I exposed Sadiq Khan’s darkest secret that’s put him on the brink | UK | News

Finally, Susan Hall broke away. The Conservative London council leader repeatedly asked Sadiq Khan about the number of rape gangs in the capital, but the Mayor demanded he be “more specific”.

“No, you know exactly what I’m talking about,” Hall said in an exasperated tone, before Khan launched into a monologue suggesting that the city’s biggest problem was the drug-dealing gangs along the county line.

Only he knows why Khan blocked questions about grooming gangs that day.

As Hall later stated in statements to the media, it would have been easy for him to acknowledge the issue and say it was being taken seriously.

The difference in January was that there was no external pressure to move the issue to the top of the agenda.

Beyond the odd question or motion from the local Council Conservatives, there has been little scrutiny as to whether Britain’s biggest city is riddled with child sex abuse gangs that have left deep scars on Northern towns such as Rochdale and Rotherham.

But that all changed dramatically when an investigation in the Express and MyLondon uncovered public records that experts corroborated as proof that London had grooming gangs all along.

Following the story, the Metropolitan Police revealed a shocking 9,000 potential cases were being investigated and the Mayor claimed he was pushing for “transparency” and “justice” for victims despite his previous obstruction.

Clips of local council meetings don’t tend to go viral, but the seriousness of the issue Hall raised and the arrogance with which Khan addressed it were embraced by right-wing commentators.

Videos of the shooting went viral and were viewed by millions on social media.

But a less publicized point was that Khan was not alone in denying the existence of grooming gangs in London when he blocked Hall’s questions.

Just a month after the clash at the meeting, Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley was grilled by Lord Bailey of Paddington about whether the force was missing something when it came to organized child sexual exploitation.

“I can’t guarantee there’s something there that we haven’t seen,” Rowley told the former mayoral candidate.

But in terms of the broader news agenda, neither Khan nor Rowley’s comments affected the gangs’ narrative.

Spurred on by the sudden interest of Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and at the time a close confidant of President Donald Trump, the Labor government was grappling with the reemergence of a scandal that many believed was confined to the past.

Calls for a national investigation into gangs were growing amid allegations that local efforts to hold people accountable were unreliable.

In June, then Home Secretary Yvette Cooper attempted to tackle the problem by announcing a series of tough measures against group-based child abuse.

As well as confirming that a national investigation would be held, Cooper revealed in January that he had asked police forces to “identify cases involving allegations of grooming and child sexual abuse that have been closed without further action” and that “more than 800 cases have now been identified for formal investigation”. He added that he expects that number to rise to over 1,000 in the coming weeks.

Following the Home Secretary’s announcement, Hall raised the issue with Khan again and found him becoming even more specific when asked about the London cases.

“I choose my words carefully for reasons he will understand,” he replied. “There are no reported cases and there is also no indication of grooming gangs in London that he is concerned about.”

He added that there was not even a hint that any of the thousand cases identified in Cooper’s official review came from the nation’s largest police agency.

“I have no indication they are in London, but [Met Police] He understands the importance of controlling the causes he knows,” Khan told Hall.

In September, the Express contacted tipster Jon Wedger, a retired Metropolitan Police detective who claimed his efforts to investigate grooming rings in London in the mid-2000s were shut down by senior officers.

Wedger’s police notebooks and reports from the time revealed significant evidence that children were being abused in care homes in Haringey, North London, in a manner very similar to scandals in Rochdale or Rotherham.

We also found evidence presented in the previous investigation into grooming gangs, which included examples of numerous police operations into organized child sexual exploitation.

Wedger had never seen Khan’s confrontation with Susan Hall, and when the Express showed him the footage he was furious and called for the Mayor to resign. He was not alone in this assessment; We tracked down one of the survivors in London and were horrified.

But the mayor was having none of it. A spokesman for the mayor said the allegation that he had failed to properly respond to a serious problem with gangs was “inaccurate, malicious and politically motivated”.

While this denial was being made to the Express, our sister title MyLondon was also conducting its own investigation. The headline asked each council in a Freedom of Information request whether there had been any gang investigations: only one of 32 boroughs, Hounslow, said there had been a case.

Council under pressure from journalist stopped and minimizedfinally explains the three-year police investigation into “a single child” from the area.

To test whether this outright denial is actually true, the Express and MyLondon launched a joint investigation.

As journalists delved into public records, it quickly became apparent that not only was there “no indication” of gang grooming in London, there was plenty of evidence hiding in plain sight.

Using case study examples from Metropolitan Police inspection reports and examining witness statements from Judge Alexis Jay’s inquiry into group-based child sexual exploitation, we found 11 potential victims of grooming gangs.

We presented the details of these cases to two experts, Rochdale whistleblower detective Maggie Oliver and care industry campaigner and author Chris Wild. Both confirmed that the cases crossed the threshold of being indicative of gang grooming; Oliver suggested that the patterns seen in the three examples were “typical” of the types of groups he had researched in Greater Manchester.

Oliver said Sadiq Khan’s stance that there were no signs of gangs was “incredible” as he responded directly to each of the four inspection reports. The Savage went further. “WHO [or] What are they protecting?” he asked.

In their official response to the findings, neither the mayor nor the Metropolitan Police have changed their public stances.

But 24 hours after submitting his answers, Sir Mark Rowley received an unusual, off-topic question from Len Duvall, a Labor member of the London Assembly, during a scheduled meeting of the London Assembly.

Politicians who months ago had been unwilling to discuss the issue of group-based child sexual abuse and had rejected proposals for a London inquiry suddenly wanted to talk.

Rowley revealed a “very significant number” of cases were being examined as part of the Home Office initiative, representing a striking U-turn from his statement in February that he “didn’t see it”.

Pressure mounted on the City Hall and the Met in the week after the Express/MyLondon investigation was published. Other outlets began publishing stories based on allegations by political opponents, suggesting that the denials were part of a “cover-up” in the face of evidence in the public record.

Then late on Friday evening the Express saw a letter from Sir Mark Rowley to Sir Sadiq Khan providing an “update” on the Home Office review of the case.

It turned out that 9,000 cases were identified that needed re-evaluation.

After publishing the details, a spokesman for the Mayor finally addressed the issue of grooming gangs, claiming: “Sadiq has been consistently clear to the Met that no stone should be left unturned to deliver justice for the victims of grooming gangs and ensure despicable perpetrators are brought to justice.”

Later, in an exclusive interview with ITV, one of the few major outlets that did not air anything about the scandal, Khan promised to be “completely transparent”.

Hall was furious and told the broadcaster that it was hypocritical and disappointing that the Mayor “pretended not to ignore the plight of gang grooming survivors in London”.

As well as claiming to be pushing for transparency, Khan began discussing the ethnicity of victims and perpetrators, drawing comparisons to scandals in the north of England.

“In some of the towns in the north, where those terrible perpetrators were, [they] were of one ethnicity, while the victims were of another ethnicity. These horrific cases are not the kind we see in London; “They are more complex,” he said.

Ethnicity was not mentioned in any of Hall’s questions, nor did the Express or MyLondon articles reveal the existence of grooming gangs. However, speaking publicly for the first time since the story broke, Khan had decided to raise the issue.

It is also significant that both the Mayor and the UK’s largest police force, who have not specifically used the term ‘grooming gangs’ in public communications for years, now claim they have been tackling the “insidious” threat all this time.

But what will happen next is anyone’s guess.