Right here’s a rule I have a tendency to use throughout the board in Westminster: If a politician is speaking, politics might be happening.
Add into that, if the subject of debate is very grave or critical, be extra ready to use the rule, not much less.
Which brings us to the grooming scandal.
There isn’t any doubt Tory chief Kemi Badenoch was politicising the problem when she ripped into the federal government within the Commons on Monday.
In truth, she admitted as a lot.
Requested about it throughout her information convention, she mentioned: “When I’m in the Commons, I will do politics. If every time we are pointing things out and doing our job we are accused of politicising something, it makes it a lot harder.”
So the query right here is much less about whether or not politics is at play (it nearly all the time is and that’s not essentially a nasty factor), and extra about whose pursuits the politics is working in direction of.
In different phrases, does Ms Badenoch care in regards to the grooming scandal as a result of she cares about victims or as a result of she cares about herself?
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To reply that, it’s helpful to attempt to pinpoint precisely when the Tory chief began displaying such a eager need for a public inquiry.
Was she all the time harbouring it? Or did it solely arrive after Elon Musk and others pushed the scandal again up the information agenda?
On this, she’s not helped by the file of the governments she served in.
Sure, the broader youngster abuse inquiry was introduced below David Cameron, however there was no particular statutory grooming inquiry.
As late as 2022, the then Tory safeguarding minister was batting away calls for for a public inquiry on the premise that locally-led probes have been preferable.
That’s – because it occurs – the identical rationalization the present Labour safeguarding minister Jess Phillips supplied to Oldham Council within the rejection letter that sparked outrage and set us on a path to this eventual final result.
Learn extra:
Officers tried to cowl up grooming scandal, says Cummings
Why many victims welcome nationwide inquiry into grooming gangs
Grooming gangs scandal timeline
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How Andrew Norfolk uncovered grooming gangs
“If we’d got this right years ago then I doubt we’d be in this place now,” wrote Baroness Casey in her audit.
If Labour might be attacked for appearing too slowly, the Tories – and by extension Ms Badenoch – might be too.
In response, her aides insist she was sure by collective duty whereas she was a minister, and that the problem was outdoors her temporary.
Ms Badenoch additionally factors to her work with sufferers of the now closed Tavistock Gender Identification Clinic as proof of her monitor file campaigning for change in thorny coverage areas.
On this context, the presence within the grooming scandal of questions across the function of gender and ethnicity mark this as a problem that you simply’d count on the Tory chief to not solely be eager about, however to genuinely care about too.
However as beforehand mentioned, simply because a politician is considerably honest in what they’re saying, doesn’t imply there isn’t a dollop of politics combined in too.
And having dug out a recording of a post-PMQs briefing with Ms Badenoch’s media adviser from January, that actually appears to be the case right here.
Requested what had modified to set off the requires an inquiry, the spokesperson mentioned: “We can all go back and look at the reasons why this entered the popular discourse. This is something that is of high public salience.”
Or to place it one other approach, the politics modified.
