This is how the grooming scandal is being weaponised – and this is what Starmer must do | Gaby Hinsliff

“Sophie” was 12 years old when she walked into Oldham police station to report a sexual assault. For a vulnerable child, first befriended and then viciously exploited by much older men, that must have taken courage. But officers simply told her to come back when she wasn’t drunk. It was a terrible missed opportunity, as an independent review of so-called grooming gang allegations in Oldham commissioned by the Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham made clear in 2022. Sophie was picked up from the police station and driven to a house where she was raped by multiple men. Many years later, she learned that although a man eventually convicted of abusing her had given Greater Manchester police two other names, they had inexplicably failed to follow these leads.

There are thousands of Sophies out there, yet they are already slipping through the cracks of a debate that is supposedly about them: becoming pawns in an unedifying power struggle on the right of British politics, as the world’s richest man tests the limits of his influence over it.

It’s nearly 20 years since Sophie entered that police station, but that is not ancient history in the towns – the Rochdales and Rotherhams, Oldhams and Telfords, and dozens more around the country – still grappling with this scandal’s complex legacy: rage against the perpetrators and those who failed to stop them, plus the kind of collapsing trust in authorities and officialdom that creates a vacuum. On Friday night, under the glitterballs at a packed Reform rally in Leicester, I watched Nigel Farage move to fill that vacuum.

The BNP first tried to capitalise on rumours of Asian men exploiting white girls in Oldham a decade and a half ago, apparently distributing leaflets reading Our Children Are Not Halal Meat. Now Reform UK is demanding a new national inquiry into an already exhaustively examined scandal, the deportation of perpetrators with dual nationality – that many, not all, perpetrators were of Pakistani heritage is an awkwardly inescapable part of the story – and the jailing of anyone caught looking the other way, while Kemi Badenoch races to keep up and her rival Robert Jenrick races to outdo her. Meanwhile, the American billionaire Elon Musk accuses Keir Starmer of being “complicit in the rape of Britain”. It may sound laughable, but violent rhetoric has violent consequences, so let’s be very clear: under Starmer’s leadership as director of public prosecutions, a landmark prosecution in Rochdale paved the way for grooming trials around the country, and he introduced reforms making it easier to bring complex sex offence cases.

Just don’t ask where all this outrage for rape victims was when a jury in a civil trial concluded Farage’s good friend Donald Trump had sexually abused the writer E Jean Carroll, or when Trump proposed Matt Gaetz – who was facing allegations (which he denied) of sex with a minor – for attorney general. Or indeed why, when the deputy Reform leader Richard Tice tweeted that grooming gangs were a “horrific stain” on the establishment, the Rotherham survivor Sammy Woodhouse claimed that she’d offered six months previously to work with him on highlighting sexual exploitation and “you didn’t give a shit”.

Reform rallies are still infinitely gentler than Trump ones – everyone I met was friendly and polite, if mildly surprised to meet the Guardian – but there are flashes of something darker, including the heckler repeatedly shouting “listen to Tommy Robinson” (the far-right activist currently imprisoned for contempt of court, to Musk’s outrage). “I have a message for the legacy media,” announced the academic turned Reform cheerleader Prof Matt Goodwin. “If you’d been doing your job, we wouldn’t need Elon Musk.” By Sunday, Musk was tweeting that Farage should be ditched as leader, after a disagreement over Robinson. Life comes at you fast on X.

My guess is Musk will lose this fight, because it’s Farage Reform members come to see: bounding onstage to denounce the “mass rape abomination” – his audience consider the phrase “grooming gangs” too soft – and accusing Starmer of failing to prosecute rapists, before arguing that the Conservatives were practically as bad. He lumps Labour and the Tories dismissively together as the tired old “uniparty”, painting Reform as fresh and full of energy.

It won’t be easy, holding together this coalition stretching from posh, tweedy ex-Tories who can’t abide Robinson – one reason Farage is holding that line – to Labour deserters, Musk groupies and the distinctly far right-adjacent. But Farage has a gift for scenting both weakness and opportunity. The idea of a national inquiry didn’t come from his party but originally from Oldham’s then Labour-led council, pleading for a Home Office inquiry to restore public confidence amid a flurry of online conspiracy theories about a supposed cover-up of grooming gangs. When the Home Office minister Jess Phillips turned them down, as her Tory predecessor had before her, Reform saw its chance.

In Leicester, Farage talked indignantly about what he called a lack of “moral courage” to pursue the guilty. But while one independent inquiry in Telford did identify “a nervousness about race … bordering on a reluctance to investigate crimes” within the Asian community, others found no such thing.

In Oldham, that otherwise critical 2022 report identified serious failings in the handling of a council worker convicted of rape but found “no evidence that senior managers or councillors sought to cover up … the existence of child sexual exploitation” and concluded the council “in no way avoided” tackling it despite worries about the far right exploiting the issue. Elsewhere reviews have found little evidence of frontline child protection workers worrying about perpetrators’ ethnicity, though politicians and police were sometimes anxious to downplay it after arrests had been made in towns still recovering from the 2001 riots.

What may resonate, however, is the nagging sense that justice has still not entirely been done. With no police officer sacked or professional charged over arguably Britain’s worst child protection scandal, we are lacking a sense of catharsis. Survivors need to know that in future such failure will have consequences, which is why Starmer is right to signal a new criminal offence of failing to report abuse, as recommended by the independent inquiry into child sexual abuse set up under Theresa May. Strip away all the hysteria on X, the hype about whether Reform can overtake the Tories or how long Musk can carry on gratuitously offending America’s allies, and what’s left is a job to which Starmer is well suited: the long hard slog of rebuilding battered confidence. But if this was the first of many curveballs Farage and Musk are likely to throw him in 2025, it won’t be the last. He should be ready.

• Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist

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