Does Nigel Farage want to let men into women’s prisons?

What is a woman? Can a woman have a penis or a man a vagina? Should ‘transwomen’ – ie, men – be allowed into women-only spaces? Lob one of these simple-sounding questions at a politician and you’ll tend to get babbling incoherence in return.

Who could forget Keir Starmer’s baffling claim that while 99.9 per cent of women don’t have cocks beneath their frocks, there are potentially thousands of women out there who secretly do. Or David Lammy’s wild speculation that a man can grow a cervix – if given the right hormones. Yet it seems it’s not just left-leaning politicians who are struggling with the facts of biology. Now, the ‘woman question’ has claimed its most unexpected victim yet: Reform UK leader Nigel Farage.

🚨NIGEL FARAGE SUPPORTS SOME MEN SHOULD BE IN WOMEN'S PRISONS

He says 'it's about risk assessment' before deferring to Vanessa Drake his Justice Adviser

REFORM ARE A JOKE

NO MEN SHOULD BE IN WOMEN'S PRISONS IT'S THAT SIMPLE pic.twitter.com/znAb9PHMOA

— Basil the Great (@Basil_TGMD) August 4, 2025

Incredibly, the usually straight-shooting, sharp-witted Farage struggled to answer a simple question at a press conference today on whether male convicts should be allowed into women’s prisons. ‘I can’t answer it’, he said, because ‘I have never worked in prisons’.

He then deferred to his newly hired justice adviser, former prison governor Vanessa Frake. Her ‘experience at the highest levels’ in prison has led her to conclude that some men really should be allowed into women’s prisons, under certain conditions.

Before Reform’s press conference, Frake told Times Radio: ‘There are equally vile women as there possibly are transwomen. So it’s all about the risk assessments for me, and each has to be done on an individual basis.’ She did, however, concede that she ‘is not an expert on trans people’.

No one has to be an ‘expert’, on either prisons or trans issues, to know that transwomen are men – and that male convicts, however they identify, pose an intolerably high risk to female inmates when they are placed on the women’s estate. It is not the job of prisons to affirm an inmate’s gender identity. Nor should women in prison be expected to accommodate such men.

Put bluntly, there is simply no rational reason to let men into women’s prisons. That even Nigel Farage struggles to say this suggests that the fight for women’s spaces has a lot longer to run.

Fraser Myers is deputy editor at spiked and host of the spiked podcast. Follow him on X: @FraserMyers.