Don’t blame the ‘boys’ club’ for bringing down Starmer

Unemployment in the UK is at a five-year high. Private-sector pay growth is the lowest since 2020. The number of young people out of work is at an 11-year high. Illegal migrants continue to cross the English Channel, and the welfare bill is spiraling out of control. Senior government appointees are embroiled in scandal, and there have been more than a dozen policy about-turns. By any metric, Keir Starmer’s government has been a spectacular failure.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised. As spiked has long pointed out, Starmer is a prime minister who ‘has no idea what he’s for and no idea what he’s doing’. Scandals ‘are a feature, not a bug’ of a Labour Party high on sanctimony, but completely lacking in vision or competence. Yet acknowledging these blunt truths is a step too far for Labour lifers, so other explanations are being sought for Stramer’s struggles.

Spin-doctor-turned-podcaster Alastair Campbell thinks the voters must take their share of the blame. ‘We are becoming ungovernable’, he moans, ‘with dissonance, hypocrisy, short-termism, naivety, industrialised rage and wilful ignorance off the scale’. If this all seems a touch Brechtian, a bit ‘dissolve the people and elect another’, then the party’s higher-ups have another, more palatable explanation for Labour’s failure.

According to many Labour women, Starmer’s government is mired in difficulties because it is a ‘boys’ club’, where misogyny reigns supreme and back-slapping bros salute one another’s bad decisions. Grande dame Harriet Harman says Peter Mandelson was appointed as the UK ambassador to Washington because: ‘It was about the boys’ club not realising that once you’ve got somebody who has supported a sex offender against young girls that’s a showstopper.’ To turn things around, she argues, Starmer must create a new role for a woman to ‘transform the political culture in government around women and girls’. It’s almost as if she has someone in mind…

Culture secretary Lisa Nandy has joined in, claiming: ‘We need far more women around every table where decisions are being made and we need to make sure that we model that change that we’re creating out there in the country.’ And Labour peer Margaret Hodge, a minister under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, is another one who has suggested that what Starmer lacks is women who bring a different perspective and policy priorities to government. Are they overlooking Labour’s female chancellor, home secretary and foreign secretary? How misogynistic.

It is certainly true that Starmer seems happier on a five-a-side pitch with the blokes than he does thinking about politics. And it is also true that the experiences of women and girls often appear inconsequential to government ministers.

It is indeed shocking that Starmer’s first response to those calling for a national inquiry into grooming gangs was to accuse them of jumping on a far-right bandwagon. It is appalling that last year’s Supreme Court ruling that sex means biology and female-only spaces must be protected under the Equality Act has still not been properly implemented. And it is nauseating to see Starmer saying sorry to the victims of American sex offender Jeffrey Epstein while offering no apology to Rhiannon Whyte, murdered by a Sudanese asylum seeker, or to the 12-year-old girl who was abducted and raped by an Afghan migrant, despite both men having entered the country illegally and then being housed by Starmer’s government.

But we can hardly assume that Labour’s women would respond differently. Bridget Phillipson, minister for women and equalities, has dragged her feet over legal changes to defend women’s sex-based rights. Jess Phillips, gobby under-secretary of state for safeguarding and violence against women and girls, has had little to say about the many women and girls raped by migrants. Deputy Labour leader Lucy Powell called the discussion of grooming gangs a ‘right-wing dog whistle’. And Nandy displayed her transgender activism with a ‘Protect the Dolls’ t-shirt.

Nonetheless, women are, indeed, being promoted in No10. With former chief of staff Morgan McSweeney and former cabinet secretary Chris Wormald now gone, Starmer finds himself surrounded almost entirely by female advisers. Vidhya Alakeson and Jill Cuthbertson are acting chiefs of staff, Amy Richards is the PM’s political director, and Sophie Nazemi is acting head of communications. Louise Casey, a ‘Whitehall fixer’, is, apparently, now in Downing Street, too.

But those Labour women busy celebrating that ‘the boys’ club has been replaced by girl power’ need to take a cold shower. If the answer to Labour’s problems is hiring Antonia Romeo as cabinet secretary – a woke activist from the Home Office who backs gender ideology and failed to stop the boats – then clearly, the wrong question is being asked. It’s not XX chromosomes Labour needs, or even a whole army of women with mops and brooms – it’s people untainted by the Blob, who are in touch with what voters think, and are brave enough to call out not just rubbish wages and sky-high bills, but also men in women’s spaces and migrants preying on girls.

Labour’s failure is not down to too much testosterone. Doubters need only cast a glance at the occupant of 11 Downing Street, bigged up as Britain’s first female chancellor of the exchequer, to explode the myth that XX chromosomes automatically mean competence. It will take far more than a shift to identity politics to turn this Labour government around.

Joanna Williams is a spiked columnist and author of How Woke Won. Follow her on Substack: cieo.substack.com.