‘I exposed Keir Starmer’s grooming gang lies — but the real scandal is who kept it secret’

The Rochdale grooming gang scandal shook the nation, and rightly so; it exposed how victim-blaming by authorities made those in power complicit in industrial-scale child abuse.

And, although we have seen many similar horrors play out in towns and cities across the country, it was the betrayal of the girls in the Greater Manchester town that is considered the definitive case that woke people up.

Part of the reason for this was that, in 2017, the BBC produced a drama, Three Girls, that cemented the scandal's key characters in the public imagination.

This three-part series told the story of victims Holly, Amber and Ruby, as well as recognising the work of the whistleblower police officer Maggie Oliver, sexual health worker Sara Rowbotham and prosecutor Nazir Afzal.

The drama ends with the perpetrators finally being brought to justice, and in the years since that show was broadcast, the idea that the Rochdale scandal ultimately ended with success has grown.

Without doubt, the most prominent figure to push this story is our current Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, who claims to have personally played a role in the so-called triumph.

In fact, when the Prime Minister was defending his grooming gangs record, he told Parliament he’d “asked to see the [Rochdale] file” and, after reading it, told his lawyers to charge an offender who was missing from the list.

But the truth about the Rochdale prosecution is that it was a cruel, cynical way for the authorities to mask another scandal.

Far from being the “good practice” claimed at the time, the actions of the CPS have been found, in the words of an independent review years later, to in fact have served as “deplorable further abuse of a CSE survivor.”

What Sir Keir’s file would have told him back in 2011 is that, after one of the victims, Amber, was subjected to hours of traumatising interviews about her abuse at the hands of the vicious gang, his legal team plotted an act of heinous betrayal.

The girl’s evidence was twisted by the prosecution to falsely portray her as a predatory teenage pimp who procured vulnerable children for the rapists.

In court, presumably with the blessing of their boss who’d read the file, Sir Keir’s team spent day after day telling vicious lies about a teenager who had no way of defending herself.

They took the darkest traumas given to them in good faith by an innocent child and created a vile, fictitious narrative that put her safety at risk.

Lies told about Amber in court resulted in death threats. Someone threatened to petrol bomb her house, and the address was shared on social media in posts calling her a “paedo.” Worse still, social services tried to remove her child.

The craziest thing about all of this is that you’d think the Prime Minister would be ashamed that his team of lawyers had used testimony given by a witness, without them being arrested or cautioned, and presented it in court as evidence that the victim was actually a paedophile.

But he’s not; Sir Keir is proud of the Rochdale case, he was using it as recently as last year to bolster his reputation.

That, to use the words of Ruby, another victim of the gang, is “absolutely vile.”

Which brings me to the betrayal she suffered at the hands of the state.

Ruby told me herself how the gang raped her five days a week for three years from the age of 12.

She was forced into rooms filled with men who didn’t speak English, made to get “blackout drunk”, and then sexually assaulted over and over again.

When Ruby tried to tell them 'no', they were violent, threatening to kill her and her family. On one occasion, they brandished a gun.

By the age of 13, gang member Adil Khan had got her pregnant. The 43-year-old taxi driver had a wife and three kids; the child he abused had special needs.

Just like her sister, Ruby was abused by the authorities as well as the paedophiles.

As she endured the trauma of a teenage pregnancy termination, Greater Manchester Police secretly swooped in to take possession of the aborted foetus and put it in a freezer.

Ruby was then asked to help prosecute the man who’d raped her in her case by granting them permission to test the stolen baby for DNA.

She was under the impression that after this series of violations, the CPS would throw the book at Khan and try to lock him up for as long as possible.

But, as Sir Keir would know, given the extreme interest he claims to have taken in the Rochdale charging decisions, the CPS chose to prosecute Khan for conspiracy to commit sexual activity with a child.

Despite it being his DNA on the aborted foetus of a 13-year-old, who had special needs and was “blackout drunk” when he raped her, the vile predator spent just three years in prison.

What beggars belief is that the man who claims to have overseen these decisions, who openly says he “took the file” on Rochdale and dealt with it personally, is our Prime Minister.

He is not hiding his involvement; he is brazen, and I’m afraid those meant to scrutinise this man, including the British media, have failed.

We allowed Keir Starmer to present Rochdale as a success; we allowed him to use it to pave the way to become the leader of the Labour Party and then the Prime Minister of this country.

The shame for us is that those disgraceful decisions around Rochdale were never a secret.

They lay in plain sight all along and should have been exposed much, much earlier.