Andrew Barker

Among those currying favour with Elon Musk, it has become an article of faith that the “mainstream media” ignored the UK’s grooming gangs scandal until the brave truth-tellers of X uncovered it, er, last week. Give over. Feminist writer Julie Bindel first wrote about the disappearance of Charlene Downes in 2004, a year after the Blackpool teenager went missing. And if anyone deserves credit for bringing this story to wider attention, it’s Andrew Norfolk of the Times, who doggedly reported on cases across the north of England, starting in 2011, despite legal pressure and accusations of racism. He won Private Eye’s Paul Foot Award for investigative journalism in 2012, with the citation pointing out at the time — almost thirteen years ago — that his work “has prompted two government-ordered inquiries, a parliamentary inquiry and a new national action plan on child sexual exploitation”. Norfolk then bagged the Orwell Prize for Journalism in 2013. Subsequent cases, including those in Rotherham, Telford, Huddersfield, Oxford and Oldham, also received widespread coverage. The news even made it to America, with the liberal New York Times running typically ponderous headlines like “Life in an English Town Where Abuse Flourished” and “Indifference to Child Rape” in 2014. That year, columnist Ross Douthat wrote that “what happened in Rotherham was rooted both in left-wing multiculturalism and in much more old-fashioned prejudices about race and sex and class”. Full story in the new Private Eye, out now.