“Sophie” was 12 years old when she walked into Oldham police station to report a sexual assault. For a vulnerable child, first befriended and then viciously exploited by much older men, that must have taken courage. But officers simply told her to come back when she wasn’t drunk. It was a terrible missed opportunity, as an independent review of so-called grooming gang allegations in Oldham commissioned by the Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham made clear in 2022. Sophie was picked up from the police station and driven to a house where she was raped by multiple men. Many years later, she learned that although a man eventually convicted of abusing her had given Greater Manchester police two other names, they had inexplicably failed to follow these leads.

There are thousands of Sophies out there, yet they are already slipping through the cracks of a debate that is supposedly about them: becoming pawns in an unedifying power struggle on the right of British politics, as the world’s richest man tests the limits of his influence over it.

It’s nearly 20 years since Sophie entered that police station, but that is not ancient history in the towns – the Rochdales and Rotherhams, Oldhams and Telfords, and dozens more around the country – still grappling with this scandal’s complex legacy: rage against the perpetrators and those who failed to stop them, plus the kind of collapsing trust in authorities and officialdom that creates a vacuum. On Friday night, under the glitterballs at a packed Reform rally in Leicester, I watched Nigel Farage move to fill that vacuum.

The BNP first tried to capitalise on rumours of Asian men exploiting white girls in Oldham a decade and a half ago, apparently distributing leaflets reading Our Children Are Not Halal Meat. Now Reform........

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