Jeremy Clarkson has been backed by a TV legend amid calls for a public inquiry into the grooming gangs.
Monty Python and Fawlty Towers actor John Cleese has offered his support to the Clarkson’s Farm presenter.
The 66-year-old former Top Gear host, who lives in the Oxfordshire Cotswolds, waded into the grooming gangs scandal in a column for The Sun last year.
And after the comments were resurfaced on social media, Mr Cleese said: “100 per cent support from Cleese.”
John Cleese (Image: Dave J Hogan/Hogan Media)
Mr Clarkson wrote at the time: “I do not believe we need a public inquiry into the grooming gangs.
“Public inquiries are just rooms full of people who deploy mock incredulity in the hopes they’ll end up on the Six O’Clock News.
“And we simply don’t need a dusty old baroness to tell us what the problem is, because we already know.”
Mr Clarkson said that junior policemen “know that if he reports the crime to his superiors, he will be accused of racism and get cancelled. That’s what has to be addressed”.
He added: “We need to remove the shackles of political correctness from the police.
“We need to explain that it’s not racist to investigate a rapist. Do that, and we’re halfway there.”
Mr Cleese said in support: “Islamophobia, a word much bandied about by Sadiq Khan, is used by Islamists to stifle legitimate criticism of their culture
“It should be replaced by the more neutral word ‘Islamoscepticism’.”
In March, the government selected the phrase “anti-Muslim hostility” instead of Islamophobia, noting that the choice reflects a balance of stakeholder perspectives.
Operation Bullfinch, a joint investigation launched in May 2011 by Thames Valley Police and Oxfordshire County Council, resulted in the convictions of 21 men for serious offences against children and young people spanning the late 1990s to the late 2000s.
The extent of catastrophic failures by authorities – predominantly police and Oxfordshire County Council’s child services department – to realise dozens of girls were being groomed, abused, raped or prostituted were laid bare in a damning report from 2015.
Young people were subject to rape, trafficking for sexual exploitation and arranged for prostitution.
The Serious Case Review – ordered because of the Bullfinch scandal for which seven men were jailed for a minimum of 95 years – showed the professionals charged with protecting six girls routinely ignored signs of abuse, even when they found the underage victims with adult men.
But the gangs are not just limited to Oxford historically, with instances in Rotherham, Rochdale, Derby, Oldham, Bradford, and Keighley, as well as London.
Chaired by former Children’s Commissioner Baroness Anne Longfield, a public inquiry was launched earlier this year in April.
