yorkshire canal in 2010, six years after concerns were raised that she was at risk of being sexually exploited by men.
A safeguarding board redacted information identifying Laura as one of several girls in Rotherham who were suspected of falling victim to sexual abuse by Asian men.
Also kept hidden were details of care professionals' involvement with Laura from the age of 11 to 15, including meetings that discussed concerns about child sexual exploitation. The board's application for a High Court injunction to gag The Times was dropped after Gove accused the board of withholding 'relevant and important material'.
Laura, identified in the report as 'Child S', was murdered in Rotherham by Ashtiaq Asghar, 17. Ishaq Hussain, 21, a married man who impregnated her a month after her 16th birthday, was found not guilty of murder.
The report, published by Rotherham's safeguarding children board, found that 15 agencies had had dealings with Laura. It identified 'numerous missed opportunities' to protect a vulnerable child who became 'almost invisible' to some care professionals.
Redactions were made to 61 of the report's 144 pages, ostensibly to protect 'the privacy and welfare' of the dead girl's baby.
Hidden from view was the fact that Laura 'was mentioned' during a 2009 police inquiry that led to the conviction of five British Pakistanis, aged from 20 to 30, for sex offences against three girls aged 13 to 16.
A spokesman for Rotherham council said: 'There were clear failings at that time in Rotherham in relation to child sexual exploitation as fully covered in the reports by Alexis Jay and Louise Casey.
'Since then, Rotherham council's children's services have been transformed and as Baroness Casey reports Rotherham today is a completely different council . We will never again be complacent and we will continue to pursue the highest standards of protection and support for our children and young people.'
A government spokesman said: 'The grooming scandal is one of the most appalling failures in our country's history and this government is taking the action needed for vulnerable people who were let down time and time again. That includes setting up a new national inquiry that will end the blame shifting apathy towards victims and a nationwide police operation to target predators to ensure we are tackling this vile crime while supporting survivors.'
