The First Novel to Explore England’s Muslim Grooming Gangs Scandal: “Bothelford’s Gone” by Edward McLaren

Bothelford’s Gone
Edward McLaren
Maldon Press, 2026

From the publisher: Edward McLaren is an academic, journalist, and novelist living in Oxford. He draws upon a wide range of influences, blending myth, politics, and romanticism.

I don’t tend to read many novels, but Edward McLaren’s Bothelford’s Gone is a rare exception. I couldn’t put it down. The euphemistically termed “Muslim Grooming Gang Scandal” may count as the most serious crime committed against the English people in their entire history. As the prologue to the novel points out, between the 1950s – when Muslims began coming to England in significant numbers – and today, over a million under-age English girls have been groomed, often via the use of drugs, into becoming sex slaves for Muslim men.

The details of what has happened and its causes – such as the infiltration of the authorities, including the police, by leftists and Muslims, the pathetic conformism of English people and their desperation not to be called “racist,” and a related materialistic culture that turns us all into disconnected drones with little to live for – is so painful that, for many people, the easiest thing to do is to put it out of our minds. It is something that happens to “Chavs” – the British term for “White Trash” – and they are so genetically incompetent and sexually incontinent that they somehow deserve it.

It is for this reason that Mr McLaren’s idea of exploring this on-going attack on the English people in the form of a short novel is so compelling. It allows us to understand the different kinds of characters involved in this scandal; to enter their minds and feel what they do. Bothelford is a fictional every-town, seemingly somewhere in the north of England. Its name is an allusion to the lost town of Bothelford in Cumbria, a town which disappeared from the record in the Middle Ages. Mr McLaren, a Gen Z author himself, describes the ancient history of the town, its pagan roots, and even how its central church is haunted by a plaintive female ghost. Until very recently, the people of Bothelford had a strong connection to the ghosts of its past, but this has been broken by the soul-annihilating decadence of the modern world: binging the internet via smart phones, vile and foreign takeaway food, mass non-White immigration making the town unrecognisable, ethnic divisions even within classrooms, and the degree to which, like most of the characters in Nineteen Eighty Four, most people just want a quiet life and will tell themselves lies in order to achieve this internally and cope with living through the self-caused destruction of their birthright; they are so materially wealthy, and emasculated by the female-run education system, that they don’t feel the urge to fight.

Mr McLaren takes us through each of these reasons: “There was also a third power involved: denial. For it was always easier for the sorry, pale victims of these spirits to turn to their phones, to consuming and making porn, than ever to acknowledge their displacement and the on-going colonisation of Bothelford. . . . Few allowed themselves to imagine that the black mother with three babies who passed their window, followed by an older white mother with only one, might mean something overwhelmingly significant.”

The central character, a 15 year-old school boy called Jack Grundon (an Anglo-Saxon name meaning “green hill”), is highly intelligent, to the extent that his school thinks he might be capable of one day attending Cambridge. Even his conformist mother understands that school was a safer and more pleasant place when she attended it, but, like the donkey in Animal Farm, is an expert at forcing herself to ignore or play down what she sees with her own eyes, if only to maintain her sanity. In moments of awareness of the invasion, “Mary remembered Hitler, she remembered Enoch Powell, the secular sin of white racism, and tried not to think about it.” Jack, in return, wonders why he is “condemned” to “live alongside terrifying young men” who have nothing in common with him and will prey upon him when his mother “as a child dealt with nothing of the sort.”

Slowly, Jack has an awakening to the full horrors of what is happening in his town and in particular to his friend Agatha. Matrix-like, the superficial and dysfunctional town of Bothelford falls away to reveal the reality: his friend Agatha has been groomed, raped and passed around Bothelford’s Muslim community. Even with the names of the characters, Mr McLaren is determined to always peel back the connection to a deep history that English people all share, and has Jack muse on the meaning of the name “Agatha” for this reason.

As in some real-life cases, Muslim police officers and teachers are complicit in Agatha’s torture, Muslim school children are much older than they seem, and the lie is given to the nonsense cliché that “We’re all human.” Jack realises that they are simply not like us. They think like Mafia dons and the humiliation of colonialism has left them with a visceral hatred for White people. For them, the “grooming gangs” are an act of war, a righteous vengeance on White people who have allowed women – and thus suicidal concern with empathy and unmet maternal feelings – to dominate their society and, so, allow Muslims in by the millions. Mr McLaren does a particularly impressive job of allowing his Muslim characters to articulate how they feel; why they are treating under-age English girls so horrifically.

Without giving away too much of the plot, the book culminates in an inspiring call to arms. What should Jack do after the terrible things his investigation has put him through? When our ancestors settled England, or even as recently as World War II, the notion that the English would permit themselves to dominated by shrill women and displaced by Muslims was something that danced around only in the mind of a madman; yet it has come to pass: “After all, the world we live in now was once nothing more than a madman’s dream!” Likewise, those who suggest now that the current Clown World can be reversed are widely dismissed as “mad.” For Mr McLaren, the English shouldn’t be too downhearted. The madman’s dream came true once, so why shouldn’t it again? Only this time it will involve the English reclaiming and fighting for at least part of their inheritance.