Since Louise Casey published her report into grooming gangs, Kemi Badenoch has been wildly missing the right tone in her response. On Saturday, she sent an email to Conservative Party members complete with a jaunty exclamation mark: “We won! Grooming gang inquiry announced.” Anyone else who has read the details of these rape cases wouldn’t immediately assume there were any “winners” here.
On Monday afternoon in the Commons chamber when facing the Home Secretary Yvette Cooper, she claimed she “couldn’t believe my ears”, and seemed barely to contain her anger. Not, though, at the sickening betrayal of the victims, but at the fact Labour was staging “another U-turn”. Winter fuel and now this? What next, the non-doms? To what sounded like genuine shock from the Opposition benches after Cooper’s sombre address, she shouted her gotcha: “They can mutter now, they all mutter now! Three times these Labour MPs voted against a national inquiry!”
By Tuesday morning, she seemed to be picking up on the mood – holding a promising-seeming press conference introduced as not about “the politics” but giving survivors and their families, who sat alongside her, “a platform”. But this promise didn’t last long, as two minutes into questions she was already saying how it should not have taken the government “six months to agree to a national inquiry”. When asked about her own government’s record? “My brief didn’t cover this area,” replied the former minister for women and equalities and children and families.
The damage of Badenoch’s tin-eared response appears to have been done. “I see her using my lived experience, and the lived experience of girls up and down our country, for political point-scoring,” said Natalie Fleet, a grooming survivor raped as a teenager who was motivated by the ensuing state support to become Labour MP for Bolsover, on LBC.
“Kemi Badenoch was the minister for women and equalities, she never met a single grooming victim, she never spoke about grooming in the chamber, what was she doing?” asked Fleet. “I tell you there are victims up and down the country that are so angry with her for how badly she let us down.”
[See also: Keir Starmer’s grooming gang cowardice]
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