Winter is coming for DEI die-hards

Have you been using your job to push your progressive politics on to customers and colleagues for months, or even years? Then don’t splash the cash this Christmas – because your role is at risk. For activist employees, the bleak winter has arrived.

Across the corporate world, senior leaders have spent 2025 calculating how to cut costs. After asking, ‘Which jobs can we replace with AI?’, their next question is: ‘What else can we chop that has no business benefit – and is even creating risk?’

The cull has begun. Action has been silent, swift and ruthless. The corporations won’t shout about it, but the clues are everywhere.

Diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) leads have been instructed to ‘reduce spend’, as companies are ‘going in a different direction’, ‘being more strategic’ and ‘moving away from performative allyship activity’. Code for: ‘Bin it.’ For the HR teams, writing emails starting ‘Unfortunately…’ to the activists who once felt like friends (things were always too cosy) will have hurt.

A series of high-profile departures confirms this trend. Last week, we learned Jaguar’s chief creative officer, Gerry McGovern, was dismissed and escorted from the building, after overseeing the car manufacturer’s catastrophic woke rebrand last year.

A non-disclosure agreement will make sure we never hear what happened – but it’s hard to imagine a highly valued employee leaving like this. Did Jaguar’s new CEO, India-born PB Balaji, pull rank and get rid? It may not be a coincidence that the CEO of Barclays – CS Venkatakrishnan, known as ‘Venkat’ – is also Indian, and is firmly resisting woke in his company.

There are similar rumblings in the legal sector. Also in November, law firm Clifford Chance’s global head of DEI, Tiernan Brady, quietly announced his return to the freelance consulting circuit.

Again, we don’t know what happened – but given the backlash against DEI, it’s an odd time to resign from one of the cushiest staff jobs in corporate inclusion. When you’re cosy indoors, why venture out in a storm?

Whatever happened, Brady’s final months will have been miserable. In the summer, news broke that Brady had welcomed activist podcasters QueerAF to record a live episode at the law firm’s Canary Wharf office. In it, trans influencer Abigail Thorn is heard calling the UK’s Supreme Court judges ‘fucking idiots’ for clarifying that woman means an adult human female in law, and the audience can be heard laughing. Despite being there, Brady appears to have said nothing, and let the episode air.

Open contempt for the judiciary is a bad look for lawyers at the best of times, but Brady chose the worst of times. The big international law firms have taken US president Donald Trump’s decree against left-leaning corporate activism incredibly seriously, so it’s unlikely Brady’s ‘allyship’ fiasco landed well with his American colleagues.

The exits continue. The Chartered Institute of Personnel Development (CIPD) has just announced that its CEO, Peter Cheese, plans to retire in June 2026, having headed the UK HR industry’s professional membership body since 2012. His exit marks the end of an era. For over a decade, he has positioned himself – and the CIPD – as the supposedly respectable business-focussed face of corporate inclusion, for which he earned £300,000 per year.

He stayed too long, and now faces serious questions about whether he let a ‘woke’ agenda impact the culture of his organisation, and the accuracy of legal advice presented to CIPD members (ie, employers trying to get this stuff right). The CIPD’s deeply flawed ‘trans inclusion’ advice was referenced in Sandie Peggie’s now infamous employment tribunal against NHS Fife.

Cheese’s legacy will be his toe-curling endorsement of the cross-dressing trans activist, Katie Neeves. During an internal CIPD training session in 2022 – which Cheese himself attended, praising Neeves’s work – Cheese did not step in when Neeves said employees must be allowed to self-ID into single-sex spaces, and talked about his knicker fetish. After grossed-out female staff members complained, Cheese supported a police investigation – yes, really – into the women.

As the spell breaks, dangerous ideas fall out of fashion, and the ‘data’ supposedly backing them turn to dust, corporations will want to bury the evidence – which means DEI’s senior champions must be swept away with it.

Junior staff aren’t safe, either. Expect UK employers to follow their US counterparts soon. No doubt, they will have been watching the showdown in the corridors of Condé Nast’s plush Manhattan office a few weeks ago. When around a dozen employees gathered outside the office of HR director Stan Duncan to protest the decision to lay off their friends covering LGBT, race and climate-change stories at Teen Vogue, the executive pulled rank and fired four more of them, citing ‘gross misconduct and policy violations’.

The message is clear. There is a crucial difference between the student / university relationship, and the employee / employer relationship. If you don’t know what it is, you’ll have plenty of time to work it out while you’re looking for a new job.

There are two forces big enough to win the war against woke – and both are salient for employers. First, the good sense of the general public (most customers and employees hate this stuff). And second, the ruthlessness of capitalism. Woke is rotting companies from the inside. Weak leaders have allowed strong activists to take over. They have baked daft ideas into policy, lost or silenced their best people and been left with their worst. They need to fix it, fast.

That’s why the corporate world is now the frontline in the battle against bad ideas and organisational dysfunction. This is good companies’ time to shine, resetting sloppy standards and wonky power dynamics. Will the public and charity sectors watch and copy – or are they too far gone? The answer depends on the strength of their current leadership.

So what will become of the activist employees ejected into the cold? Are they likely to find success by leaning into their ‘identity’ and going it alone as consultants? The experience of Philip ‘Pips’ Bunce – once investment banking’s answer to Eddie Izzard – suggests not.

Bunce, who is known to sometimes go to work in a wig and women’s clothing, was named one of the ‘Top 100 Women in Business’ by the Financial Times in 2018. Since packing up his pot plant at Credit Suisse in July 2024 (his exit aligned with redundancies when the bank merged with UBS that summer), Bunce seems to have struggled to make a splash with his new business as a ‘gender diversity’ trainer, and seems a long way from matching the £150,000 salary it’s likely he was on previously.

At least he picked the right name for his consultancy: Humility Hub.

Tanya de Grunwald hosts the podcast This Isn’t Working and is the founder of the new business network This Is Working.