I’ll admit to building up my first meeting with Andrew somewhat in my mind, for all the wrong reasons, of course.
It was in 2012 and, although we’d joined The Times within a year of each other more than a decade earlier, we’d never actually met. I’d spent several years on the sports desk and by the time I switched to news, Andrew’s stock had risen such that he had been allowed to quit the news room in London — a city he would invariably only visit in order to watch his beloved Spurs — and move to Leeds, in his adopted home county of Yorkshire.
I’d just been appointed home news editor, but I was really quite unsure as to whether I’d be up to the job. So I viewed this first meeting with Andrew as a chance to get our relationship off to a flier, surmising that my future, because there was also a new editor of The Times incoming, would be strongly linked to how we worked together.
By the end of the meeting, in the old coffee bar in St Thomas More Square, I felt very differently. I’d just met a man so morally invested in his story, so selfless in his determination to seek justice for the victims at the heart of it, that my perspective had shifted entirely. And I realised that my job was very simple, actually: it was to help Andrew deliver his journalism.
Only the story mattered. And for the record, this one was about Andrew’s Rotherham investigation, and in particular his discovery that the then deputy leader of Rotherham council had helped to broker the handover at a petrol station, some years before, of a missing 14-year-old girl to South Yorkshire police.
The girl had been with a relative of the councillor during the time she was reported missing, and was two months pregnant. By now, almost two years into his investigation into the grooming gangs scandal in towns across the country, Andrew was no longer shocked to learn that no arrests had been made, and that the girl went “missing” again shortly after she was handed to the police.
Andrew had begun his investigation into the sexual exploitation of girls by gangs of men of predominantly Pakistani heritage, in towns like Rotherham and Rochdale, in 2010. James Harding gave him the time and space such a story required and John Witherow continued in the same vein. Most of Andrew’s obituaries, including the one in The Times, referred to his initial misgivings over the story; he didn’t want this apparent pattern of offending to be true, a feeling he attributed more than anything to a fear that it would become a dream story for the far right.
So he was well aware that his stories, appearing beneath headlines such as “Conspiracy of silence on UK sex gangs’’ and “Role of Asian gangs played down by report on thousands of sex victims’’ had the potential to prompt a narrative over which he would have no control. Was there something immoral, illegal, evil even, within these communities? Yes, of course there was; should that, then, fuel sectarian tension and outright racism? Well no. That’s not why I’m here, was Andrew’s view.
His nervousness at taking the story was a mark of the sensitivity and the feeling of responsibility that he felt keenly in the years that followed. None more so, of course, than to the victims of those gangs — and the respect and gratitude that they, and those close to them, had for Andrew was also apparent in abundance in the days after he died.
Let’s just remind ourselves of what Andrew’s journalism for The Times achieved.
Working with some of the bravest people you could wish to meet, including a youth worker who put herself at risk by handing over the restricted-access files which proved his story — and you’ll be hearing from Jayne Senior a little later — he blew the lid off that conspiracy of silence among police and social workers, two arms of the state who had repeatedly failed to act and allowed the abuse to continue for years.
His work led directly to the Alexis Jay Report, the result of an independent inquiry ordered by Rotherham council because, its chief executive admitted, “The Times won’t leave us alone.” The report confirmed the systematic grooming and sexual exploitation of more than 1,400 children in Rotherham between 1997 and 2013.
He prompted legal and institutional changes. In court, Andrew had seen trials collapse as victims were subjected to cruel cross-examination; so he met Sir Keir Starmer, at that time the director of public prosecutions, and helped the introduction of new guidelines that led to a huge increase in convictions.
You know if someone were to google Andrew Norfolk they would learn very quickly that he won the Paul Foot Award and the Orwell Prize, and various journalist of the year titles, and they are of course important accolades; but it was all the previous things I mentioned that he considered — if he ever allowed himself to be patted on the back — his achievements. (Though by the way, he preferred to pay tribute to his sources than to accept praise.)
Wading through such grimness takes its toll. It certainly did on Andrew, with whom I was privileged to form not just a close working relationship but a genuine friendship from the moment of our first meeting. But it didn’t stop him listening to victims of sexual exploitation. Although, eventually, he had to investigate and write other stories, the nature of this one meant he returned to its theme many times in the final decade of his life.
He also exposed cover-ups of such abuse at some of Britain’s most prestigious schools; scandals that I could see affected him every bit as much as Rotherham and Rochdale.
All of this, and we don’t even get to discuss his investigations into the treatment of asylum seekers in the northeast, or of corruption on councils, or of a Qatari-controlled bank providing financial services in Britain to organisations linked to Islamists, or to the curious case of Unite, the most powerful of trade unions, which gave highly questionable multimillion-pound contracts to a company run by an associate of the then general secretary, and which is still reverberating today.
Our actions inevitably define us in the minds of those we leave behind and, for those with legacies notable enough, they provide a rough sketch through which future generations might paint their own picture of who we were.
I hope with Andrew they will see the integrity with which he told stories — never for acclaim or acclaim’s sake, but for justice. I hope they will read of the families, and of the children, who trusted him, and the victims whose voices he made heard when no one in authority had listened.
I hope they will recognise the changes he helped to make — in the law, in media, in public conscience — through the power of doggedly uncovering uncomfortable truths.
His life reminds us that journalism matters. That stories matter. That the people at the heart of those stories matter, and that there are truths so painful, so inconvenient, that only those who are willing to face them head-on will effect change.
As Janice Turner wrote shortly after his death, Andrew walked into the heart of the most toxic story in Britain and stayed there for almost five years. That’s why the impact of his work survives him in every moment when justice prevails over silence.
And it’s why Andrew will correctly be remembered as one of the finest journalists in the history of The Times. It’s one of the reasons why, in conjunction with the National Council for the Training of Journalists, we’re launching the Andrew Norfolk Investigative Journalism Award.
It will give a promising young investigative reporter the chance not just to break into a highly competitive field, where they will work alongside some of Andrew’s closest colleagues, but to forge their own path in pursuit of public-interest journalism.
Andrew was an innately modest man. I’m sure he liked to be quietly recognised for his work, as we all do, but it would have been alien for him to allow the grooming gangs scandal to become a podium upon which he might stand. It was the story, he felt, of many, many girls who had been abused and betrayed and who had put their faith in him to tell their story when others had failed them so badly.
He did that. And in spite of his modesty, I know he would be immensely proud to hear that his work will now serve as the inspiration for a new generation of journalists.
