Here’s a rule I tend to apply across the board in Westminster: If a politician is talking, politics is probably taking place.
Add into that, if the topic of debate is especially grave or serious, be more prepared to apply the rule, not less.
Which brings us to the grooming scandal.
There is no doubt Tory leader Kemi Badenoch was politicising the issue when she ripped into the government in the Commons on Monday.
In fact, she admitted as much.
Asked about it during her news conference, she said: “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 question here is less about whether politics is at play (it almost always is and that’s not necessarily a bad thing), and more about whose interests the politics is working towards.
In other words, does Ms Badenoch care about the grooming scandal because she cares about victims or because she cares about herself?
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To answer that, it’s useful to try and pinpoint exactly when the Tory leader started showing such a keen desire for a public inquiry.
Was she always harbouring it? Or did it only arrive after Elon Musk and others pushed the scandal back up the news agenda?
On this, she’s not helped by the record of the governments she served in.
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Yes, the broader child abuse inquiry was announced under David Cameron, but there was no specific statutory grooming inquiry.
As late as 2022, the then Tory safeguarding minister was batting away demands for a public inquiry on the basis that locally-led probes were preferable.
That is – as it happens – the same explanation the current Labour safeguarding minister Jess Phillips offered to Oldham Council in the rejection letter that sparked outrage and set us on a path to this eventual outcome.
Read more:
Officials tried to cover up grooming scandal, says Cummings
Why many victims welcome national inquiry into grooming gangs
Grooming gangs scandal timeline
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“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 can be attacked for acting too slowly, the Tories – and by extension Ms Badenoch – can be too.
In response, her aides insist she was bound by collective responsibility while she was a minister, and that the issue was outside her brief.
Ms Badenoch also points to her work with patients of the now closed Tavistock Gender Identity Clinic as evidence of her track record campaigning for change in thorny policy areas.
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In this context, the presence in the grooming scandal of questions around the role of gender and ethnicity mark this as an issue that you’d expect the Tory leader to not only be interested in, but to genuinely care about too.
But as previously discussed, just because a politician is somewhat sincere in what they are saying, doesn’t mean there isn’t a dollop of politics mixed in too.
And having dug out a recording of a post-PMQs briefing with Ms Badenoch’s media adviser from January, that certainly seems to be the case here.
Asked what had changed to trigger the calls for an inquiry, the spokesperson said: “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 put it another way, the politics changed.
