Labour MP shuts down grooming gangs ‘stitch-up’ claim as pressure piles on Jess Phillips

But Natalie Fleet, Labour MP for Bolsover, backed her colleague and said she was intent on delivering justice for the victims.

Mrs Phillips has successfully campaigned for a law change which comes into force on Monday to stop rapists who make their victims pregnant from having access to their children.

It emerged on Thursday that the five victims had contacted Keir Starmer and the Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, outlining a range of conditions for their continued participation.

They said Phillips has “devoted her life to hearing and amplifying the voices of women and girls who would otherwise have been unheard”.

One of the group, Samantha Walker-Roberts, who was abused in Oldham from the age of 12, has chosen to waive her right to anonymity. The other four have used pseudonyms and call themselves Scarlett, Caitlin, Claire and Katie.

She told today’s Chopper’s Political Podcast: “How I see it is: we’ve got a Safeguarding Minister who’s been campaigning on laws like mine for years, who has made sure that we’ve got people like me in Parliament. She cares. She cares deeply.

“She will not let there be a stitch-up. She will make sure there’s a proper inquiry with a proper chair. She will never, ever let us have cheap political fixes.

“So – get a chair in quickly. She wants it to be the right chair. She wants it to be the person who’s actually going to do the work. She wants victims to be listened to.

“She’s so determined for it not to be a cover-up or a stitch-up that she’s made sure she isn’t having anything to do with it. And this is all being run by an independent external charity.”

Ms Fleet criticised Tory leader Kemi Badenoch for using grooming gang victims “to have a go at the Government” after failing to help them when she was Women’s Minister for two years.

Fleet – who entered Parliament at last year’s general election – has previously spoken of her experience of becoming pregnant at 15.

Fleet said: “If you’ve got into a position where you’re groomed in the first place, things have probably been quite tricky.

“I’ve got a history of homelessness and domestic violence – things that I don’t have to talk about because other people do. Thank God – I only talk about rape because nobody else does.

“Life has been quite tough, and you’re always... I’ve been taught not to trust the police, not to trust people that... So they have been let down for so long. And then this is what really, really gets to me. The last Government, Kemi Badenoch, was Women and Equalities Minister. She never mentioned grooming. Now it’s advantageous to her.

“She’s using victims to have a go at the Government. When she had the power to help us, she didn’t. She left us. She was another one on the long list of people who let us down. Now she’s using us again.

“So I see these victims who don’t trust Government, police, the establishment – and we are part of that. I know that Jess has reached out to them.

“I’d like them to get to a place where they can trust Jess and see that she’s doing the right things for the right reasons, because she won’t let there be a cover-up. And I’d like them to have faith in an independent inquiry.”

A law change on Monday, successfully campaigned for by Fleet, will mean that rapists who get their victims pregnant will no longer be allowed automatic access to their child.

She said: “We’re now making sure that where there’s rape, where there’s a conviction of rape, parental responsibility will automatically be removed. Even better still, if there isn’t a conviction – because they’re so hard to get – but the court thinks that this may have been conceived by rape, they make a referral to the local authority.

“The local authority then removes parental responsibility in cooperation with the mother. So we’re saying: we see you. We know how tough this is. We know that this is really traumatic, and we’re just going to do this for you. We don’t want you to be re-traumatised by this.”