And at Westfield there are boys lying in wait. Teens are there, in small groups, sent to target girls of around 13 who are hanging out with no adults in tow. This is “first-stage seduction” — a tried-and-tested technique — and I’ve seen it first hand, as a group of three boys bought ice creams for a couple of girls who they had obviously just met. The girls were giggling and coy and lapping up the attention, clearly in awe of the boys. Then the lawyer I was with discreetly pointed out the older Asian men hanging around the peripheries, watching the interactions.

Stratford’s shopping center has been a notorious grooming hotspot for years. It’s easy to be anonymous in the cavernous mall, and security guards have spoken about how hard it is to keep an eye on suspicious individuals as they disappear into the front and out of the back of many of the large department stores. “It’s not illegal for teenagers to have coffee together, or to flirt, go into the cinema, or try on sneakers,” one police officer told me. “What are we supposed to do?”

By now, everyone is familiar with the grooming gang scandal. But few people realize how serious the problem is in London — and those who do are very reluctant to call it out. As we are only now discovering, the capital’s politicians, police and social workers are just as guilty as those pilloried Up North for conspiring to keep this growing threat out of the public eye. Rather than exposing and stopping the trafficking of girls, they have dodged the issue by saying this isn’t sexual exploitation: instead they say the girls are criminals too. They’re being recruited for “county lines”, to move and supply drugs.

Sadiq Khan, Mayor of London, produced exactly this deflection at the beginning of the year. Asked directly, by Susan Hall, leader of the Conservatives in the London Assembly: “Just how many grooming gangs have we got in London?”, Khan replied with an unhelpful: “The situation in London in relation to young people being groomed is different to other parts of the country.”

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There followed a lengthy and revelatory exchange, during which Khan managed to dodge the same question nine times. Eventually, he did manage a response — of sorts. “What we have in London,” he said, “is young people being groomed, your words not mine, to be using county lines.”

Khan’s response is scarcely credible on many levels, especially since the grooming of girls in London has been going on for decades and if one whistle-blower is to be believed, it is at “catastrophic” levels. Jon Wedger is a former Metropolitan Police officer with more than 25 years experience investigating child sexual exploitation. Back in 2006, Wedger submitted a list of 50 youngsters who had been groomed and sexually abused in the capital, providing details such as the car-registration numbers of the perpetrators. But he was told to back off by social services, and even a large children’s charity, because he was generating “extra work”.

Wedger tells me that nothing has changed. The gangs are still operating; the authorities are in denial. And the methods of procurement are just as we’ve seen countrywide. “The idea that they aren’t prevalent with the similar MO in London is just staggering to me,” he says. While the city is target-rich, Wedger’s focus has been on care homes. “Girls are being collected by men outside children’s homes in fancy cars, and being taken to a brothel. In the meantime, the police are looking for kids cycling around London dealing drugs for the big players, and the girls are ignored.”

The authorities are, quite literally, turning a blind eye to the problem. As late as 2018, Metropolitan Police officials claimed they were unable to address concerns about grooming gangs because “the terms ‘rape gangs’ and ‘grooming gangs’ are not legally recognized and do not appear in MPS policy”.

And yet, we know for a fact that Arshid Hussain, central to the infamous Rotherham grooming cases, took one of his victims to London, where she was sexually assaulted by three men as repayment for Hussain’s debts. And Mohammed Karrar, convicted in 2019 in the Oxford grooming scandal, trafficked his victim repeatedly to Paddington Station, selling her to other men. We also know from Professor Alexis Jay’s 2021 Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse that grooming gangs in London exist and operate along the classic “boyfriend model” of procurement, just as they do in the North. But at every mention of the situation in London, Sadiq Khan insists on using “county lines” terminology, instead of acknowledging the existence of rape gangs.

Michaela Addison has worked closely with victims and survivors of grooming gangs in London, and she is appalled at the use of what she describes as “sanitized language” to describe these crimes. It’s perfectly understandable why the mayor might do this, she explains: “if you can’t name it, the problem doesn’t exist”.

But the problem does exist. Just ask Katie. She was victimized twice: once by the grooming gangs, and then by the police. “I fell in love with Dan, big style,” she tells me, describing her Afghan boyfriend. “And by the time I realized he was a psycho, I was trapped, I was living partly with him, and partly with my foster carers, and his friends would come round and take me to flats where dirty old men would queue up to abuse me.” Katie was 15 years old at the time, and only called the police when it became clear she was in real danger. “I saw Dan with another bloke and he had what I thought was a gun. I knew they were dealing drugs, they used to give me some when I’d seen enough men, but it was the gun that really scared me, so I went into the police station and told them everything.”

However, the police totally ignored her claims of sexual violence and pimping, honing in only on the allegations about weapons and drugs. “As soon as I mentioned the gun, I could tell by the questions they were asking me that all they wanted to know was, ‘Where is this gang, who were the main drug dealers, where do they stash the gear?’”

Katie, now in her 20s, knows she will never see justice for what happened to her. “It’s all about county lines,” she tells me. “The girls are worth less than the gear.”

When I approached Sadiq Khan’s office for comment last month, this dismissive response found its echo: “The Mayor and the Met remain vigilant and will continue to do everything they can to protect children in the capital from violence and exploitation in all its forms, such as offending by grooming gangs,” but that in London, “in particular, we are dealing with “county lines”… These gangs exploit children and often use coercion, intimidation and violence, including sexual violence.”

The trouble is, to use such language implies that the girls are complicit in criminal activity, rather than being the victims of abuse and coercion. It also avoids the fact that the term “grooming gangs” is heavily racialized.

Susan Hall has also been deeply troubled by Khan’s insistence over many months that grooming gangs only exist in London in the context of county lines. “Given how widespread this appalling criminality has been in other towns and cities across the country,” she says, “it is impossible to think that grooming gangs like those uncovered in Rochdale and many other areas have not also operated in a city as big as London.”

The evidence backs this up: Sir Mark Rowley, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, is on the record denying that London has a grooming gang problem; but when presented with the evidence, admitted that there is a “steady flow” of live multi-offender child sexual exploitation investigations, and a “very significant” number of cases that would need to be reinvestigated as a result of the current review.

“This is exactly what Sadiq Khan has done,” Maggie Oliver, a former police officer and anti-grooming gangs campaigner, tells me. “He denied the problem for as long as he can, and then being forced to at least partially admit that it’s going on but by using different language to describe it.”

None of this is to dismiss the importance of the county lines angle. It is serious, widespread and warrants significant police attention. But the reluctance of the Met and the Mayor’s Office to discuss grooming gangs — to even use the term, let alone investigate — means that rape victims are, as usual, the ones paying the price.

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All the while, carers and whistleblowers are having to go back to basics in order to convince people that these girls are actually victims of grooming gangs. One sexual health worker I spoke to told me that in many cases, the police simply weren’t interested. There is, she told me, one notorious McDonald’s in South West London where gang members like to go to pick up girls. She and her colleague had reported, no fewer than half a dozen times, “information that the girls have told us about themselves being directly abused, and, in one case, two very young sisters being targeted and raped by the men”. But each time she followed up her call, she discovered that none of the previous reports had been logged. “We had given them as much information as we had, including in one case a car registration of one of the perpetrators, but they have mysteriously ‘lost’ all of this information.”

As Wedger told me: “What you don’t look for, doesn’t exist.”

But for how long can the authorities keep looking the other way? Already, news is starting to break. Only this week, a national newspaper confirmed what our investigation suspected. Sadiq Khan had access to and is known to have read several separate reports by His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services, from 2016-2025, which identified six victims of these gangs. These documents also outlined the dreadful details of the abuse endured by these girls — some as young as 13. Some of the girls were raped by multiple men in London hotel rooms after being plied with drugs and alcohol. Chris Wild, an author and care-home consultant, has described the problem as “more catastrophic in the capital than anywhere else in the country”. We now know that Khan knew about it, and still he could only obfuscate and point to “county lines”.

The really shocking thing, though, is that we have been here before. While Khan keeps his own counsel, Keir Starmer’s grooming gang inquiry, which was resisted for so long, is already falling apart. Members of the initial panel have claimed that the terms of the investigation are already being watered down, and cite “a disturbing conflict of interest” regarding the identities of two possible chairs. Fiona Goddard, a member of the panel and a grooming gang victim, sent a searing note of resignation, in which she echoed a refrain which is now too all familiar: “I’m further concerned by the condescending and controlling language used towards survivors throughout this process who have had to fight every day just to be believed.”

As the scandal in London grows, the process for bringing institutions to account is in complete disarray. And last night, a third member of the Starmer inquiry resigned: all three women are victims; all three are sick of the continued cover-up. The question for the rest of us is: how can there ever be justice for the abused girls, and retribution for the perpetrators, if public servants such as Khan remain in denial?

Johnson may not actually have much blue blood in his veins, but he is certainly a toff. Shakespeare’s Falstaff is both the greatest clown in English literature and a knight of the realm. Lord Byron was nobleman, rebel, daredevil, libertine and criminal (he had an incestuous affair with his sister), all of which made him more popular in his day than Billy Connolly is in ours. And though people detest the arrogant kind of patrician, they are ready to give their vote to the kind of high-class eccentric who shambles around with a parrot on his shoulder, even if he lives in Downing Street.

Dukes and Viscounts are powerful in one sense but marginal in another. As marginal figures, they have an affinity with the crook and the nonconformist. The landowner has a soft spot for the poacher, but not much sympathy for the petit-bourgeois gamekeeper. Some aristocrats see life as a game, playing it with one ironic eye on its arbitrary nature. In this, they are like the medieval Fool, who sees that all social roles are reversible, including his own.

The Fool is wiser than the king because he knows he is playing a part, whereas the king takes himself for real. The Fool thus speaks a subversive kind of truth, for which, as in King Lear, he risks being beaten up by his employers. Fools know that they aren’t up to much and so are more canny than their masters, who aren’t up to much but don’t know it. Playing the fool is a matter of playing the fool, making a performance of one’s folly which requires art and intelligence. The wisdom of foolery shows up the foolishness of the wise.

The strength of the clown, then, lies in his weakness. Because he is one of the lowliest forms of social life, he can’t fall any further and thus assumes a strange invulnerability. It is dangerous for ruling classes if the common people have nothing to lose. Fools and clowns are “all-licensed”, as one of Lear’s daughters complains of his jester, but this doesn’t matter much because they have no real power beyond mockery and wordplay. They are free in proportion to their impotence.

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The trouble begins when the jester, like Johnson, is really a king in disguise, falling over his feet as a useful ploy for landing in Downing Street. Shakespeare understands that maintaining a pact with failure and frailty is the only basis for genuine power, which is different from arsing around in order to charm the electorate. The jester plays with the truth in a way which reveals some acute insights, whereas Johnson simply lies through his teeth.

Breaking the rules isn’t always to be censured. Great artists do it all the time. Even if you are a Schoenberg or a Beckett, however, you have to grasp the conventions well enough to sense when you should throw them away. Sometimes it’s the conventions themselves which will tell you this, or allow you to intimate it. You may need a textbook to learn Malay, but you are fluent in the language only when you can put the book aside. You incorporate the rules rather than ignore them, just as you don’t need to make an agonising act of choice every time the little green man, frozen eternally in the act of stepping forward, turns suddenly to red. Doing things without thinking about them is part of social existence. It shouldn’t be confused with not thinking about them because you don’t give a damn.

How do clowns become kings? The clown’s problem is how not to be a cynic. If he pushes his mockery too far he can end up deflating not this or that value, but value as such. All that remains to be believed in is his own ego. Shakespeare’s Iago, who has a touch of the jester about him, is ruthlessly self-interested, just like our dear leader. Like a whimsical monarch, the only reality that exists for the cynic is his own appetites. These can be gratified all the more easily if human life is a game, since if things are insubstantial you can manipulate them better. This applies especially to women. The cynic may not be a rake, but almost all rakes are cynics, convinced that women exist purely for their own pleasure. It isn’t accidental that Boris Johnson is a philanderer.

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Britain is one of those rare nations in which not being serious is thought to be a virtue. Seriousness is for shopkeepers, not for rogues and roués. The middle classes have character, whereas the upper classes are seen as characters. The Roundhead is grim-lipped and high-minded, while the Cavalier makes light of things in order to show his superiority to them. This is the kind of sangfroid which helped to build the Empire, and in the form of a certain slapdash amateurism helped to lose it as well. Giving the debonair Lord Mountbatten a colony to rule over or a battleship to command was like giving a machine gun to a gorilla. The word ’amateurism’ means doing things because you love to, not because you have to. Check-out assistants have to turn in for work each morning, but gentleman farmers occasionally heave calves into land rovers because they rather fancy the idea of mucking in.

As the oldest capitalist nation in the world, Britain has long been a breeding ground for individualism. Each individual is a quirky deviation from the norm, in which case there isn’t really a norm in at all. Everybody, like Dickens’s grotesque figures, is a law unto themselves, which means that the law doesn’t exist and society is essentially anarchic. The irony is that the very disdain for convention which endeared Boris Johnson to voters who were tired of plastic politicians is what threatens to bring him down.

There are two other social groups which have traditionally played the Fool. The first is the long tradition of Irishmen who were jesters to the English court. One thinks of the 18th century writer Oliver Goldsmith, who hailed from the Irish midlands and seemed to exist in London simply for the amusement of Samuel Johnson and his circle. The Dubliner Edmund Burke, one of the finest orators the House of Commons has ever witnessed, was said by some English MPs to smell of whisky and potatoes. His scorching rhetoric, which once caused some gentlewomen in the public gallery of the Commons to faint away, could easily be dismissed as blather and blarney.

Some decades ago, the resident Irish jester to the English nation was the bibulous playwright Brendan Behan, who graduated from the IRA via Borstal to the London TV studios. He once described himself as a drinker with a writing problem. Television producers would wait until late in the evening, when Behan was bound to be drunk, and then haul him on their show to be interviewed. Not long ago, the Northern Irish poet Tom Paulin inherited this dubious honour, loudly berating all and sundry on late night television. He did so, however, in a thick Belfast accent which signalled that he wasn’t really one of us, and so was not to be taken too seriously. You could savour his idiosyncrasies while overlooking his opinions. As Olivia remarks in Twelfth Night, there’s no harm in a licensed Fool.

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The other traditional group of clowns is old-style Oxbridge dons. Seriousness for them, too, is a vulgar affair fit mainly for traffic wardens. Only nerds talk shop. A medical colleague of mine who spent much of his time plucking bits of helmet from the brains of dying motorcyclists would saunter into college dinner and recount a few amusing anecdotes about golf. I was also acquainted with one of the world’s experts on black holes, who was as silent on the subject of astronomy as if he was a bouncer in a night club. As a young don still wet behind the ears, I once asked a senior colleague how many children he had.

This was an unforgivable move, since it made it almost impossible for him not to give a factual reply, and facts were for oiks. He did, however, sidle out of it superbly. “Oh, thousands and thousands,” he sighed. This is the background from which Boris Johnson emerged. No wonder he can’t tell the truth.

This might seem an uncontroversial policy for organisations providing accommodation for female victims of domestic violence — but that was far from the case. Research by Dr Shonagh Dillon, CEO of an organisation that supports victims of domestic violence in Hampshire, found that service providers “understood that they risked their funding if they spoke up in objection to trans women in female-only spaces”.

And so in the summer of 2020, I wrote to Sophie Linden, Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime, warning her about the chilling effect of Sadiq Khan’s mantra that ‘trans women are women’ on organisations that might seek funding from City Hall. I didn’t get the clear assurance I sought so in October that year I wrote to the Mayor, asking whether he believes that single-sex spaces are lawful in certain circumstances and necessary for the protection of the most vulnerable women in London.

It should have been an easy question to answer: back in 2009, when he was a Labour MP, Khan voted for what became the 2010 Equality Act and its list of exemptions, one of which allows organisations to provide single-sex spaces. In my letter to the Mayor, I said we are entitled to know if he has changed his mind about a piece of legislation that’s vital for the protection of women. That was sixteen months ago — and he still hasn’t replied.

My sacking as Co-chair of the VAWG Board came the following summer. I was aghast at the insensitive way it was done — by email, on a Friday afternoon when the entire country was stunned by a horrific mass shooting in Plymouth the previous evening. The killings were carried out by a young man who appeared to be an incel, a phenomenon I had written about in Home Grown, my book on the links between misogyny, domestic violence and terrorism. I was in the middle of doing broadcast interviews, explaining the background to the harrowing events in Plymouth, when the email arrived from City Hall. Within days, more than 4,000 women had signed a petition calling for my reinstatement. They’re still waiting for the Mayor’s response.

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At the time, Linden dealt with press inquiries, insisting that my removal was due to a restructure and had nothing to do with my views on transgenderism or any other issue. In a phone call, she apologised for the way I was informed and asked me to stay on as an ‘advisor’ to the board. I couldn’t see any point, given that I would no longer have any influence over the agenda. All the while, violence against women was reaching epidemic levels, with the number of rape reports in London climbing to a ten-year high in March 2021.

In that very month, Sarah Everard had been abducted, raped and murdered by a serving Met Officer. On the morning after Cressida Dick revealed the news that Ms Everard’s remains had been found, I received a phone call from Linden. Somewhat to my astonishment, she said she was calling to ask me what Khan should say about it. A few weeks later, I got another call from Linden, asking what the Mayor should say about VAWG during his campaign for re-election.

None of this inspired confidence in the regime at City Hall, to put it mildly. I kept on raising important issues, however, such as the Met’s egregious failure to identify sexual predators within its own ranks. I insisted that senior officers should attend the next meeting of the VAWG Board to tell us how they intended to deal with violence committed by police officers, and I called for a public inquiry into misogyny at the Met. I got no support from City Hall; suffice it to say that I wasn’t surprised by the series of scandals that culminated in Dick’s sudden resignation earlier this month.

After my phone conversation with Linden in August last year, amid a blizzard of emails cancelling all my scheduled meetings at City Hall, I agreed to write to her formally. I reiterated my view that the board needs a Co-chair who isn’t a salaried employee of the Mayor, and asked for a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer to my question about Khan’s support (or otherwise) for the crucial exemption in the Equality Act. In a pattern I’ve come to expect from the current administration at City Hall, Linden did not write back for five months.

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In a letter that finally arrived earlier this month, Linden says that she and Khan “have always been clear that the commissioning of all of our services will be based on the best interests of the user”. But if we are talking about a women’s refuge, who is the user? Many of us would say it means natal women, but here is Linden’s answer: “It is vital that anyone seeking refuge is able to access the services they need and that women, including trans women, fleeing abuse from men should be able to access spaces where they feel safe”. (My italics.) If the Mayor intends to fund separate refuge spaces for people who are transgender, no one would argue with that. But does he?

I also doubt whether service providers will feel reassured by the legalistic language in Linden’s letter, which stands on its head to avoid offering an unequivocal endorsement of single-sex spaces: “Our approach in commissioning services does not penalise any agency that is working within the boundaries of the law… No agency we fund is required to act any differently from the requirements of equalities legislation.”

So what happens if the board of a refuge has a different interpretation of the Equality Act from the Mayor? If the CEO refuses access to a male-bodied trans woman, prompting howls of outrage from activists, will her organisation be treated by City Hall as “working within the boundaries of the law”, or accused of transphobia? Would any service provider funded by the Mayor dare take the risk?

There is one significant revelation in Linden’s letter. In a major climb-down, City Hall now accepts that the VAWG Board needs an independent Co-chair. It’s back to the status quo, in other words — but I’m not going to be reinstated. Despite offering fulsome thanks for “the vital work you have done for women and girls through your role on the VAWG Board”, City Hall has been having discussions about appointing an “external expert”. Members of the board will be ‘notified’ when an appointment is made.

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Forgive me thinking there is a bitter taste to all this. Khan went on supporting Cressida Dick, calling into question his judgement, long after I pointed out that the Met’s culture was mired in misogyny. Now Dick has gone and the country’s biggest police force has been left rudderless. Four and a half million women and girls live in London, where they face quite unacceptable levels of violence, yet the Mayor’s attachment to gender ideology appears to mean that no one at City Hall can talk about women without instantly adding ‘including trans women’.

More than ever, women in London need someone to stand up for their rights and make sure their voices are heard. As a feminist who believes in biological reality, that person evidently won’t be me.