Former Conservative lawmaker Michael Gove has confirmed a claim that the government had attempted to prevent reporting on the Pakistani-heritage ‘grooming’ child rape gangs hitting the headlines in 2011.
More Westminster figures are coming forward with stories of how elements within the British government brought pressure to cover up the decades-long ‘grooming gang’ scandal, conveniently in the wake of the Casey review, which has suddenly made discussing the matter socially acceptable this week.
Lord Michael Gove, who held several senior positions in the last Conservative government, was credited by this week by government insider-gone-rogue Dominic Cummings as a driving force behind the scandal reaching the papers. Confirming the story, Gove told broadcaster GB News on Thursday that: “Dominic’s account is broadly absolutely correct.”
Relating that there had been a move within the Department for Education, which he led at the time, to block the publication of a then-ground-breaking article on grooming gangs in 2011 through legal means.
Gove said: “Rotherham Metropolitan Borough Council at the time didn’t want the full details revealed, they approached the government and the Department for Education where I was secretary of state at the time, asked us to join them in a legal case to prevent The Times publishing.”
Explaining that he had gone beyond merely not acquiescing to the report, the-now Lord Gove continued: “I looked at the material alongside Dominic and some other people in the department, and we contacted Rotherham Council and said ‘yes we will intervene in this case, but on behalf of The Times, because it is vital that the truth be told’.”
Gove said it had been argued by the Council and some sympathetic individuals within the government that “adverse publicity” could impede Rotherham Council from improving. Further, he said it was standard practice in the department before his arrival to censor and redact serious case reviews — “you could tell almost nothing from them” — because to reveal the full truth would be “unfair” and could cause “finger pointing towards professionals”.
He claimed to have rejected this position, arguing that “the only way to learn the lessons” was through transparency.
Looking forward to the coming inquiry, Gove said Whitehall itself had to be included in the investigation, not just local government and police forces.
As previously reported, Dominic Cummings — who had been advisor to Gove in 2011, later led the Vote Leave Brexit campaign, and was advisor to Prime Minister Boris Johnson — had related some of this incident in an interview with Sky News. He’d said earlier this week: “Some officials wanted a total cover-up and were on the side of the council… They wanted to help the local council do the cover-up and stop The Times‘ reporting, but other officials, including in the DfE private office, said this is completely outrageous and we should blow it up. Gove did, the judicial review got blown up, Norfolk stories ran.”
On what an effective national inquiry would mean, Cummings predicted it would be a “total shitshow for Whitehall, because it will reveal how much Whitehall worked to try and cover up the whole thing.”
While various groups in the United Kingdom including the English Defence League (EDL) had long warned about the phenomenon of Asian-heritage men ‘grooming’, raping, and pimping often extremely young white girls in post-industrial English towns, they were generally condemned for doing so and decried as racist obsessives. For many, the first mention heard of the grooming gangs — or at least the first from a source they were not inclined to disregard — was the 2011 Times report discussed by Cummings and Gove, written by journalist Andrew Norfolk.
As previously reported, the story came to him after a youth worker whistle-blower, identified years later as Jayne Senior, presented Norfolk with “two cardboard boxes full of documents … that showed how police officers had continually ignored reports of child sex abuse by Pakistani gangs”.
Breitbart London noted in 2015: “Such was the sensitivity over the leak that Andrew Norfolk hid the documents in a secret location over 30 miles from his home and agreed not to speak with Senior for six months. Rotherham Borough Council tried to set up a criminal enquiry to find out who leaked the files, but they were unsuccessful.”
For Norfolk himself, he said reporting the story was “uncomfortable” and he was accused at the time of publication of “racialising” crimes, with The Guardian calling the story a case of “Dubious claims about Muslim men grooming white girls”. Norfolk “died suddenly” during a medical appointment in May 2025, aged 60.
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