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  8.  » I exposed Sadiq Khan’s grooming gangs cover-up – major update just made my jaw drop

Zak Garner-Purkis – The Daily Express July 5, 2026

Sir Sadiq Khan’s spokesperson effectively called us liars when we first approached him about London grooming gangs in September 2025.

In fact, you could say the Mayor of London’s claim that our story was “false, malicious and politically motivated” went further, suggesting that these were lies in bad faith – a dog whistle on a sensitive topic.

The problem for him was that we weren’t going to be intimidated. The evidence was there and, as we kept pushing, we found more and more.

By November, it was clear that claiming anything was “false” was untenable. The Times was quoting our reporting in critiques of the mayor, and the story had been followed up by the vast majority of national newspapers.

In response, Sir Sadiq somehow pivoted to claiming that he’d been telling the police to “leave no stone unturned” in seeking justice for the victims of grooming gangs the whole time.

It would be a laughable u-turn if it weren’t on a subject so dark and disturbing.

But part of the reason he was able to do this 180 was that the authorities in London have a long record of ignoring glaring evidence of grooming gangs through bureaucracy.

The most glaring example of this came at the last independent inquiry into child sexual abuse.

Tower Hamlets in East London was one of the places selected for scrutiny as part of the inquiry and, during the course of the evidence hearings, multiple clear-cut cases were introduced as evidence.

Senior officers from the Metropolitan Police were presented with these examples and, in response, they didn’t recognise them as such because they “used a different definition”.

Unlike the rest of the country, the threshold the Met used for what constituted a rape gang was based on similar criteria used to assess organised crime groups. So, even though there was evidence of a group working together to exploit children, they didn’t qualify as a ‘gang’.

This was a ludicrous state of affairs – a technicality that denied the blindingly obvious fact that London had the same type of rape gangs that had been exposed around the country.

It might have sounded ridiculous. But given the Mayor of London claimed in the years that followed there was “no indication” that grooming gangs existed and the Met Police Commissioner said it was “not something” the force was “seeing” maybe we shouldn’t be surprised.

You’d think, given both the force and the mayor now acknowledge the existence of grooming gangs in the capital, that it would put an end to this type of avoidance through bureaucratic process.

But I was shocked to see that last weekend, a strikingly similar approach appeared to have been adopted, albeit in reverse.

The Sunday Telegraph has claimed that some 4,000 cases had been passed by the Met Police to the National Crime Agency project examining grooming gang investigations that were prematurely abandoned.

The problem is that the number sounds ludicrously high, even when considering London’s population compared to other areas of the country.

That is, until I found the explanation for the discrepancy, from a source who spoke to the Standard for a follow-up article.

The paper did not disclose who the unnamed figure was connected to, but said they had been told “the criteria of cases that had been identified for review were ‘much broader’ than the profile most typically associated with commentary or reporting on grooming gangs.'”

Why would you do that? All that would really do is muddy the waters and dilute the impact.

The most obvious explanation in my eyes is that it is essentially using the “flood the zone” tactic pioneered by Donald Trump’s one-time advisor, Steve Bannon. Flooding the zone is a political strategy that uses large volumes of information to disorientate opponents and distract the public from undesirable details.

What’s ironic is that we’ve flipped from having criteria that identify no grooming gangs to criteria that find too many.

The sliver – and it is a sliver – of hope is that the grooming gangs inquiry will examine London.

We can only hope they call Sir Sadiq Khan as a witness and grill him on the unholy mess.

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