Ex-Downing Street Advisor Cummings Claims UK Deep State Pushed Grooming Gang Cover Up
Britain’s permanent bureaucracy pressured elected government ministers to cover up the child rape grooming gang scandal, Boris Johnson’s former top advisor Dominic Cummings claimed.
After mounting pressure, Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer finally agreed over the weekend to launch a national inquiry into the predominantly Pakistani-heritage sex grooming of young white working-class girls across England.
The inquiry, which, unlike previous reports, will have statutory authority to compel witness testimony and obtain documents, will focus on the failures of local officials and police to safeguard victims, the intentional ignoring of grooming by certain ethnic groups for fear of appearing racist, and alleged cover-ups of such behavior.
However, concerns have been raised that the inquiry will only focus on the failures and cover-ups committed at the local level and ignore the culpability of Whitehall bureaucrats in the national government in Westminster.
In an interview with Sky News broadcast on Monday, Dominic Cummings claimed he witnessed efforts by officials in the Department for Education (DfE) to help the Rotherham council quash initial reports from The Times of London on the scandal in 2011 through judicial review, which can be used to impose reporting restrictions.
Mr Cummings, who was serving as an aide to then-Education Secretary Michael Gove, said: “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 stories ran.”
Cummings, who later served as a key strategist for the Brexit campaign and later a top advisor to former Prime Minister Boris Johnson, went on to say that a national inquiry would “be a total s**tshow for Whitehall because it will reveal how much Whitehall worked to try and cover up the whole thing.”
Yet, the political strategist noted that the deep state may yet escape accountability once again. Indeed, the national inquiry was prompted by the recommendations of a review from Baroness Casey published on Monday.
In her review, Casey specifically called for an inquiry to coordinate a “series of targeted local investigations,” perhaps leaving the door open for investigators to ignore any role played by the national government.
“Everybody who has been campaigning must keep campaigning so the investigations get Whitehall’s documents,” Cummings said after the publication of the Casey review.
MP Richard Tice, the deputy leader of the Reform UK party which has been among those leading the charge demanding a national inquiry, a series of targeted local investigations that if Cummings’ claims are true, then Whitehall “officials should be prosecuted”.
In addition to calling for a national inquiry, the Casey review forced the government to finally acknowledge that there has been explicit links between the Pakistani community in Britain and the child rape grooming of young disadvantaged white girls. The links, previously detailed in numerous local reports, have long been dismissed by the media and political elite as conspiracy theories.
The report also called on the government to order local government and police forces not to destroy historic documents, lest they — by accident or design — be lost between now and the inquiry getting legal powers.
In the House of Commons on Monday, Tice asked Home Secretary Yvette Cooper if the Prime Minister plans to apologise for branding those who raised the issue as “far-right.” Cooper merely replied, “I do believe that victims and survivors are owed an apology for that failure over very many years.”
