Tuesday’s G2 carries an interview I did with Rotherham’s badger-striped MP, Sarah Champion. Space constraints meant I couldn’t dwell on the challenge she faces in her constituency from Ukip, who came a decent second in the 2012 byelection. But she admitted she is at risk from Jane Collins, a Yorkshire MEP and Ukip’s cancer-surviving contender.

“I’m concerned that she could win. I’m taking it very seriously,” said Champion, insisting that she would fight tooth and nail to continue her work with victims of child sexual exploitation in the town. She is defending a majority of 5,318, a misleadingly low figure given the inevitably poor turnout that comes with a miserable November byelection.

Ukip now has ten councillors in Rotherham and will contest all 21 wards up for grabs in May’s local elections. But people often forget that there are three parliamentary constituencies in Rotherham, not just Champion’s. Her colleagues arguably face an even bloodier battle to cling on in the general election than she does.

Sir Kevin Barron probably has most to worry about. An MP for the last 32 years, his majority has dwindled to 5,866 and a poll by Lord Ashcroft before Christmas put him just six points ahead of his Ukip challenger, with the Tories a very distant third.

Whereas Champion can say with justification that she was not involved in local Labour politics at all during the child sexual exploitation scandal, Barron represented part of Rotherham throughout the period covered by Alexis Jay’s devastating report.

This is a problem for Barron, even if he insists that he knew nothing of the scale of the town’s sex grooming problem until he read Andrew Norfolk’s reports in the Times back in 2012. Just one constituent had come to him about grooming, he told me over the phone on Tuesday, back in 2003, and it is well documented that he referred the matter to South Yorkshire police (who took no action).

Asked whether he saw Ukip as a threat, Barron said: “Clearly they did well in local government elections last year, so we ought to be concerned.” But he said Ukip’s candidate, former IT programme manager Allen Cowles, appeared to be fixated on a virtually non-existent immigration problem in Rother Valley.

Local councillor Cowles, 63, was interviewed by Kay Burley on Sky News last month and admitted he did not know how much immigration there was in the constituency, despite blaming migrants for many of the area’s woes. According to the 2011 census, just 3,573 (3.7%) out of 94,608 residents of Rother Valley were born abroad, 1,732 of whom are from other EU countries.

The issue for Barron is that plenty of research has shown that opposition to immigrants is highest in areas with the lowest levels of immigration. More than 75% of white British people are opposed to immigration in areas where fewer than 2% of residents are immigrants, a Demos study found. This compares to 60% opposition in areas where 10-15% of the population is non-British.

Barron will be hoping that his local profile will see him through. But Cowles is also portraying himself as the working class local lad done good. The son of a coal miner, he was born in nearby Wath-upon-Dearne - part of the Wentworth and Dearne constituency, currently held by Labour’s John Healey with a 13,920 majority - and worked around the country and the world before settling in Whiston in the Rother Valley.

“I should be a natural Labour voter, but the Labour party now doesn’t represent the working man in any way that I can see,” he told me. “I’m the son of a coal miner but I had the opportunity to get a good education and go to university and benefit from social mobility, but in my view all these things are now out of the grasp of the working class because of Labour’s policies on mass immigration.”

He says Barron is seen as a Labour loyalist - a negative in the aftermath of last week’s Casey report, which branded Rotherham’s Labour council a rotten pit of sexism, bullying and whistleblower-suppression. Barron is of course not a local councillor, but he has almost never rebelled against the party whips in more than three decades in parliament.

Then there’s the inevitable question of Barron’s record. “He’s been the MP for 32 years but what jobs has he brought to the Rotherham area?” asked Cowles. In response, Barron reels off a laundry list of new developments which have been built during his tenure, including the high tech Advance Manufacturing Park, and points out that unemployment is actually lower now than it was when Rother Valley’s six coal mines were open.

In my interview with Champion, she vowed to serve a maximum of two terms, saying:

I don’t think it’s healthy to be there for too long. Because the longer you’re there, the more distant you get from reality.”

I asked Barron if it wasn’t perhaps time to step back and let someone else have a go. He thought not: “I don’t agree with that analysis, quite frankly. I think the reality is that I had a South Yorkshire upbringing and no matter what I’ve done in the 32 years here, I am not divorced away from the people I grew up with and lived and worked with before I came here [to parliament].”

But is Barron really at risk of losing? He said he’d taken note of the Ashcroft poll, which put him on 40% and Ukip on 34%, but that “the only poll that matters is on 7 May.”

For the same reason, he said he didn’t particularly take solace in the fact Labour beat Ukip in every district in October’s police and crime commissioner byelections, including Rotherham. (I have my own theories about why Ukip lost that vote, which you can read here.)

One thing is for sure. The battle for Rotherham’s three seats is not going to be a pretty: Champion, Barron and Healey are already suing Collins for defamation after she claimed they knew about sexual exploitation and failed to act. With just 85 days until the general election, the gloves are very much off.