Good morning. It's three minutes after ten and it's a day that I can't quite remember the like of.

A story that's been around for ages, it's been around for so long that we've perhaps become a little calcified in our consciousness of it.

It, of course, is a story that reaches to the very top of the British establishment, to the heart of the royal family itself.

It involves a man who certainly used to be the Queen's favourite son, according to reports and insiders.

And it involves what it occurred to me this morning, I think for the first time, is a grooming gang.

We are talking about a grooming gang. Jeffrey Epstein and

Gilane Maxwell ran an international grooming gang. She has found to have, or has been found,

to have facilitated the sexual abuse of children. This is precisely the sort of horrors that unfolded in English towns like

Rochdale and Rotherham. And yet because it is being undertaken by rich people, possibly rich

white people, Tom Sawbrett can take a call at the end of his program there from somebody

seeking to defend one of the,

um, accused and to malign one of the victims. That didn't happen with the grooming gangsters. Well,

do you know, it did actually when you read into it and you speak to Nazir Afzal, who may be on

the program a little later, about what happened and how it was allowed to happen,

there was a perception that even though these girls were often underage, not always,

you can be trafficked and groomed even if you've gone beyond the age of consent.

You can still be a victim of trafficking in criminal terms,

even if you have passed the age of consent.

But one of the reasons things were not properly investigated was because of the portrayal of the teenage girls as somehow being, um, as somehow asking for it, or being

the architects of their own abuse. And that's what I literally just heard at the end of Tom's show.

I mean, it's actually staggering, isn't it? Maybe I'm doing that fellow at this service,

and he would have been defending the taxi drivers in Rotherham as well,

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