Lord Laming’s review of child protection ordered after Baby P appears to have been leaked to the News of the World ahead of its official publication on Thursday.

Whether or not the content reported by the paper is genuine (one authoritative source has suggested to Community Care the NotW is merely guessing) it raises the question of the motivation behind the story. A clue could lie in the way the main political parties have used the tabloids for point-scoring over Baby P. Was the “leak” placed by the Tories in yet another attempt to attack Labour’s record on child protection since Victoria Climbie?

Unsuprisingly, the Tories have used The NoW’s sister paper, The Sun, to attack Labour on the issue before. After roasting Gordon Brown over the handling of the Baby P case at Prime Minister’s Question Time, Tory leader David Cameron wrote in The Sun criticising the government’s decision not to publish the full serious case review.

Children’s secretary Ed Balls retaliated by making several appearances in both The Sun and the News of the World as a way of reassuring readers that the government WAS doing something.

So is the “leak” of the Laming report just another twist in this tabloid tit-for-tat? The News of the World claims Laming will warn that “the government’s obsession with reports, performance indicators and middle managers has left social workers isolated and overworked. As a result, social services are too slow to take children into care.”

As this story is a ”leak” the government would not comment out of principle, leaving NoW readers without any spin. It is a way of presenting the story in its most damaging form – before Laming’s review is published alongside a ministerial statement on Thursday.

It’s hard not to see the story in The Sun’s stablemate as a political missile as the Tories’ ratings continue to rise. The Sun, after all, has been unrelenting in its condemnation of Labour’s track record on child protection – and made Labour-led Haringey a punchbag for everything it thinks is wrong. In the words of The Sun’s former political editor Trevor Kavanagh on Baby P:

This avoidable tragedy tells us about the way the Left works when, as in Haringey, it has unbridled power.

This could sound like a conspiracy theory – perhaps the NoW reporter was just desperate to get the report but couldn’t, so made it up to silence the news editor’s undoubtedly desperate demands to fill that dreaded void of a newsless Sunday. 

But if the contents are at all accurate the blow to Labour will be hard indeed.  

Reader comments

1. Liberal Conspiracy

   New post: Baby P back to being a political football http://tinyurl.com/amfcbc

   [Original tweet]

Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.