The Prime Minister Promoted the Woman Who Misled Parliament Over the Rape Gang Cover-Up.

Why Is Dame Antonia Romeo Not In The Dock?

The most senior civil servant in Britain appeared before Parliament and failed to disclose that police forces had received no instruction to preserve evidence for the grooming gangs inquiry. That is not a matter of judgment. It is misconduct in public office. The question is why nobody with the power to act has done anything about it.

The Legal Test

Misconduct in public office is a common law offence carrying a maximum sentence of life imprisonment. It is committed when a public officer, acting in the course of their duties, wilfully neglects those duties or wilfully misconducts themselves to a degree that amounts to an abuse of the public's trust, and does so without reasonable excuse.

Each element matters. The person must hold public office and must be acting in that capacity when the misconduct occurs. The misconduct must be wilful, meaning either deliberately wrong or committed with reckless indifference as to whether it is wrong. Simple negligence will not suffice. The courts have been explicit on this. The conduct must also reach a high threshold of seriousness, so far below acceptable standards as to amount to an abuse of the public's trust in the office holder. And there must be no reasonable excuse for what was done.

The threshold is deliberately high, requiring conduct so far below acceptable standards that a jury could find it an abuse of public trust. Poor judgment or errors of process will not meet it.

Dame Antonia Romeo meets every element.

What Romeo Did

In June 2025, Baroness Casey published her national audit into group-based child sexual exploitation. Among her twelve recommendations was a clear requirement. Local authorities, police forces and other relevant agencies were required not to destroy any relevant records. Required. Not advised.

The Home Office did not write to the National Police Chiefs' Council until the 14th of January 2026. Seven months after Casey required it. In those seven months, forces across the country operated under their existing deletion policies. Records relevant to the most significant child sexual abuse inquiry in British history may have been destroyed.

In December 2025, before Robbie Moore's Freedom of Information requests had produced their results, Dame Antonia Romeo appeared before the Home Affairs Select Committee. She was then the permanent secretary at the Home Office, the most senior civil servant in the department responsible for the inquiry. Parliament was asking, directly, whether the evidence base for that inquiry had been protected.

She told the committee the department expected records to be preserved. She did not tell them that no formal instruction had gone to police forces, or that Bradford and other areas had received nothing. She knew, or the means to know were available to her, that Casey's requirement had not been met for six months. She offered reassurance she was not in a position to give.

What she did before that committee was wilful misconduct by a senior public officer at a moment of the gravest public importance.

The Rules She Was Bound By

When civil servants appear before select committees they do so under obligations that are not optional. The Civil Service Code requires honesty. The guidance governing civil servants giving evidence to select committees, the Osmotherly Rules, states that factual elements of evidence must be accurate and that answers must not mislead. The 1994 Treasury and Civil Service Committee put it plainly. The knowledge that civil servants will not lie or knowingly mislead Parliament is one of the most powerful tools MPs have in holding the executive to account.

Romeo did not lie in the narrow technical sense. She offered a reassurance that was true in the most limited possible reading, that the department did expect records to be preserved, while omitting the fact that it had taken no formal action to require it. That is misleading by omission. In the context of a parliamentary inquiry into a potential catastrophic failure of evidence preservation, it is a betrayal of the constitutional function of parliamentary scrutiny.

The Hillsborough Law Irony

This government has introduced the Public Office Accountability Bill, known as the Hillsborough Law. It creates a statutory duty of candour for public officials. Under that legislation it would be a criminal offence for a public official to mislead proceedings or inquiries where they know or ought to know their act is seriously improper. The Bill was introduced in direct response to exactly the kind of institutional opacity that has protected the powerful at the expense of victims across decades of public scandal.

Romeo's appearance before the committee predates that legislation. Under the law as it stood in December, her conduct falls to be assessed under the existing common law offence of misconduct in public office. The government that employs her as cabinet secretary is simultaneously legislating to make conduct of precisely this kind a statutory criminal offence. The Hillsborough Law exists because of people like Dame Antonia Romeo. The woman whose conduct it would now criminalise is running the civil service.

The Structural Problem

Romeo is now the cabinet secretary. The most powerful civil servant in the country. She is responsible for the machinery that would investigate any referral of her conduct. No MP has referred her for investigation. The Civil Service investigates itself, the police would need a referral, and the CPS would need a referral. Without political will to make that happen, nothing moves.

This is the design. The accountability system for senior civil servants in this country runs through ministers, who answer to Parliament, which is run by the government that appointed those civil servants. When the government has every reason not to investigate, the investigation does not happen.

The Pattern

Romeo is not the first senior official to face no consequence for conduct connected to this scandal. Nobody at the top has faced criminal investigation for anything connected to the grooming gang cover-up. Councils suppressed evidence, police forces refused to investigate, and officials briefed against survivors. None of them have faced personal criminal accountability. Accountability in this scandal has always been applied downward, to frontline workers, to processes, to systems, never upward to the people who made the decisions that allowed the cover-up to persist.

The Home Office buried a report in 2020 that was used for years to dismiss the ethnic reality of the rape gangs. Nobody was charged. IICSA spent seven years and £186 million and excluded the towns where the gangs operated, then Jess Phillips refused Oldham's request and dismantled the five local inquiries. Still nobody was charged. And now the permanent secretary of the Home Office appeared before Parliament and failed to disclose that the evidence base for the national inquiry had not been protected.

Nobody has been charged.

This is a system working exactly as it is designed to work, to protect the people at the top while the children who were raped in Rotherham, Rochdale, Telford, Oldham and Bradford wait for justice that never comes.

Dame Antonia Romeo should be referred for investigation and prosecuted for misconduct in public office. The case meets the legal threshold, the conduct is documented, and the harm is measurable.

The only question is whether anyone in this country with the power to act will summon the courage to do it. On the available evidence, we already know the answer. This is why the fight belongs to us. Without us, the cover up would never have been exposed.

I’m Raja Miah MBE. For seven years, I led a campaign that exposed how senior Labour politicians helped protect Pakistani rape gangs. The people of my town helped force the national inquiry.

You won’t see me on the BBC. You won’t read my work in the legacy press. That’s not an accident. I take this to a place from where there is no coming back.

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