Damning stack of evidence is closing in on Labour after grooming gangs inquiry fiasco

What do you call an inquiry where some of the survivors, or victims, don't want to take part and no one seems willing to head it up? That would be an inquiry into the national grooming gangs scandal which the government has allowed to descend into utter chaos and political in-fighting which has left those victims desperately looking for answers feeling bitter and betrayed. For a former Director of Public Prosecutions - and let's be truthful, he never tires of reminding us of that - Sir Keir Starmer seems to have been at a legal loss at this from the start.

As recently as last January he was still spectacularly misjudging the public mood by inisiting anyone calling for such an inquiry was "jumping on a bandwagon of the far right." Is that really the way for a Prime Minister to respond to the jailing of scores of men from a network of gangs who raped, abducted, imprisoned and trafficked an unknown number of underage girls and older teens and plied them with drugs, cheap booze and gifts? And who were also let down - possibly criminally let down - by our police forces, local authorities and parts of the NHS?

His insistence, shared by senior ministers, that it could be dealt with by a series of underfunded and disconnected regional inquiries showed how out of touch they were.

Bullied into submission, Sir Keir announced the inquiry FOUR months ago, and with statutory powers it has the power to compel witnesses to attend. But since then, precisely nothing has been achieved.

Indeed it has actually been the opposite - somehow the government has allowed it to go backwards, and now it seems it won't start work until next year! Both potential chairmen who had been cited have opted to withdraw from the process and at the time of writing four survivors have quit the inquiry panel.

Two of those brave women appeared on my radio show last week and their testimony was searingly honest and equally distressing, with one of the most puzzling aspects being they were told they couldn't be in contact with each other while the inquiry was sitting.

Seeing as in many instances it was their close support group that helped persuade them to take part, this is at the very least questionable. While there might be valid procedural reasons, it is nevertheless deeply insensitive.

One of the survivors - they balk at being called 'victims' - told me she thought the government was seeking to "widen the inquiry in a way to downplay the racial and religious aspect of what we went through."

Disturbingly, there seems no shortage of hard evidence to back up these damning assertions. Look at the towns and cities where this often unchecked criminal abuse was ignored or even indulged and you'll see the overwhelming majority have Labour-run local councils and can be seen as supposed safe Labour seats. Incompetence and inaction at this level is not a good look therefore for a Labour central government.

There's also the ethnicity of nearly all the perpetrators, most of whom are of Pakistani or Bangladeshi background and are classed as Muslims.

Anyone with the sketchiest knowledge of Islam knows no 'true' Muslim behaves in this fashion, but in some constituencies with high Muslim populations Labour nearly lost seats last year due to what it seen by some as their weakness in standing up to Israel.

Indeed the Safeguarding Minister at the heart of this, Jess Phillips, saw her majority in Birmingham Yardley plummet from nearly 11,000 to just 693!

Inconvenient as these truths might be for Labour, our lawlerly PM will be 'judged' by the leadership he shows now.