Under-fire Jess Phillips has been blasted after she blamed Liz Truss for her being roundly vilified over the grooming gangs scandal. The minister for violence against women and girls received abuse online after not backing a full national inquiry into the furore, with tech billionaire Elon Musk branding her a “rape genocide apologist” and an “evil witch”.
In an interview with Victoria Derbyshire on BBC Newsnight on Monday, Ms Phillips addressed the furious reaction she received surrounding Mr Musk’s comments. Pointing her finger, she said: “It was actually Liz Truss – she gets forgotten in this story – who started it, and then Elon Musk carried it on.” But the former Tory prime minister brutally hit back, writing on X: “I accused @jessphillips of excusing masked Islamist thugs – which she did.
“And of rejecting Oldham’s calls for a Government inquiry into grooming gangs – which she did.
“It was not a ‘far-Right bandwagon’.
“It was about holding her to account for her complete dereliction of duty.”
Commenters on X were quick to denounce Ms Phillips, with one saying: “The amount of deflection from the likes of @jessphillips is going to be off the scales!”
Another said: “They are incapable of being responsible. They have to blame someone so they pick the ‘in vogue’ bad people.”
A damning report published on Monday by Baroness Louise Casey revealed that crimes committed by Pakistani or Asian paedophile rings were covered up to avoid inflaming community tensions.
She even revealed that on one form about a crime involving a child, the word “Pakistani” was erased using Tipp-Ex.
In a humiliating U-turn, Labour caved into demands for a national probe as Baroness Casey’s bombshell report was released.
In the same Newsnight interview, Ms Phillips defended Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer at the time for claiming that Tories such as Kemi Badenoch and Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp were jumping on a Right-wing bandwagon.
She denied Derbyshire’s suggestion that it was a “knee-jerk reaction simply because they were politicians on the Right”, saying: “No, I think it’s because they’re politicians who had never cared and thought it was politically expedient.”