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Before Anyone Crowns Burnham, Ask Him About Operation Augusta. The Westminster commentary has settled on its preferred narrative. Andy Burnham is the answer. The King of the North. The popular, relatable, effective politician who can reconnect Labour with the voters it has lost. Union leaders are backing him. MPs are championing him. The NEC has cleared his path. Nobody is asking the question his own record demands. Operation Augusta was a Greater Manchester Police investigation into a grooming gang of up to 100 members who abused at least 57 children, some as young as 12, all in the care of Manchester social services. The operation was shut down. The official reason was lack of resources, despite Greater Manchester Police having gained over 1,000 additional officers in the preceding years. Of 97 individuals identified as suspects, three were imprisoned. That was recorded as a success. When the subsequent review was published and MPs wrote to Burnham challenging him on the failures, his response was described in Hansard as supine. He accepted the lack of resources argument without challenge. MPs noted there was no sense of injustice in his reply. The minutes from the meeting where the decision to end Operation Augusta was taken had disappeared. The minutes from Manchester City Council had disappeared at the same time. The Rochdale review, which Burnham also commissioned, identified 96 men still deemed a potential risk to children who remained at large. That review covered failures between 2004 and 2013, documenting multiple failed investigations and apparent institutional indifference to the plight of hundreds of girls, mainly white, from poor backgrounds. Burnham described it as a lamentable strategic failure. He expressed anger. He called for a duty of candour on public servants. What he did not do was explain what his mayoralty had done to locate and prosecute the 96 men still identified as dangers to children. To be precise, Burnham commissioned these reviews. But commissioning a review of institutional failure is not the same as confronting it. The reviews documented failures that occurred both before and during his mayoralty. His response to parliamentary challenge on those failures was judged inadequate by MPs who examined it. Now the same political class that failed to press him on those questions is preparing to hand him the keys to Downing Street. Union leaders who represent workers in the communities where these failures occurred are backing him without condition. MPs who sat through the Hansard debate on Operation Augusta are championing him as the clean candidate. The media is treating his popularity as a sufficient qualification. The parallel with the Mandelson affair is not superficial. The central argument of this affair has been that institutional accountability has been systematically avoided by a political class more concerned with managing consequences than confronting them. The grooming gang failures in Greater Manchester represent exactly that pattern applied to the most vulnerable children in the country. Girls in care were failed. Suspects were identified and not prosecuted. Evidence disappeared. The response was described as supine. A political culture that cannot ask these questions of its preferred successor has not learned anything from the crisis that is forcing the current Prime Minister out. Changing the leader without changing the culture of institutional evasion simply reproduces the problem with a more popular face attached. Before anyone in Westminster, in the unions or in the media decides that Andy Burnham is the answer, they should read the Hansard record of Operation Augusta. They should ask what happened to those 96 men. And they should require a better answer than the one he gave the last time he was asked. "Operation Augusta was a Greater Manchester Police investigation into a grooming gang of up to 100 members who abused at least 57 children, some as young as 12"