D'you Wanna Be In Their Gang, Their Gang, Their Gang?

On the eve of the local elections, Kemi Badenoch's weaponisation of child sexual abuse was cheap. But politics is not for the squeamish. Jess Phillips is on course to lose her seat to the Muslim candidate of the Workers Party, which has called for an inquiry into the grooming gangs. Yet who is a grooming gang, and who is not?

Like you, I have never met a paedophile. I mean, we may have done, in the way that we may have met a Muggletonian. But we are wholly unaware of having done so, you and I both. I apologise to any Muggletonian reading this. Yet this country's cultural and political elite cannot get out of bed, if that, without tripping over one or more nonces. And every single time, our betters had had no idea. Or so we are invariably expected to believe.

The truth is that like illegal drug use, the sexual abuse of children, especially but not exclusively adolescent males, is fundamental to cultural and political power in this country, both those practices themselves and the opportunities that they presented for blackmail. That in turn crosses over with the endemic sexual harassment and assault of male staff who are barely, if at all, into adulthood.

It has all come out about Margaret Thatcher's friends. She knew about Cyril Smith when she arranged his knighthood. Jimmy Savile's knighthood was rejected four times by the relevant committee, until she absolutely insisted upon it for the man with whom she spent every New Year's Eve, and on whose programmes she was so obsessed with appearing that her staff had to ration those appearances. Her closest lieutenant was Peter Morrison. Unlike the then Prince of Wales, she would have had sight of every file on Laurens van der Post.

Smith was a highly eccentric and largely absentee MP for a tiny minority party, but he was a Thatcherite avant la lettre, who had left the Labour Party when he had started to see cars outside council houses. Thatcher's father was also a Liberal until all of that fell apart between the Wars, and he was never a member of the Conservative Party. He, she and Smith were politically indistinguishable.

That the Radical Right put out pamphlets demanding the legalisation of paedophile activity was mentioned in Our Friends in the North, which was broadcast in 1996. Our Friends in the North is so integral to subsequent popular culture that one of its four stars went on to play James Bond, another was the first Doctor of this century’s revival of Doctor Who, and neither of the others is exactly obscure.

That Thatcherite MPs were likely to commit sexual violence against boys with the full knowledge of the party hierarchy formed quite a major subplot in To Play the King, the middle series of the original House of Cards trilogy. To Play the King was broadcast as long ago as 1993. Of the generation that was now in its pomp, every politician and commentator saw every minute of that trilogy.

Moreover, anyone who came to political maturity in what were then the newly-former mining areas will have been made fully aware that the miners in the dock, all the way back in 1984 and 1985, routinely made reference to the proclivities of the Home Secretary of the day, Leon Brittan. Those proclivities were common knowledge from Fife and the Lothians, to County Durham and the southern part of Northumberland, to South Yorkshire, to Derbyshire, to South Wales, among other places. Nothing was carried in the papers or included in the court reports, but the pit villages never needed Twitter in order to circumvent that kind of censorship.

Yvette Cooper has a former mining constituency. Yet she thinks that those grooming gangs which were currently attracting attention should be investigated only by the Police. She should tell that to the veterans of the Battle of Orgreave, along with the Hillsborough families, the victims of the spycops, and numerous others, including Doreen Lawrence, on whose reputation Keir Starmer had long traded. Ah, yes, Starmer. With no diplomatic background, one of Jeffrey Epstein's closest friends has been made the British Ambassador to Washington. Who is a grooming gang, and who is not?

Underage groupies have always been integral to rock 'n' roll. We all know what at least used to be endemic at public schools. Popular entertainers were known to sleep with underage girls at the youth conferences of the political parties back in the day. And so on. Reading about the role in grooming gangs of fast food outlets, minicab offices, and other such establishments, I am not alone in asking to be told something that I did not already know from towns and villages that were still overwhelmingly white, and which were literally or practically 100 per cent so in the 1990s, when it was effectively less illegal than underage drinking for men in their twenties, or even older, to have sex with girls of 15, 14, or even younger.

White men who commit certain offences are "lone wolves", black men who do so are "gang members", and brown men who do so are "homegrown Islamist terrorists", yet the crimes are the same. Likewise, a certain type of organised crime syndicate is a "grooming gang" or a "rape gang" when the members are South Asian, or Muslim, or both, but a "paedophile ring" when they are not, and most emphatically when they are all white and non-Muslim. But again, they are the same thing.

Earlier this year, Radio Four broadcast a series on the Paedophile Information Exchange, a story known to readers of this blog throughout the 19 years of existence. If PIE was not a grooming gang and a rape gang, then what ever has been or could be? It was at the very heart of the Establishment, and this year, it will be 40 years since the Thatcher Government secured a judicial fiat that, without bothering to ask Parliament, abolished the age of consent altogether. Gillick competence ought instead to be called Thatcher competence.

The Major Government did write Thatcher competence into the Age of Legal Capacity (Scotland) Act 1991. But it is applied in Northern Ireland on no authority that is apparent to anyone. Even in England and Wales, it has never been subject to a parliamentary vote. Let there be one now. And if there were to be an inquiry into the grooming gangs, then Victoria Gillick should be on it, along with Lisa McKenzie and the distinguished criminologists in the Workers Party, for a start. But we all know that British inquiries take years on end to exonerate the lifelong friends who had appointed them.

Digital ID would be administered by the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, Peter Kyle. Like a serving Government Whip, Kyle was given his big break in politics by the Chief Whip whose Whips' Office included both Kyle's close friend, closest ally, and sometime lover, Ivor Caplin, and at the same time Dan Norris, who was also notably close to Caplin. Along with the subsequently adjudicated and disqualified electoral fraud Phil Woolas, such was the Whips' Office that forced through the Iraq War. Caplin, Norris and Woolas were all made Ministers a few weeks later. Up behind them has come Kyle, among others. Would you trust him and his ilk with your children's and grandchildren's photographs and contact details?

Was Rolf Harris a Pakistani? Was Chris Denning? Is Stuart Hall? Is Paul Gadd? There were and are Pakistani grooming gangs. But they were and are far from the only ones, and far from the most powerful. Boris Johnson was a pupil at a private school when Paedophile Action for Liberation, which later merged into PIE, said without challenge that it could shut down both the private school system and the youth criminal justice system by calling its members out on strike. As Prime Minister, Johnson described the money spent on investigating Medomsley Detention Centre as having been "spaffed up the wall".  Clearly, he could not see the problem. He had been groomed.

Of the same generation is Starmer, late of Reigate Grammar School, the Sunday Times Independent School of the Year 2025. Yes, it was private when Starmer was there. In the words of Doughty Street Chambers, on its page about Starmer, now amusingly removed from public view: "He was Director of Public Prosecutions and Head of the Crown Prosecution Service from 2008-2013. As DPP, Keir was responsible for all criminal prosecutions in England and Wales." Therefore, Starmer would have been responsible for the decision not to charge Savile even if he had never set eyes on the file. But that is in any case inconceivable. We are talking about Jimmy Savile here. That Starmer took the decision not to charge Savile has been repeated all over the place, far beyond parliamentary privilege. Starmer has yet to sue anyone for having made that claim. Again, he could not see the problem. Again, he had been groomed. Who is a grooming gang, and who is not?