General Election: Target Towns voters on why details and decency matter
“It’s usually My Way by Frank Sinatra.”
Neil welcomes us onto his allotment in Grimsby with a cheerful explanation about the background music.
His vegetable plot is next to the cemetery, so the funeral soundtracks regularly drift over the hedge while he tends to his seedlings.
“I sometimes think they have Sinatra stuck on repeat,” he laughs.
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This is where the retired RAF engineer loves to escape and contemplate life – he’s been thinking a lot about the prime minister’s apology after leaving the D-Day commemorations early.
“Every man and his dog could have made that decision. And got it right,” he says, still clearly angry about it.
“I think that’s left him (the PM) in trouble – it could be what he’s remembered for.”
Neil is looking forward to the next leaders’ event on Sky News – The Battle For Number 10 – on Wednesday night which will come live from his adopted hometown here in north Lincolnshire.
“You want a competent leader, somebody who is all over the facts,” he says.
“If you see him stumble, or is taken by surprise, you know he is not all over his brief.”
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Neil is an undecided voter and is yet to be convinced by Sir Keir Starmer.
“He has said he is the son of a toolmaker lots of times, he has said the NHS is in his DNA quite a bit,” he says.
“But I want to know what he is actually going to do,” Neil adds.
“I haven’t heard that yet.”
In a polytunnel at the far end of the Peakesfield allotments we find a Women’s Institute (WI) coffee morning.
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They started an allotment here during lockdown and love the collaborative nature of the project.
They welcome us in for a cuppa and a slice of homemade cake.
“I like honesty,” Wendy Croft tells us.
The retired hotelier tells Sky News: “I like honourable people to put their hands up when they’ve done wrong.
“I think it’s a very difficult job and it’s a thankless job and thank God somebody does it.”
The WI can be a tough crowd.
Tony Blair was famously slow hand clapped by a Women’s Institute audience when a speech he was giving became too political in 2000.
It is a good litmus test for any politician.
Josephine Kweka, a retired health visitor
WI member Josephine Kweka is a retired health visitor – she tells us she wants to hear more about the leaders’ plans for the NHS and tackling poverty.
She tells Sky News she is also very wary of sales pitches from politicians.
“At my age you don’t trust everything.
“If people are willing (to serve) I will be listening, but I don’t have to believe everything.
“Whoever is elected is going to try harder, better… they won’t just do business as usual. They will work hard.”
She tells Sky News about the qualities she is watching out for.
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“When people are truthful, and they have a proper plan and then follow the plan.
“Listening and sharing leadership are important too,” she adds.
The Battle For Number 10 will be hosted by Sky’s Political Editor Beth Rigby live from Grimsby on Wednesday night at 7:30pm and will feature in-depth interviews with both Rishi Sunak and Sir Keir Starmer as well as extended Q&A sessions with the audience.
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Whitehall officials tried to convince Michael Gove to go to court to cover up the grooming scandal in 2011, Sky News can reveal.
Dominic Cummings, who was working for Lord Gove at the time, has told Sky News that officials in the Department for Education (DfE) wanted to help efforts by Rotherham Council to stop a national newspaper from exposing the scandal.
In an interview with Sky News, Mr Cummings said that officials wanted a “total cover-up”.
Politics latest: Grooming gangs findings unveiled
The revelation shines a light on the institutional reluctance of some key officials in central government to publicly highlight the grooming gang scandal.
In 2011, Rotherham Council approached the Department for Education asking for help following inquiries by The Times. The paper’s then chief reporter, the late Andrew Norfolk, was asking about sexual abuse and trafficking of children in Rotherham.
The council went to Lord Gove’s Department for Education for help. Officials considered the request and then recommended to Lord Gove’s office that the minister back a judicial review which might, if successful, stop The Times publishing the story.
Lord Gove rejected the request on the advice of Mr Cummings. Sources have independently confirmed Mr Cummings’ account.
Education Secretary Michael Gove in 2011. Pic: PA
Mr Cummings told Sky News: “Officials came to me in the Department of Education and said: ‘There’s this Times journalist who wants to write the story about these gangs. The local authority wants to judicially review it and stop The Times publishing the story’.
“So I went to Michael Gove and said: ‘This council is trying to actually stop this and they’re going to use judicial review. You should tell the council that far from siding with the council to stop The Times you will write to the judge and hand over a whole bunch of documents and actually blow up the council’s JR (judicial review).’
“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.”
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Grooming gangs victim speaks out
The judicial review wanted by officials would have asked a judge to decide about the lawfulness of The Times’ publication plans and the consequences that would flow from this information entering the public domain.
A second source told Sky News that the advice from officials was to side with Rotherham Council and its attempts to stop publication of details it did not want in the public domain.
One of the motivations cited for stopping publication would be to prevent the identities of abused children entering the public domain.
There was also a fear that publication could set back the existing attempts to halt the scandal, although incidents of abuse continued for many years after these cases.
Sources suggested that there is also a natural risk aversion amongst officials to publicity of this sort.
Read more on grooming gangs:
What we do and don’t know from the data
A timeline of the scandal
Mr Cummings, who ran the Vote Leave Brexit campaign and was Boris Johnson’s right-hand man in Downing Street, has long pushed for a national inquiry into grooming gangs to expose failures at the heart of government.
He said the inquiry, announced today, “will be a total s**tshow for Whitehall because it will reveal how much Whitehall worked to try and cover up the whole thing.”
He also described Mr Johnson, with whom he has a long-standing animus, as a “moron’ for saying that money spent on inquiries into historic child sexual abuse had been “spaffed up the wall”.
Asked by Sky News political correspondent Liz Bates why he had not pushed for a public inquiry himself when he worked in Number 10 in 2019-20, Mr Cummings said Brexit and then COVID had taken precedence.
“There are a million things that I wanted to do but in 2019 we were dealing with the constitutional crisis,” he said.
The Department for Education and Rotherham Council have been approached for comment.
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