The award-winning reporter Andrew Norfolk had only just retired from the Times when he agreed to appear on one of its podcasts, The Story, to talk about Elon Musk, the businessman and adviser to the US president, at the start of this year. “This wasn’t how I intended to spend my 60th birthday,” he said.
Not only did Norfolk, who has died suddenly, refuse to promote his work on social media – he spent only two weeks on Twitter in 2010 as part of a deal to watch the World Cup final in South Africa – but his dogged, forensic reporting was in so many ways the antithesis to Musk’s inflammatory online commentary.
It was Musk’s wild accusations about the grooming gangs in Britain and the failures of not just the authorities, but the media, that forced Norfolk briefly out of his retirement.
“The farcical attacks on mainstream journalism don’t make sense when it comes to this story,” he said. Norfolk knew that better than most – his investigations into grooming gangs in Rotherham and cities in the north of England led to a public inquiry, which found that 1,400 children had been abused over a 16-year period. His work led to him being garlanded with awards, including the Paul Foot and Orwell prizes for journalism.
When the Labour MP Ann Cryer first raised the alarm in 2003 about young girls in Keighley being groomed outside local schools, Norfolk shied away from signs of an emerging pattern of abuse among the perpetrators, for fear of feeding into “a dream story for the far right”.
The story of Rotherham was largely of vulnerable young white girls, many of them in care, being abused by men, mostly of Pakistani Muslim heritage. Years later, another case involving a 14-year-old girl being “passed around” a group of men, while regarded with something Norfolk considered contempt by police and social workers, led him to decide “to get over my fear that this story is impossible to cover”.
His initial front page story in the Times in January 2011, headlined “Conspiracy of silence on UK sex gangs”, identified 17 cases in 13 places where 56 men had been convicted.
The government launched an inquiry and his then editor James Harding put Norfolk on the story full time. His next investigations were all based around Rotherham.
In one, a girl who had gone missing from a children’s home 15 times in two months, was taken to a house in Greater Manchester and raped by 50 men in one night. Another told of the police, on finding a nearly naked and drunk 13-year-old girl and seven men in a flat at 2.30am, convicting the girl of being drunk and disorderly, while failing to question the men.
“The exposure to so many horrific cases of manipulation, rape and assault was gruelling,” Harding said. “Through it all, [Norfolk] was selfless and softly spoken – except on the page.”
Norfolk was accused of racism and suffered a torrent of abuse, including two death threats. He always said the plight of the victims and their survival kept him going, but he hated the suggestion that he was being racist, pointing out that an awareness that most child abuse is carried out in Britain by white men should not stop the reporting of such abuse. “In the way most white men don’t abuse their daughters and most priests don’t abuse choir boys, not all Kashmiri men behave like this,” he said.
When I interviewed him for the Guardian in London in 2014, I found him deeply uncomfortable at being the focus of any story; he stressed he was a “reporter, not [a] columnist or opinion-former”. Yet, we eventually sat talking for three hours, perched on uncomfortable bar stools in a hotel near King’s Cross, as he discussed the importance of the investigation.
I described him as “that increasingly rare thing, an old-school shoe-leather reporter; his investigation of what appeared to be a local issue ended up not only on national front pages and news bulletins, but questioning accepted truths and holding the powerful to account”.
Even then Norfolk, a chain-smoker with the blinking demeanour of someone who spent too many hours working, was showing signs of the distress and exhaustion that led him a year later to ask to be taken off the story. Yet the controversy never really went away, nor the attacks on him. Nor his concern for his victims. In this year’s podcast, he said: “Every single child who falls victim to these men is one child too many.”
Although Norfolk rarely moved south after studying English at Durham University, he was born in Canterbury, Kent, to Olive (nee Bellerby) and David Norfolk, a headteacher and Methodist lay preacher, and went to Kent college, a local private school. The family moved to Harrogate, North Yorkshire, when his father took up a post at Ashville college, where Andrew completed his schooling. After leaving university, in 1989 he joined the Scarborough Evening News, then in 1995 moved to the Yorkshire Post.
His award-winning reporting of a corruption scandal in Doncaster led to a job on the Times in 2000 but, after two years there, he threatened to resign unless he could relocate to Leeds. He became chief investigative reporter a decade later, investigating abuse at some of the UK’s leading boarding schools.
After being showered with awards, including journalist of the year at the 2014 Press awards, he told me he had been happiest on his first newspaper job at a local paper. He loved the connection to readers and sense of making a difference, and admitted: “I’m not from the London media world.”
Suffering from rheumatoid arthritis, he retired in October 2024 after 35 years as a journalist. His work brought changes in the law and guidelines that had hampered prosecutions, and a recognition that many of the most vulnerable women and girls in society were being ignored. Rotherham council’s explanation that it had ordered an independent inquiry into grooming gangs because “the Times won’t leave us alone” was a statement Norfolk described as “in itself … vindication for being a journalist”.
In Rotherham and beyond, he trawled through archives and documents and gained the trust of people who had learned to trust no one. “It was an uncomfortable story,” he said, “but sometimes uncomfortable truths are the ones for journalists to tell because if we don’t, no one else will.”
Norfolk is survived by two brothers and a sister.
