I remember it well as it was my birthday, and my friends immediately started to make stickers and badges. I went back to my Mum’s house proudly sporting an “Enemy Within” sticker on my pregnant belly. A Thatcher-supporter, she said I was a reason why women should not be given the vote.

Back then, everyone I knew in London supported the miners. We hated Thatcher and understood this to be a battle between the capitalist state and the working class, an attempt to crush union power once for all. If you ever had doubts, you didn’t show them out of solidarity. This still carries for those who want to romanticise the strike as the last great civil war. War changes lives forever and the miner’s strike changed this country forever, its ghosts popping up in Billy Elliott, Pride and Sherwood.

Today, a three-part series starts on Channel 4, Miners’ Strike 1984: The Battle for Britain, and, 40 years on, it makes for essential viewing. Through interviews with striking miners and scabs, with those working in the shadows to defeat it on the government’s behalf, with the police and with reams of extraordinarily violent footage, this is intense, visceral stuff. To reckon with the defeat of the miners — and it was a huge thrashing — is to gaze on a gaping sore that some argue leads all the way to Brexit. But reckon with it we must.

In 1984, Britain was home to 173 working collieries, but the richest seams of coal had already been mined and it was becoming more expensive to reach what remained. The answer was mechanisation, which meant redundancies. Thatcher wanted three things: a confrontation with “the Yorkshire Stalin”, Arthur Scargill; to close inefficient pits in order to grow the economy; and to break the strongest union. The National Coal Board said it would close 20 pits; Scargill told his men that it would be 70. And so they downed tools.

While the strike was indeed about jobs, the documentary reveals that it was also about so much more. Going down the pit was the most money a lad with no qualifications could make. But nor was it just about wages. It was about something more intangible: a sense of self, of masculinity, of community. Or as they said 40 years ago and keep saying in these films, it was about “the future”.

In some pit villages, there was no alternative. The pit was not simply somewhere men worked but the centre of their clubs, associations, their entire world. The soot-covered nobility of the miner’s face is easy to mythologise. But this was horrible, filthy, backbreaking work. When actual miners turned up at the benefits I attended, working-class heroism became flesh with all its less noble needs, and middle-class activists gave themselves to the cause in more ways than one.

What Scargill had on his side was his ability to command flying pickets; his refusal to hold a national ballot, though, meant the fragmentation of the workforce. The Nottinghamshire miners, for instance, wanted to keep working as they considered the strike unconstitutional without a national ballot. The result was that, in some pits, strike-breakers were bussed in on coaches with grills over the windows for protection. It allowed Thatcher and the Tory press to paint the strike as nothing more than mob rule based on violence and intimidation. And so an industrial dispute became an existential one, a battle between good and evil. The revelation that NUM funds were sequestered, as part of its dodgy dealings with Gaddafi, only further undermined the cause.

The identification of miners with their own local area rather than their whole industry is what for some Marxists call the “deterritorialisation” of capital. This division was further exploited by David Hart, the sinister figure who appears as Stephen Sweet in David Peace’s fantastic novel GB84 and is often referred to as “the Jew”. This super-rich, Right-wing libertarian told Thatcher that a deal didn’t need to be struck, that the miners could be defeated. He set about funding and aiding those who wanted to go back to work. An actual enemy within? Certainly, this was the state intervening in a highly suspect manner. The government distanced themselves from him as soon as possible.

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Their other shocking intervention, and one they couldn’t distance themselves from, were the new “techniques” of policing. The police were now being sent across the country, and actively and brutally working to protect the interests of “capital”. This was not a neutral peacekeeping force. They could now use roadblocks to turn away anyone they deemed to be a flying picket. They could beat up miners and then arrest them; their own police footage shows them at The Battle of Orgreave where they corralled minors into a field and then charged at them with baton-wielding mounted police. This was a battle alright, medieval and one-sided. The breaking of heads, the breaking of will, the breaking of collective action. It hurt; it clearly still does.

The strike may well have taught us something about power and the strength of people standing together, but where did that idealism go? The pits were always going to close. There are just six mines left, the rest of our coal imported. Was it a fantasy that all these men could even keep their jobs in that time of deindustrialisation?

To see the fate of those abandoned places is heart-breaking. Heroin moved in, as it always does. Oh and fancy Bang & Olufsen shops. Those with big redundancy payments like to splash out on something fancy for their homes, something they can control.

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The sadness of all this was apparent when I was interviewing ex-miners in a working-men’s club in the late Nineties, and every man described himself as “retired undefeated”. They had, in other words, been made redundant after the strike. Now they were at home mostly looking after the kids, though they did not want to say that. They had turned down jobs in service industries because they were from a generation who thought that men’s work was manual work.

It was a Sunday lunchtime in the club, so there were strippers. Only a few women were there, and the men called them “pudding burners” — as they were out instead of making the Sunday lunch, as they should be. I wondered a bit about what kind of community we were all busy “protecting”, having seen the remarkable resilience of the miners’ wives during the strike. It turned out that many of the women now had two or three jobs and were getting by. They had adapted in a way some of the guys just couldn’t.

Perhaps all this has something to do with the difficulty of admitting that you were once on the losing side — and the fact that it’s still hard to understand what that even means. Something bigger than the closure of certain coal mines was at stake here. It was, after all, as much a story of demoralisation as deindustrialisation. This country lost the idea that the working man or woman could ever really win again, and that wound still weeps.

In the interests of “balance”, an opposing view was deemed necessary. The counter-argument, published last week, was made by Jacqueline Rose, a professor at the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities. According to Dawkins, her response does not make any “coherent sense”, which he suggests may be a badge of honour among postmodernists.

I am a long-time admirer of Rose. Her insights on psychoanalysis have suffused my own writing and I loved her book Mothers, which, as it happens, I reviewed in the New Statesman. I described her as “one of our very best cultural critics”.

Yet even I was surprised at how poor her recent article was. I understand that, unless you are Zizek, you have to sign up to a lot of nonsense if you are to survive on the international academic circuit. Unlike Dawkins, though, I am weirdly steeped in postmodern theory. In the Eighties, I got an interview with Baudrillard and tried to sell it to The Guardian, but they had never heard of him.

From early on, I could see how much of this fashionable theory — rooted in a rejection of “grand narratives” about the truth — does not accommodate feminist politics. When I was teaching American students about postmodernism and Judith Butler, it became even more apparent that much of her argument was a response to Marxism; that postmodernism was born of the failure of revolutionary politics.

But there were good bits. And the Rose article reminds me strongly of something I wrote in 1988: “If the whole question of power cannot be tackled, it is because these new hysterics with their male bodies and optional female subjectivities cannot speak of a desiring subject who is actually a flesh and blood woman.” I was talking here about male theorists, rather than trans people. But I return to it in an attempt to understand how, in a call for “generosity”, Rose has written a piece that is so completely dismissive of women, our concerns, rights, bodies and fears.

She begins by claiming that a “central goal of feminism is to repudiate the idea of womanhood”. Is it? What is womanhood if there is no such thing as a woman? Does she mean “femininity”?

On the threat of sexual violence, she suggests that it is “the category of women as much as the safety of women that needs protection”. That category, she thinks, should include women who were once men. Let’s take this idea for a walk, shall we? Out of the academy and to Iran and Afghanistan, to places where women die in menstrual huts or undergo FGM, where women-only spaces are compelled. She complains that “the idea of female” is “some kind of primordial condition… as if it were the bedrock of all the limitations to follow”. She’s actually right here: this is the unfortunate reality in many parts of the world.

Of course, she uses the de Beauvoir quote — “One is not a woman, one becomes one” — but, predictably, chooses to ignore the rest of it: “No biological, psychological, or economic destiny defines the figure that the human female acquires in society; it is civilization as a whole that develops this product, intermediate between female and eunuch, which one calls feminine.” The second part of the quotation is key. The construction of gender is social and there is a difference between being female (sex) and femininity (gender) which is learnt.

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Rose’s preference for referring to “females” as opposed to women, she says, is because Andrea Long Chu argues that “female” was developed in the 19th century as a way of referring to black slaves. As a result, it is “historically naive and racially blind” to assume it is a “neutral biological category”. Woah!

“Female” was in common usage long before the 19th century and I think Rose does Long Chu down here. Long Chu is a controversial, often witty, trans author who starts her book Females with: “Everyone is female, and everyone hates it.” For Long Chu, a female identity is one of self-negation and fuckable porn-addled passivity, which is precisely why she transitioned. If the answer to “What is a woman?” is this person, then the majority of the population — women — are tragic failures. Perhaps we are, but at least I know that male babies are not born “with spermatozoa”, as Rose asserts.

Rose goes on to argue that the act of transitioning challenges a binary which “reinforces the most regressive of gender stereotypes”. For her, it is an “imaginative leap”. Others might call it a fiction and listen to the accounts of detransitioners who can never experience parenthood or sexual pleasure. Others might say they are being sold a fantasy, that the sexed body has limitations whatever the imagination says, and that cynical drug companies and surgeons are cashing in on this.

Still, Rose insists there is no bedrock on which “sexual differentiation can securely ground itself”. Perhaps she has not read Dawkins or perhaps she knows more about biology than him. I couldn’t possibly say, but she goes into the familiar refrain that because some women don’t have a uterus, biology cannot be the gatekeeper of what she would call “femaleness”. This is true, but every one of us, however sexually interesting we may be, was born from someone who did have a uterus. There is no way of escaping this.

Transwomen, she says, have “a feeling that biology and a core, lived, sexual identity have been woefully misaligned”. What, pray, is “a core, lived sexual identity”? Is it a soul? Is it an orientation? Is it changeable? The issue with this Butlerian perception of gender is that, if it is nothing but performative, why is anyone compelled to repeat the performance repeatedly and permanently?

The dissonance between who you feel yourself to be and a sexed body is dysphoria, and I don’t know a single feminist who is not sympathetic to those who suffer from it. It’s just that, on the whole, we’re more worried about distressed, often gay, teenagers doing it.

The goal of transition is to simulate femininity, not femaleness because it cannot be done. The liberatory aspect of this, which Rose refers to as “discarding the straitjacket of masculinity”, is actually done by many men without them claiming to be women. But Rose doesn’t address the attendant power grab of women’s spaces and language. Instead, up comes Stuart Hall and his important work concerning moral panics in the Seventies, with a focus on “muggers” and young black men.

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Trans people, she is right to say, have become political footballs when we should be thinking about other things. Yet no other “civil rights” movement has had the dominant group identify into the oppressed group and then tried to take away their rights. Rose doesn’t dirty herself with such issues.

“‘Reality’ for feminism”, she argues, is something that has to be negotiated, and to dictate on this matter is patriarchal. Rose, you have to understand, is coming from a place where discourse always trumps objective reality. Postmodern theory depends on us seeing ourselves as formed only in and through language. Meaning is never settled; it is always contested. This is a fine and interesting philosophical argument, but as a politics it stinks. Postmodernism is patriarchy in drag.

What is a woman? “In the end,” we’re told, “it is a matter of generosity and freedom.” Well yes, that will go down well with the Taliban. Where is the generosity towards women who have lost jobs and reputations because of this “debate”? Where is the freedom for women to define themselves? If oppression is not rooted in biology, where does it come from exactly?

One is not born a woman but becomes one. And then one becomes an angry woman — not because we are gatekeeping an essentialist position, but because we cannot individually identify our way out of trouble. Feminism is a collective struggle or it is merely cosmetic.

What is a woman? I suspect Rose knows. She just also knows which side her bread is buttered on: the side that holds the power in academia, publishing and literary circles. They have stopped dreaming big and kid themselves they are radical in their safe spaces. Yet most women don’t get to choose our safe spaces: we are too mean and unsophisticated. Thankfully, unlike Rose, some of us remain unkind, unpersuaded, unbound.

We talked about everything, from Partygate and his relationship with Boris Johnson, to the deep state and whether he needs a therapist. What follows is an edited version of our conversation.

Were you surprised by the Sue Gray report?

Some of it is a bit brazen: where she says she stopped investigating the party in the flat because the police got involved — even though the police didn’t then investigate it. So basically, they have sort of just said: “Fuck this. We’re not going to get involved with the after-party on the night of 13th.”

You mean the party in the Downing Street flat on 13th November 2020?

It was reported a few days after I’d gone, in Metro weirdly. Somehow the story got out but because we were in extreme lockdown it got no coverage. The media was so happy that I’d gone, no one wanted to talk about it.

Dozens of people downstairs could hear it, so all the police had to do was interview any one of them to find out. You don’t have a work meeting, at the top of Number 10, where the music is so loud that you can hear it in the fucking press office.

Why aren’t people angrier? Why is nothing happening?

The Tory party itself is quite rotten now and the sign of that is that they can’t think of anyone better than Boris, who’s clearly just completely shot. They are collectively saying, “if we get rid of him, we might get somebody worse”. It says a lot about the state of the Tory party. And they actually could get somebody worse: Liz Truss would be even worse than Boris. She’s about as close to properly crackers as anybody I’ve met in Parliament.

Do you ever feel bad that you helped him win the election?

I don’t know. I don’t feel bad about it. Because I think the reasoning at the time was pretty simple. Various people from Vote Leave were attracted to the idea of just staying out of it and letting the Tory party collapse.

When was this?

June 2019. But there were two basic problems. One was that if we didn’t go in and sort it out, Brexit wouldn’t happen, and there would be a second referendum, which we thought would be very bad for the country indeed. And the second was Corbyn. It’s one thing to stand back and let the horror of the Tory party blow up, it’s another thing to let Corbyn take over.

So we reluctantly thought: the downside is we save the Tory party, but the upside is we can crush a second referendum. Kick Corbyn off the stage. And there’s a chance, with Boris being as lazy as he is, that we’ll be able to set the country on a new path — hence me making various terrorist demands of him when he came round to the house — but even then, we thought: there’s a reasonable chance that this goes tits up.

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Why?

Carrie.

We had worked with Boris during the referendum. Then, of course he was with Marina who was a stabilising force. She’s intelligent. She was good at calming him down. Carrie was obviously the opposite. She was sort of injecting more craziness into the whole situation. She basically supported us until 10pm on election night, simply because she thought, as she put it to me in July: “He has no clue how to get through this. He doesn’t have a clue how it all actually works.” Carrie was supportive of Vote Leave from the day we came in to help with the 2019 election. She personally called me and said “Please do this”.

And if we hadn’t, you’d have had that completely wrecked Parliament colliding with Covid in March 2020. God only knows what would have happened. Possibly with Corbyn as prime minister. Even more people killed. Fuck knows what.

You keep saying ‘we’: who do you mean?

My team from Vote Leave.

But what was going wrong?

The way that the Tories went about Brexit on every level was a total disaster. Starting the whole formal process before they even knew what the hell they were trying to do. Using EU citizens as negotiating chips, which we’d said should never happen. We should have passed unilateral legislation immediately to guarantee their rights.

They just fucked up, all the way down. People kept saying, “why does everything have to be so aggressive?” But it wasn’t Vote Leave that drove the country crazy. The Tory party and Whitehall spent three years cocking it up.

By summer 2019, something had to break: there’s no clean way of getting out of that situation. A second referendum would have been very bad. Smashing through things, the way that we did, had downsides, but staggering on just unable to resolve the issue would have been a disaster as well.

What did you think about a second referendum?

Back in 2015, I floated the idea of having two referendums, and said that maybe the way to do this is: you have a referendum on the principle and then you negotiate a new deal. Then you have a second referendum on the actual deal. Everybody said, “no way”: the Prime Minister, the Tory party, the Labour Party, the official Remain campaign, the CBI. Everybody said, “Absolutely not. One referendum, it’s got to resolve this for a generation.” And then they spent three years dicking around, only to say, “you know what? Fuck it, we actually can’t do this, because it’s unsolvable. You shouldn’t have voted like this.”

Do you still think it was right to leave Europe?

A lot of people, especially the centre-Left in London, thought joining the Euro would be a success. Now we know we are best off out of it. When the Euro came under pressure it completely wrecked the Greek economy.

That took the blinkers off for me.

Especially now, when you look at how history worked out, and knowing that Covid was coming, it’s very hard to make the case that things could have been different. We know that Whitehall was completely unprepared for Brexit; we know that the whole thing was a complete shitshow; we know the original plan had to be ditched. And we know a bunch of us had to steer it, while dealing with him. And on top of that, we had a non-functioning government with no parliamentary majority. I mean, my God, imagine how much worse the whole thing could have been.

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Was there a time when you did get on with Johnson personally?

We are both really odd characters. In the second half of 2019, he was just completely desperate. He knew that he had only been put in there because no one could think of anything else to do. He sort of did as we told him and at that point Carrie wasn’t causing chaos. She was basically saying: “Listen to what they say.” So as far as anything can be with him, it was reasonably stable, if chaotic for the country. He was reasonably focused because he knew he was not far from being booted out.

So, you got on with him on the basis that he took your advice. And then he stopped?

He trolleyed around a bit, obviously, but in terms of big things he mostly listened. But as soon as he came back in January from his holiday, you could see immediately that the whole thing was going to be a disaster.

That quickly?

Immediately after the election. The election happens; there’s five or so days and then he’s sauntered off to some sort of billionaire island; and then at the beginning of January she immediately was on at him about firing all of us, which obviously is not a great way of starting a new government.

Perhaps not.

But also, from the start we had completely different attitudes. My attitude was: okay, we’ve won the election, we’ve got a supermajority, now we have the chance to solve a whole load of fundamental problems. 2020 is the year to do the hard things: things like planning reform, which no one dares touch, decade after decade, because it’s so politically difficult. Fuck that. It’s time to do it. Ignore the press. Focus on this.

And he didn’t share this view?

His attitude was: I’ve done the hard thing, which was the election. Now it’s time to enjoy myself. And so very quickly, there was this clash of basic ideas.

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Because you want systemic change in almost every part of the state. You had been talking about planning for procurement, reforming the civil service, nuclear weapons, pandemics: is that because you are all doom and gloom?

Some people would say that. But in the last couple of years, I’ve thought: “What did I say about pandemics?” Now, we’re all talking about nuclear war and Putin. But with nukes, for example, it’s incredibly complicated. The timelines are very long. The budgets are huge. For any PM, it’s very tempting to continue the cycle of: “Keep everything extremely secret and punt the bills off to the next poor sucker.”

And then in 2019, I came along and started poking around, trying to get all the real figures. I was sitting down with the deep state saying: “Open the books.” And they’d say, “Can I just tell the truth?”

What do you mean by the “deep state”?

I mean the set of officials who actually control Whitehall — people like the Cabinet Secretary, those who run the intelligence services, certain crucial people in the Cabinet Office. These people who have a lot more power than basically any ministers — apart from, nominally, the Prime Minister.

Certain conspiracy theorists use the phrase “deep state” in America.

I think to some extent Trump does use the phrase as a conspiracy — but that doesn’t mean I do. I am talking about something entirely real. I’m not talking about any kind of conspiracy.

But to some extent, Trump had a point, right? In the sense that there was obviously a whole set of people, particularly around the intelligence community, who did hate Trump and would attempt to cause trouble. And I know people who were going to be appointed who were shut down, like scientists who were going to get jobs who were then frozen out. The FBI simply refused to vet them for 18 months.

Trump obviously talks a whole load of shit but as a lot of the Russia stuff showed, there actually was a conspiracy against him in parts of the system.

Do you mean the machinery of government then? I ask because it seems to me that you pitted yourself not just against Johnson but against that machinery.

The irony of the situation is that of all the different players in Westminster — the political parties, the media, Boris, the Tory MPs — the people who we, the Vote Leave team, got on with best was the deep state. There was a kind of alliance in a lot of ways. We both wanted to sort out some of these problems: the shitshow around nuclear weapons, procurement, bringing technology into Number 10.

The media presented us as Vote Leave psychopaths, at war with everyone, but that wasn’t true. Our relations with the Tory party were extremely bad. But our relations with the deep state were obviously variable, depending on exactly who you’re talking about.

When you say Vote Leave, you’re not talking about Nigel Farage?

No. That’s why there was the coup in January 2016. To try and get rid of me. Because Bernard Jenkin-type people wanted to merge the whole thing together with Farage. I refused. He’d always said to me “I’m a general but I shouldn’t be overall Commander. Everyone will have their role. I’ve got 15% — maybe 20% — of the country’s support and my job should be to mobilise them.” But around July 2015, suddenly his attitude changed. It was: “I’ve got to run the whole thing.” He’s a bit like Boris: he has some communication gifts but he’s also a total organisational shambles.

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You’ve written a lot about the kind of people who go into politics, and you’ve been criticised for your attitudes to work/life balance — and yet you’ve also been promoting women around you.

It’s not really contradictory.

Some people would say it is, because if you want people in the office 16 hours a day, and you want this buzzy start-up feel, how do people go home and put their kids to bed?

Number 10 is obviously big enough that you could have, say, some young woman who’s just had kids and only wants to work three days a week. But my basic point is that if you’re in Number 10, there are huge responsibilities. And it’s your job to be trying, all the time, for millions of people — a lot of whom have got fuck all and have very desperate lives. Your job is not to be thinking, “well, how do I have a nice life and get home for bath time?” There has to be a core of people who are there, demented, working extremely hard — because that’s the nature of it, this constant chaos.

When you put your call out for “weirdos and misfits”, people interpreted that as you wanting employees who would be totally dedicated to you.

Partly. But it was also a call to Whitehall and Westminster. They’re full of very similar people who did very similar degrees at very similar universities. My view is that you need different kinds of people around. I think the Covid inquiry will show that groupthink was a very serious problem.

I put out that blog about “weirdos and misfits” in January 2020 and it became the foundation for recruiting. It did bring in some excellent women. By summer, 29-year-old women were sitting at the Cabinet table, saying to Matt Hancock, “you just said that it’s not growing exponentially and you’re wrong. Here’s the actual graph. Here’s what’s happening.”

A lot of people didn’t like what I had done, but I thought: “this is now working as it should”. You’ve got smart people, who know what the fuck they’re talking about, telling either ministers or senior civil servants who don’t know exponential growth from a hole in the ground: “Here’s the actual facts.” So, I’ve radically improved how decisions are taken. The advice to the Prime Minister, though he could still trolley around and fuck things up —which he did, obviously — was at least much better.

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Have you ever had therapy?

I’m not interested in my own emotional state.

Why not?

Never have been.

But you’re interested in other people’s emotional states?

I’ve got no interest in my own emotional state. Or myself. I find my own emotional state the most boring subject I could think of.

Isn’t one of your gifts being able to interpret other people’s emotions? I’m surprised to hear you say that you’re not interested in your own. It sounds like denial to me, but a lot of people in politics are like this.

Most people in politics are recruited based on whether they can stand up and speak. I noticed that a long time ago, with Boris and Gove: we’d all be exhausted, arriving somewhere where one of them was speaking, and I would always think “my God, the idea of standing up and speaking right now is just completely horrific”, but they feel the exact opposite. They both love speaking and they’re both energised by it, whereas I would be driven catatonic at the thought of it. Then there are the 1,000-yard stares among the likes of Hancock and Truss. Rolling news and social media encourages more of the narcissists to get involved as a sort of low-grade alternative to being a celebrity.

Do you still have contact with people there? Is Johnson staying?

As far as we know. The fact that Rishi blew himself up makes it much more likely that Boris will somehow survive. I don’t want to say “no chance”, but I think Rishi is out of the running. They’re going to be thinking who can win the next election. Whatever you might think of Michael Gove’s abilities, he is not a loved character. There are some very junior people who I like, who I won’t curse by naming — if I name them then everyone will hate them. But it’s a very, very poor Cabinet.

You said you thought Labour should be led by a woman from the North like Lisa Nandy?

Yeah, because Starmer is pretty rubbish.

What about the trans stuff?

The  last thing we should be doing is giving a desperate Tory Party that has been a fiasco for years a wedge issue — the chance to say at the next election, you can’t define a woman. Labour is stupid. The more they try to fudge it, the worse the problem gets.

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You’re not in the Tory party. Do you want to be in another party?

I’m not a joiner by nature. I don’t like parties. “Parties” or parties. I don’t like going to parties.

Were there journalists at the parties?

Carrie is friends with a lot of them and it was persistently stated that they were hanging out with her and him. But obviously the police and Sue Gray decided not to investigate that — or to investigate Chequers either.

Were there parties at Chequers?

So people say.

There are a lot of rumours about Carrie now.

Nothing would surprise me. She can’t be happy with the situation now. Obviously it’s all blowing up in her face. And then there’s all of his money stuff.

Did he talk about all this with you?

That was an important part of the whole disaster with Covid, because he was literally in the process of trying to finalise his divorce. He was broke. He was having to find money to pay Marina, and at the same time, he had Carrie doing this insane renovation of the flat with Lulu [Lytle, the interior designer] running up these huge bills. In January, he said: “You’ve got to help me get money to pay for this stuff. She’s upstairs, she has spent £100,000. All this gold wallpaper and stuff. And I’m fucked with my divorce. I can’t pay for it.”

I said: “Go to Coutts. Get one of your rich friends to take out a loan.”

“No, fuck that. I want to get donations in to do it. But obviously it’s bad PR so I have to keep it quiet.”

I said: “That’s illegal. What the fuck are you talking about? You idiots. The Prime Minister can’t get secret donations.” But his mindset was very much: “Fuck that. I’m going do what I want.” He’s always been like that: famously turns up at places and then just leaves and lets everyone else pay the bill.

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What do you do for fun?

I had a child three months before the referendum. So either I’ve been doing the referendum and then Number 10, or I’ve just been hanging out here reading and playing with him. That’s about it.

Do you like music? Do you like film? Do you watch telly?

I watch telly. I used to watch a lot of movies. Not much really. I just hang around, read, go for walks.

Do you like cooking?

Not really.

I know you like Russian literature. Do you speak Russian?

I could speak basic Russian, when I lived there 20 years ago.

Must have been a fascinating time to live there.

Russia is such a fucked-up place. It’s not Europe. It’s a dark place. There are some wonderful people there — some of the best-educated people you will ever, ever meet in your life.

Did you know about the Lebedev peerage?

I can’t remember when he got the peerage formally, but I was there when the decision was made. I was in the room when other people said, “Prime Minister, you shouldn’t do this.” And I said to him: “You shouldn’t do this.” One of the many, many battles after the election that I didn’t win. I suspect they’ll just keep all that quiet until Boris goes. Unless the deep state people decide to leak it, which they might do.

He always thinks he can get away with it. And now?

You never know. He goes through those funny moods. I suspect he’s thinking if they don’t put him out before August, he’s got a reasonable chance of swinging the election. And he’ll be thinking: “Oh, I’m still here. I was close to disaster but just escaped”. Also, he will be looking at Starmer and rightly thinking, “He’s rubbish”.

But remember, he doesn’t really want to be there very long. All he wants to do is not be a loser and not be put out in disgrace. He’s not actually interested in the job. Even in January 2020, he was saying to me, “God, you know these people who say they want to do this job and go on and on? Well I want to write my Shakespeare book.”

The election was on 12 December. By mid-January he was whinging about what a difficult job it is. I said: “You are Prime Minister and if you want to sit upstairs in the morning and do a bit of writing, that’s up to you, but I wouldn’t run around the building telling everyone that you are finding the job boring. Otherwise, you might find it hard to get people to do what you want”.

He must have trusted you to tell you that.

He’s very odd. He does overshare but also at the same time never trusts anybody. Also, part of the oversharing is to see what then turns up in the newspapers to see if you’re leaking.

You’ve been accused of leaking.

I have been accused of all sorts.

I don’t have any sort of personal relationship with someone like Laura Kuenssberg. It was just a professional relationship. And it was important particularly when Covid kicked off. The Mail started to report things like tanks on the streets, rumours that London was going to be locked down and people wouldn’t be allowed to leave. She would call me and I would be able to say to her: I guarantee you that is not true. The BBC is the national broadcaster. Do not put that on the news because you’ll cause chaos.

The BBC political editor is going to have a relationship with the Prime Minister’s main political adviser. That’s just a fact of life. To think I have been criticised for that: it’s just crazy. People thought there was “Dom’s dark web”. Johnson thought: “He wants to cut me and my friends off from dealing with the media, so that everything goes through his secret network”.

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Why the elites have no shame

By Mary Harrington

Okay, what’s your secret network?

The irony was that in 2020, I was barely speaking to the press. But he never believed it. I stopped speaking to the press in November, before the election. I talked to Laura, sometimes [Robert] Peston. That’s about it. I would tell Lee [Cain] what was happening.

12 March 2020 was the most insane day of the whole thing, and probably the most insane day in Number 10 since 1945. The day started with me trying to bounce the system towards much more radical action against Covid. Trump then tried to get us to engage with a bombing mission — to fly over and bomb a load of people in the Middle East. That was never revealed at the time — it only came out when I mentioned it to the MPs last year.

Bomb who?

I can’t say who — but okay, mostly people in Iraq.

So, I say to Boris: “Listen, this idea of us cancelling all these Covid meetings because we’re going to start bombing the Middle East with Trump, it’s fucking crackers. We’re going to have thousands of people dead here in the next few weeks. We’ve got to sort out Covid.”

And he says: “This fucking Times story about Dilyn. It says the whole place is chaos. And me and Carrie are living like students with Dilyn shitting everywhere and the staff, the cleaners, all going mad. I want a fucking inquiry. I want to know who briefed it. Carrie thinks it’s you.”

We’ve got meetings on bombing. We’ve got meetings on Covid. Everything is going down the fucking toilet. But he’s getting texts from her about whether he’s started the inquiry into the Dilyn leak.

That’s what we’re dealing with.

It feels like no one is in charge.

It definitely feels like the institutions are all kind of crumbling.

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We are hostages to Government fear

By Timandra Harkness

Is this what you wanted? This disruption?

There are a lot of people who think that. It’s partly why a lot of people voted for Brexit. It’s partly why a lot of people were happy at the thought of the Vote Leave guys going into Number 10. They thought, rightly, that we would shake that shit up and things would be very different. People like me say: all these things are rotten. They say: we are going to cause chaos.

Looking at what happened with Covid, our fears were vindicated, right? The whole fucking thing did fall apart like a deck of cards. And from our point of view, it vindicates our basic idea: that we should do Brexit.

But that’s the start. You then have to go through these institutions and they need to be ripped up and rebooted in all sorts of ways. It needs new people coming in, new ideas. It needs new incentives. Or we just keep going with the closed shop of the old lobby, the old parties, the old boys’ club in Whitehall. Then we’re going to get the same old results, which is a shitshow: stagnant economy, terrible public services, no fucking A&E. It’s totally imploded in large parts of the country. Unless some force actually starts to rejuvenate these things, then…

What do you think of people who don’t vote?

Most people just think: “What’s the point? They’re all a bunch of wankers.”

This interview is adapted from Suzanne Moore’s Substack, Letters from Suzanne.

By the age of ten, though, I had the measure of her and spent a lot of time persuading my classmates not to be bit parts in Susan Cuthbert’s mundane re-enactments, but to be stars in my special fantasy games. You could be in Dr Who, Star Trek, or T Rex. You can be heroes. Just for one lunchtime. We froze her out.

But guess what? It turns out there are lots of Susans out there. And there is one Susan in particular who frequently uses his platform to demean women. Social media bullying is still something that no one knows quite how to deal with. It’s virtual until it isn’t, and all I can say is this man’s tweets bring violence and hatred to my door, including rape and death threats. It’s all especially horrible because he’s been to my house more than once for lunches and parties, only to later reveal himself to be a misogynist pest.

Owen Jones has long been very angry with me, and it’s not really to do with trans people at all. (There were trans people at many of those parties he attended — that’s how Terfy I am.) Trans people are merely pawns in his proxy war, and they deserve far better representatives. His real problem with me was that I did not support Corbyn or those who surrounded him. I didn’t feel it was my duty to get this deluded old fool elected. But Owen, with his zillions of Twitter followers, thought otherwise and became increasingly hostile to me.

I may have been rude in my responses, but my animus against that part of the media isn’t personal: it’s about class. Owen went to Oxford and was a bag carrier in Westminster before being handed a national newspaper column. So many of these hard-Left types have no life experience and it shows.

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JK Rowling and the lunch of secrets

By Julie Bindel

I was reminded of that recently when Jones went on some mad rant, posting 33 tweets about me. Way to go, mate, if you don’t want to look obsessive and harassing. He wanted to rebut the idea that he had anything to do with me leaving the Guardian. The boring details are this: I chose to leave. I was not fired, but I found it intolerable to be censored for relatively mild views. I have never claimed to be cancelled or silenced. Do I think Owen was responsible for getting my “colleagues” to gang up and write a letter denouncing me? I can’t say. I certainly think he was responsible for creating the toxic atmosphere in which it happened. But he denies it and claims the letter was never about me, even though it was leaked to his mate Patrick Strudwick at Buzzfeed, who strangely seemed to think it was.

No need to go into all that again. I wrote at length about it here without once mentioning the twerp’s name. But suffice it to say that in 30 years of journalism, no one has spoken to me the way he did. Of course, anyone on Twitter will be aware he does this on a regular basis to women. That is why #OwenJonesIsAMisogynist started to trend this week, after Private Eye reported that an independent investigator brought in by the Guardian had upheld a complaint of bullying made against him by a female columnist, and that he is yet to face punishment.

When I read the Private Eye piece, I wasn’t surprised: over the years, so many women have complained and nothing has ever been done. The fact that an internal investigator was brought in and “found that it was reasonable” for the complainant “to feel offended, intimidated and insulted by his tweets” surely means that the complaint was upheld up in part. We can argue the semantics here. Is intimidation the same as bullying? Ask John Bercow.

Yet the Guardian responded in pure legalese. In a disingenuous statement, they claimed that “it is not true that anyone was found guilty of bullying”, though some employees “have had to be reminded about the organisation’s social media guidelines”. It’s textbook gaslighting — only this time it has allowed Owen to proclaim his innocence and cocoon himself in his much-treasured state of victimhood.

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Five rules for fighting transactivism

By Kathleen Stock

So on he marches, engaging only with a few pet females who agree with him and blocking everyone else. The fact that he seems to have got away with it again sends a strong message about what the Guardian’s priorities really are. But after the Wi Spa incident — in which the paper’s reporters defended a sex offender in the name of trans rights and ordinary women were trashed as transphobic liars — perhaps we should have known. It allows Owen to dog-whistle on social media which encourages trolls to crawl out of their caves to abuse women staff. It’s a place where writers like me and Hadley Freeman can no longer be columnists. Their senior editors and writers all remain silent on all this, though I was sent supportive messages when I walked out. Their cowardice disgusts me, but ultimately this is the fault of the editor and The Scott Trust, who know what goes on and do nothing.

What Owen doesn’t realise is that he’s harming the causes he claims to be fighting for. He claims to be Left-wing but punches down on women and loathes Keir Starmer. Likewise, his support for trans rights never extends to answering any difficult questions: What is gender identity? What do we do about the huge spike in distressed teenage girls wanting to transition? Are women no longer allowed to organise as a sex class? What do we do globally about rape as a war crime? Or FGM? Or sex selection? Women’s actual issues don’t interest him. Instead, he trolls women MPs and stands up for anti-Semites, again another proxy war.

DARVO is the methodology of abusers. It stands for Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender. Men often use it to deny their behaviour and paint themselves as the victim. It’s a familiar narcissist move, and I was reminded of this when Owen tweeted this week: “It is completely and utterly untrue that I was found guilty of bullying anyone at the Guardian”. He posted it with a straight face, but that’s not quite the whole truth is it, Owen?

More from this author

Why I had to leave The Guardian

By Suzanne Moore

If you think this is all part of the trans war, you are mistaken. It really isn’t — this is much bigger. It is about how workplace culture deals with social media. It is about whether, when it comes down to it, we listen to and believe women. Thankfully, the Observer still does, but the Guardian has chosen not to. People often ask me why I left, but is it so hard to understand? Its feminism is a thing of the past. It is edited by Twitter.

I am sad for the good people who remain there, who I know feel silenced and depressed by all this. In protecting Owen, the Guardian has revealed its priorities in ways that are incredibly damaging to their own brand. Unless you think that woman-hating is being on the right side of history, that is.

I have seen off many bullies in my lifetime. I know what male violence is. I know what the truth is. So I do not fear this contemptible man and his enablers. Everyone can see what is happening if they choose to. Over to you then. As for me, I am done with his pitiful delusions of grandeur. I am done with that playground. I can organise my own games. They are much more fun.

Today, we simply accept that leaders lie; not just occasionally but habitually. Trump did. Johnson does. Putin got there way before either of them. And yet, strangely, part of Johnson’s appeal has always been said to be his “authenticity”. He is a real person. His history of lying did not bother many people, nor his history of betraying everyone he has worked for or every woman he has been involved with. The electorate could not be expected to know the truth about Borisconi’s career.

I started calling him that because he always was — pre-Trump — the only politician with a similarly acute understanding of the incestuous relationship between politicians and the media. Surely he could be king of both? Or so he thought. He could control what he understood to be the most important thing about power, which was not “truth” but “the narrative”. His narrative was “fun”. For Bunga Bunga parties just substitute batshit-crazy Jennifer Arcuri and a Christmas quiz.

But things fall apart. Some lies matter more than others. This must have been a shock to Borisconi because the visual evidence of his lies — the video, the photo — cuts through. No amount of wordplay or random classical references can make people unsee what they have seen. Mirabile dictu!

More from this author

Why I had to leave The Guardian

By Suzanne Moore

Just as the CCTV footage of Matt Hancock snogging his bit on the side did for him, so these photos did for Downing Street. Those who worked for Borisconi were sent out to lie for him, and then he lied about them too. This we know for certain. It is not an idea, an opinion, or an interpretation. It is a fact.

But it’s not necessarily the end for him. He may stagger on until the next wave of the virus has passed. Who, quite frankly, would want to take over right now? He may chuck it in, not because he suddenly acquires a sense of morality or even shame, but because he is skint and there is money to be made in them there hills of after-dinner buffoonery.

I’m so tired of writing about the mendacity and entitlement of the man, though. I would far rather talk about another man who has also made me think about the nature of reality this week (and whom I unashamedly adore): Keanu Reeves.

Normally, press junkets for a new film are nothing more than dull promotion. But in their interviews for The Matrix Resurrections, Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss answered questions about the nature of reality in interesting ways. The Matrix, after all, is an entire world of distraction — and an influential one at that. Who could have known in 1999 how it would infiltrate our culture?

Take “redpilling”, a term which has come to be used by many men’s rights activists, largely thanks to a Reddit thread in which men discuss waking up to the reality that women oppress men. Not all these guys are incels, but redpilling is nearly always talked about online by those on the anti-feminist Right.

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For some, the notion of questioning reality that The Matrix so cleverly explored has morphed into a denial of reality. Sure, men are oppressed — but more so than women? Is that the radical breakthrough that the red pill offers? Apparently so.

Will facts and statistics change their minds? I know now that we are living in a profoundly anti-science moment. Anti-vaxxers do not believe in science. Many trans-activists do not accept basic biology. Grace Lavery talks of a liberated future in which transwomen like herself will be able to have abortions — and I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

I have fought my entire life for women’s right to abortion. But since transwomen cannot get pregnant, I wonder how this is progressive, how this fantasy of womanhood is in any way radical, and not in some way deeply insulting to women’s actual experience of abortion? Can we really say physical reality has had its day?

Reeves talked in an interview about having dinner with a director who had his three teenage children with him. They had not seen The Matrix, so he explained that it was about a guy in a virtual world who was trying to get back to reality. The young girl asked: “Why? Who cares if it’s real?” Keanu said: “You don’t care if it’s real?” She said: “No”. When the interviewer asked Keanu how it made him feel, he paused and said: “Awesome.”

Are we the 17-year-old girl at dinner with Keanu Reeves who no longer cares what is real? I’m not convinced. Reality TV, itself scripted and managed, may be coming to the end of its cruel reign. Yet it was Ant and Dec on I’m A Celebrity, gunning for our Prime Minister, who alerted the Westminster bubble to the idea that the non-stop pizza, quiz, cheese and wine gatherings during lockdown was ‘cutting through’. A basic unfairness was exposed; a truth about rules not applying to those who govern us.

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By Josephine Bartosch

It was almost as if reality mattered, that endless lying was no longer acceptable. There is always something that punctures the Matrix. It’s there in The Communist Manifesto: “Man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”

Sure, it’s more comfortable to be fooled. But in the end, we have to do the work. We can argue forever about subjective and objective truth but hold the hand of a new baby or the hand of a person who is about to die and tell me that everything is virtual and nothing matters.

You can’t can you? The glitch in the Matrix is where we find ourselves. It’s the only place to be.

Distraction has always been a triggering word for me. In a good way. My PhD supervisor told me I was “a woman of too many distractions”. This was because I was venturing into journalism, frustrated by the dead language of academia. She also asked me whether having a grant made any difference. It turns out that my distractions were paying the rent, as they have been ever since.

Even though I’d been writing for them for decades, editors consistently try to steer me towards “lifestyle” subjects for my column. One even suggests that I shouldn’t touch politics at all. And yet I won the Orwell Prize for political journalism the year before. This was for articles on Brexit and war remembrance, among other things.

Maybe they were steering me away from certain subjects because they thought they were dealing with some mad old bint, or maybe they were scared and had been indoctrinated into the cult of righteousness that the Guardian embodies. At its best, the paper deserves to see itself as a beacon of the Left, but lately it has been hard to define what the Left consists of beyond smug affirmation. During the Corbyn years the paper had a difficult job to do: support Labour but to be honest about Corbyn and his cronies’ monstrous failings.

Of course, not every editor is nervous; but the anxiety around certain issues remains tangible. It has often been this way and none of this is new to me. Bad columns don’t come from bad opinions, they come from a lack of conviction. Readers know that instinctively, so to steer writers away from what they want to write about is a strange thing for an editor to do.

But, then, journalism has been in a strange place lately, unsure of itself and what it should be doing and giving itself away for free. A case of low self-esteem one might say, but not in my paper which makes journalists redundant even as it pays moderators to delete comments calling me a cunt under one of my columns about Scottish independence. Have I got issues? More than enough to go round.

My relationship with the paper has always been slightly odd, I guess.

So, I finally get to write a piece on trans issues. And 338 “colleagues” write a letter of complaint to the editor, alluding to that column.

Strung out to cry

Now, six months on, I have resigned. And I am still trying to work out why I have been treated so appallingly.

My hurt is obviously minuscule compared to so much of what has happened in the world. It’s a flesh wound and I shouldn’t make a fuss. But, do I look like a doormat with Welcome written on it?

There were no such upset letters organised regarding the various hot Tory takes about difficult subjects that we sometimes publish. Seumas Milne even reprinted a sermon by Osama Bin Laden. What about that? Not a word. So what did I do that was so terrible? I stepped outside the orthodoxy.

Perhaps I need to put my denunciation into a larger context. At the end of the year one reflects, right?

When I was first at the paper, in the 1990s, there were no women on the Comment pages. My column featured in the “Women’s pages”, which was seen as Features. The editor at the time, Peter Preston, took me out for an awkward lunch after I won Columnist of the Year at the British Press Awards and said: “It must be nice to be a lady columnist. You can write about painting your toenails.”

I had been meaning to raise the idea of an actual pay rise, but I had no idea how to do it. I don’t understand middle-class people and money (not that Preston was middle class but certainly his environment was totally bourgeois). So when he asked if there was anything he could do to make me happier, I just blurted out: “Give me more money.”

Preston’s power lay in silence. He had, after all, spent time in an iron lung. His ability to not speak was quite something, and I admired his refusal to make others comfortable. In one way. But I may as well have just farted loudly. I had made some awful faux pas: asking to be paid the same as men who were not as good as me. That was the end of the meal.

The thing is, I had found out I was being paid less than half what my male counterparts were earning. So I got an agent. She wore very short skirts and had a way of rattling her BMW keys that seemed to unnerve men. The one and only time Preston ever called me was to frantically beg — no uncomfortable silences — that he would never have to see her again. Result.

Another part of not knowing my place was that I also asked to be moved from the Women’s pages to the Comment pages. They offered a Monday slot which would mean I had to work on Sundays. As the only woman in the section, and single parent to boot, I asked them if they had ever heard of equal opportunities. Again I was not only unclubbable but unspeakable. No movement was possible. Madly, I suggested that Hugo Young be moved. I didn’t even realise he was Jesus in the hierarchy, floating above us all.

Watch Suzanne Moore’s interview with UnHerd’s LockdownTV:

The truth was, and remains that I never fitted in at the Guardian. The personal becomes political at the moment you never feel clean enough. I was always somehow inappropriate. As the anthropologist Mary Douglas said, dirt is “matter out of place”. Matter out of place. I know this feeling. I would describe it as an essential part of my political formation, this knowledge that I could scrub myself raw and it would never be enough.

Back then, I was in the office a bit, but was never given my own desk and grew bored hearing conversations about cricket and having various guys yell the names of Oxbridge colleges that I hadn’t been to at me. Telling them that I had been to a polytechnic was information some of them basically couldn’t compute.

The only people who were nice to me were Will Hutton and Richard Gott, who I was very fond of, although it turned out he had taken “red gold” from the KGB and he had to resign. A shame really, but not unfamiliar to me as I had worked at Marxism Today, which it turns out had similar “funding issues”. Let’s not go there now. I liked Richard because he would tell me fabulous stories about finding Che Guevara’s body one day and the next talk about a great Spanish fashion designer. The politics guys were dull, living on Planet Westminster. Plus ça change.

Listen to Suzanne Moore’s interview with UnHerd’s LockdownTV:

Leaving home

Fickle power-crazed harpie that I was, though, I got poached. I love that word. Off I went to The Independent, enticed by Andrew Marr’s exciting vision of having no news on the front page. Also there was no question that I wouldn’t be on the Comment page. It was great working there, I loved it, though it was all to go tits up.

The relevance of this? This was my original sin. No one leaves The Guardian. I had left the cult.

It was to get worse, as when I left the Independent, I went to The Mail on Sunday. The Indy was collapsing and The Mail on Sunday offered me a bit more money and many more readers. I thought it would be interesting to talk to the people who would decide the future of the country and I was bored with preaching to the converted.

Plus, there was the challenge of doing a tabloid column. This is much harder than long rambling pieces: The Times’s Matthew Parris told me so, bless him. The great and the good told me again that I was making a terrible mistake and I would lose my voice. This was another denunciation of sorts. Once again I was in the headmistress’ office chewing gum and telling my teachers I didn’t need them. I left school at 16 because rules did not interest me. Reading did.

This new idea, though, of talking to floating voters appealed. Politically. The very idea! And yet they were the ones deciding who was in power. They are now the ones the Left still despises while needing to win over. The Left could not and still cannot represent those whose “false consciousness” stops them from seeing the true and rightful path.

I cannot say how much I despise this way of thinking, having grown up in a Tory-voting working-class household. Don’t ask me to hate those I love in the name of socialism.

Mind you, clearly at one point I did think just like this. I wanted them all executed and joined the Workers Revolutionary Party in this hope.

Then I grew up. Not much, it must be said.

Now I was at The Mail on Sunday I was no longer pure. The dark side had claimed me. This was utter bollocks but it’s the way so much of the Left thinks, in binary terms. Electoral politics, which could be about persuasion, instead becomes a series of war games.

The Marxist philosopher Eric Hobsbawm, of all people, thought it a good idea for me to talk to “Middle England”. Middle England is a fantasy in my book. An imagined community. Still, my contract said I could write what I liked and that was honored. Anyway, I presumed it was a temporary job, like all jobs in journalism. I didn’t even start hackery till I was 30. I had a life before that. Thank god.

I lasted for several years at the Mail on Sunday, although I hankered to write longer pieces, which I did elsewhere. The lesson I learned was that I could get through to the paper’s readers on almost every social issue except immigration, where I could make no headway. This was to become key to so much of what has followed since. Facts are not feelings.

As I live in North London, when I moved to the Mail on Sunday, most people I knew who had read me regularly in the Guardian or the Indy thought I had just died. Actually I had gone from a readership of 300,000 to two million. Some of us didn’t need the arrival of social media to know about bubbles. Some of us couldn’t see a bubble without wanting to burst it. It’s a class thing.

At one point I was writing columns for both the Mail on Sunday and the Guardian (somehow, neither audience noticed) and eventually a new editor arrived at the former and wanted changes. That was fair enough, so I recommitted to the Guardian.

Back to the nest

Back among the righteous. Now, in the North London playground, other parents would talk to me — I became a “Guardian Writer” again. Resurrected somehow, absolved, I was more and more aware of the conservatism that was rising, politically and culturally.

We were being enveloped in beigeness. Especially women. When I had taken my older children to school in the late 1980s and 1990s, we had all just dropped them off and hurried to work. By 2010, mothers hung around the playground: “Lattes or pilates?” They didn’t have jobs, and made cushions. They had husbands, dogs and camper vans. Violin lessons were a thing and no one seemed to notice that the school had been ethnically cleansed. This was the work of property prices. They thought David Cameron seemed nice. This is, it’s true, a class issue, and something that’s particularly noticeable in my corner of North London. But there was definitely a wider move in modern conservatism to push women back into the home.

The electoral coalition that had brought Labour to power was collapsing. I didn’t find this out from Planet Westminster — for all my sins, I met and lunched Cameron — but from the playground. He will be prime minister I told the pol guys at the Mail. They put this down revoltingly to me fancying him. How could a woman know such things otherwise?

During my time at the Mail on Sunday there was no politician to whom we did not have access. They knew they needed that paper’s support. I have dined with every Right-wing bogeyman and every Labour bore you can imagine.

Going back to The Guardian brought another challenge. What should I be doing? I would describe my approach as: lobbing in some Molotov cocktails, some cultural analysis and some jokes. Not to buy into groupthink and in the end . . . entertainment. People should want to read what you write. I know this is verboten: actual pleasure. I chose not to go into the office. I still did not belong, having strayed from the true and rightful path.

Some debates had remained the same, some had changed. The Labour Party seemed to be imploding. Again. So I returned to my real passion: cultural politics and good old-fashioned feminism.

Seeing Red

In 2012, I contributed to an anthology of essays edited by the great poet and journalist Cathy Galvin. The theme was red. My piece was about the need for female anger and it was called “Seeing Red”. Feminism had become way too polite and we were going backwards. Fast.

The essay was about how and why women should be angry. I quoted the Liberian Nobel Peace Prize winner Leymah Gbowee: “Anger is like water; the shape it takes comes from the container you put it in.” Let it flow, I said. How little I knew.

The book came and went and the following year 2013 my essay was reprinted in the New Statesman. It contained this line: “We are angry with ourselves for not being happier, not being loved properly and not having the ideal body shape — that of a Brazilian transsexual.”

That was wrong — in that it was of its time. Now it’s a different body shape: the Kardashian ribless tits and ass. But hey, let’s roll with the times.

Suddenly I was inundated with tweets about the murder rate of Brazilian transsexuals which is appallingly high. Many of them are forced into sex work (I prefer the term prostitution but the new feminism likes to pretend all jobs are equal when they clearly are not. “Phoebe got four A-stars but hopes to become a sex worker” is not something you hear often.) But it’s true I had carelessly used a certain phrase to talk about the then fashionable shape for women; slim hips and big breasts. Indeed, transsexual models did appear on catwalks.

While I was trying to emphasise the impossibility of the ideals for women, maybe I had been thoughtless. I hadn’t actually killed anyone. Yet the backlash that hit me, online and offline, was like nothing else. And you have to understand I have been threatened in the past by the fascist group Combat 18 for my columns — on multiculturalism, immigration, being pro-choice and in favour of gay rights…  My crimes, back then, were “nigger-loving”, “paki-loving”, and “whore”. Sometimes they called me a “Jew”. I had panic buttons installed in my house. I would get phone calls at home with threats saying they knew I had kids so they wouldn’t kill me, just disable me. As ever I just got on with it. What else can you do?

But this time around, after the Red piece, the abuse was from the Left. It was a taste of what would happen in Labour a few years later with anti-Semitism.

When the big row over anti-Semitism happened, it was strangely no surprise; it had all just finally risen to the surface. I had spent enough time on the far-Left to know how the righteous thought. And it’s not so different from the far-Right. In the name of rights for Palestinians, this most elemental racism was once more permissible. A giant conspiracy theory that places itself on the moral high ground was not discouraged by the Labour leadership. It disgusts me.

Yet the abuse I got over the trans issue was different, and worse than anything that had come before. Social media was beginning to flex its muscles. It was a mindfuck. Twitter was full of people telling me how they were going to rape me, decapitate me, ejaculate inside my head, burn me. This was all somehow to do with the Brazilian transsexual remark. The police came round but they didn’t really get Twitter. They said things like: “Don’t email them back, love”. The worst threats were from people who knew where I lived and said that they would give my then 11-year-old a good fisting.

The sewer was opening, a torrent of women-hatred was pouring out, no one seemed to be able to control it. (Was this helping trans people? Was it coming from them? Mostly I think not.) I made the mistake of losing my temper and insulted my antagonists back. I would not be lectured on feminism or womanhood.

There was a new word. TERF. It posed as an acronym — trans exclusionary radical feminist — but it was used as a slur. On this row went. The label “transphobe” may as well have been tattooed on my forehead. My own history and activism was irrelevant: my years with Act Up, campaigning around Section 28, my lifelong commitment to campaigning for abortion. Nada!

I watched woman after woman denounced as a TERF. Attempted suicides of young trans people were the fault of women like me. The murder of trans people by men was somehow refracted onto feminists. Masculinity is never the problem, you see. Masculinity sets the rules. Women are always the other, the outsiders. Yet suicidal ideation is a growing issue for all young people — I studied counselling and psychotherapy for two years at this time — and suicide rates for young women are rising, too.

The Right Side of History

Why did I speak up? I have no hatred or fear of trans folk. As a feminist, I would argue that gender is socially constructed, and it can be reconstructed.

Under the professions of radicalism and the vitriol and stupidity, though, I was witnessing a new conservatism, the revenge of gender stereotypes. Pink and blue. Girl toys and boy toys. The female role models, such as Sam Cameron and Kate Middleton, were mute. Nostalgia was everywhere dressed up as irony.

During the Aids crisis, I was involved in queer politics, where difference was argued over endlessly. But we were on the same side against a straight world that hated homosexuality and women who wanted equality. Then that world fragmented. The queer alliance was fragile and the theories began to be more important than the practice. When academia moves in, activism moves out.

At the same time, women were getting ahead in the workplace by imitating men and pretending that children didn’t interfere with their wage slavery, now defined as “having it all”. Some act to pull off. I tried and failed. I had three children and worked the entire time. In my entire life, I have had eight weeks’ maternity leave.

Gender roles were becoming more fixed even as gay rights campaigners won the “victory” of gay marriage. I agreed with David Cameron that this was a basically conservative move and it cost nothing, and made people feel somehow that they were a bit modern. Gay rights and feminist campaigners were no longer the natural allies they had once been.

Looking back, I see that by the late Eighties and early Nineties, I had already picked up on something that perturbed me. A denial of female biology, of our ability to name and define our experience. Some of this came from certain strands of postmodern theory where objective reality gives way only to multiple subjectivities. A kind of gender tourism became possible. Everyone could be everything. A new kind of feminism came into being, one in which flesh and blood women and our desires became somehow a bit dull. Feminism without women. Grow a child inside you and push it out of your body and tell me this is a construct. (NB: no one has to have children.)

I believe quite simply bodies exist. I have been there when babies are born. And been there when people die. I know what happens when bodies no longer work…what shall we call my view? Materialism?

As trans ideology came into being, to question this was to question trans people’s “right to exist” — how is that even possible? They obviously exist! — when really we were questioning the ways in which we think about gender and oppression and how complex this all is.

It remains so. Yet somehow morality had entered the debate. To be good — ie, modern — one didn’t interrogate the new trans orthodoxy. Sex was no longer binary, but a spectrum, and people didn’t need to change their bodies to claim a new identity. All this was none of your business, and had no effect on your life.

I disagreed. By 2018, the atmosphere was poisonous. A fellow columnist at The Guardian replied to a message I sent about being civil at the Christmas do with: “You’ve prompted the most sickening transphobia, for which you have never apologised, you called islamophobia a myth and you publicly abuse leftwingers.” This person went on to say that I felt insecure “because a new generation of younger leftists have caught the public mood”. I didn’t even understand the accusation of Islamophobia. More broadly, I understood that the possibility of a left-wing government was exciting, but unlike half the paper, I didn’t believe that Corbyn had actually won in 2017. I also didn’t like the macho, bullying culture around him propped up by writers at my place of work.

I complained to my editor about this person at the time but was told that as neither of us were on staff, nothing official could be done. Really?

So there we have it. Here comes the “new generation”: the new Left, same as the old Left. Full of misogyny, utter pricks and those with the emotional intelligence of whelks. Misogyny in the name of socialism. Again.

Ladies who Lurch

Around this time I was in Armenia covering a story on foetal sex selection. Women were aborting female fetuses as they wanted boys. The UN population fund was doing fantastic work there, knowing that as fertility rates drop, sex selection becomes ever more prevalent. This world was a long, long way from those people who think sex is just a matter of personal choice. Foetal scans at 12 weeks mean generations of girls go “missing”. In rural Armenia I visited class rooms of 27 little boys and 5 girls, while at home I was told sex is simply “assigned at birth”.

Other women were now starting to be disturbed by the idea of transwomen with working male genitalia in womens spaces. The idea of the predatory trans person is not one I am particularly invested in, really. We are talking about a tiny percentage of a tiny percentage of the population. I am not that bothered about toilets or changing rooms. My youth was spent in gay clubs and with wonderful trans people who looked after me in New Orleans. Refuges, though? Prisons? Surely that can be sorted out and it has to be.

No, what I most didn’t and don’t like is the erasing of female bodies and female voices and female experience and our ability to name it.

What I care about fundamentally is the right of women to meet in single sex spaces and assert themselves as a class, a sex class — one that is oppressed by a patriarchal system. By men, even sometimes the good ones. As for the bad ones, they are the ones who rape and kill trans folk, too.

Feminism has to be able to talk about bodies. Many of the advances women have made in my lifetime — reproductive rights, more choice over how we give birth, discussions of menstruation and menopause — depend on biology, the biology we were now told was irrelevant.

When I walked past the Woman’s Place meeting in Brighton at the Labour Party conference last year, people were banging on the windows. More TERF-hunters. It hardly affected me, I was in a blur of distress about anti-Semitism, and a friend of mine who was dying. Her lung and bone cancer was missed and she had been told to do more yoga. Bodies fail us all in the end.

What sort of people would stop other people meeting, though? What good did it do the cause of trans people, some of whom were present at the event? Why can feminists not organise?

The moral climate had shifted from “trans rights are something we need to discuss and we must support trans people in all the ways we can” to a denial that such rights may at certain points compete with women’s rights. Friends were under threat, no-platformed in schools and universities if they questioned what had become a fixed set of beliefs.

Women who said that they were subject to threats of violence were told they had to suck it up. Any discussion of trans rights had now mutated into a denial of the existence of trans people and therefore actual violence.

Debate became murder

So while I and many others were receiving vile threats, we were somehow also responsible for the awful violence that is meted out to trans people. Social media blurred the conversation: very few trans people are murdered in Britain (around one a year) but the American stats are worse, so these are the ones used. In Britain at least two women a week are killed — estimated at 3.5 during lockdown — but women are never a marginalised group. We have it all!

In the States, trans healthcare is not free, either. So when American feminists tell us we are “behind” on trans rights, it rankles somewhat. Get your own house in order. We live in a country where abortion is free and legal and where health care for trans people, though not perfect, is free; and we have maternity leave. Neither country is perfect.

Various people who had not been there for the fight around Section 28 told us this was a re-run of that era, with trans folk being described as paedophiles and predators in the place of gay men. (As ever, lesbians were somehow invisible. Except the ones who wanted to transition.) This is revisionism. No one was being asked to give up anything for Section 28 to be dropped.

Gay people have chosen how they were to be referred to. In the trans debate, however, women were not consulted about their terms of reference. They are “Cis”. And “Cis” women are higher up the privilege ladder than trans women. We had become the oppressors — a subset of men.

Then came the rise of “non-binary”. Phew! Finally! By any definition of non-binary, this is what I am. The knowledge that since I was a tiny child my inner and outer selves did not match in any way. Knowingly, I upped the signifiers of femininity to be able to use the power of my mind. This was what I got in trouble with Germaine Greer for: hair, heels, tits. To me, just my drag. Presumably it is the same for everyone.

The Bad Column

Which brings us to March 2020. Eventually, I was allowed by a great editor to write about how gender critical women wanted to assert their basic rights. A professor of working-class history at Oxford, Selina Todd, was disinvited from an event. I noted, referring to this incident, that it is women again, never men, who were losing jobs, incomes and public platforms if they spoke up. Many of them were emailing me: not on one side or another, but generally worried. I wrote that I believed biological sex to be real and that it’s not transphobic to understand basic science. To my mind the column was fairly mild.

It was published. The next thing I know there are loads of people on social media thanking me for saying what needed to be said. And then another lot: the “die in a ditch terf” lot, amazingly telling me to die in a ditch. Again.

Seven years of this sort of abuse now, and no one from the Guardian had ever spoken to me about it. I just carried on. Do they care? Why should they? They should care, if they truly want more “diversity” in journalism, but that’s a lie which liberals tell themselves. How can you bring on working-class writers if you damn them for not knowing the codes upon which the media runs? If you won’t tolerate the heresies of outsiders? If — gasp — they haven’t been to Oxbridge?

In the new orthodoxy, where do I fit in? What is my place in the tickbox set of Left beliefs? I was Brexity, though I voted Remain. I want independence for Scotland and a united Ireland. I want England to be England. I don’t believe in the monarchy or the UK. I think biological sex is real… I have never hidden any of these views.

My experience is that I have been censored more by the Left than the Right and it gives me no pleasure to say that. Laziness of thought is my big fear, this unthinking adherence to some simplistic orthodoxy. There are values and there is experience and there are people. Complicated fuckers, all of us. The Guardian. Labour-supporting except for its Lib Dem blip in 2010. Endlessly “good”. Yeah; right.

I was discussed at “conference”, the newspaper morning meeting open to all: editorial, digital, advertising, everyone. (It looks like equality, but some people sit on the floor and others get seats, let’s put it that way.) I never go in to the office, or attend conference, but it was reported that a trans woman developer, who had already resigned some weeks earlier, resigned again that morning, because my words, my column, had made her feel unsafe. According to the news story: “the column was ‘the straw that broke the camel’s back,’ the trans employee said, following a series of pieces that pitted trans people against women and against women’s rights.”

Apparently, my fellow columnist Hadley Freeman defended me and I am grateful for that. It appeared to be an extremely upsetting incident for all concerned. I am sorry that it happened. No one will believe that, but I am.

The Letter

Then came the letter to the editor, expressing dismay about the Guardian being a publication “hostile to trans rights and trans employees”, since three trans people had apparently resigned in the last year. This was news to me. Although I wasn’t named in the letter, it was very clearly a response to my column. Three hundred and thirty-eight people signed it.

Not one of them had the decency to pick up the phone to me. Should The Guardian be a welcoming place for trans people to work in? Yes of course it bloody well should. Should it be a place where we discuss complicated issues? Again yes.

The letter made it clear to me that it wasn’t just social media activists who wanted me out of the paper. My fellow staff were gunning for me: time to hand over my job to the young Corbyn crew who spend their lives slagging off the mainstream media but cannot wait to be part of it. Could they write a good sentence? Say something from the heart? Does that matter? Apparently not, they simply think the right things.

The letter was then leaked to Buzzfeed and then the names were made public. I was devastated to find people who I like and had worked with had done this. In 30 years of journalism I have often disagreed with people and had stand-up rows with them but no one has ever done something so underhand as to try and get someone fired because of one column.

I listed the names of my denouncers on Twitter. I read one of them saying I doxxed them, not the case as the names were already in the public domain. I wrote a distraught and emotional letter to the people who I knew, asking how could they do this? What kind of victory had they achieved?

I felt fucking awful. Well, how would you feel if 338 colleagues basically bullied you? But off I went to Amsterdam to do a mushroom retreat because life goes on.

Mistakenly, I thought my editors would stand up for me because that was my experience at other papers; or they might issue a public statement. They didn’t. There was some internal email, and I hear it was discussed at the Scott Trust, which governs the paper. What this means I genuinely have no idea. Nor do I understand what editorial independence means any more. Do they? Not in my book.

This to me was utter cowardice. Shouldn’t you stand by your writers? But on this issue the Guardian has run scared. I suspect this is partly because of Guardian US sensitivities and, partly because the paper receives sponsorship from the Open Society foundation, which promotes trans rights.

This also might explain some of the utter gender gobbledegook we run about how HRT has taught someone to cry and all categories are porous. Whatever.

As a feminist, I have limited interest in all this, in the holes in which other people do or do not wish to put their bits. Sorry it’s rather dull. I am with Foucault in that I don’t believe sexuality is the essential soul or truth of an individual. My concern with this issue is only to do with the rights of women and the welfare of children.

So much of the discussion is about trans women, but the unhappiness of teenage girls must concern us. We have known since 2017 — earlier in fact — that there has been a huge uptick in female teenagers wanting to transition. Presenting to the Tavistock with self harm, eating disorders or suicidal ideation, these girls may end up on puberty-blocking hormones and then go on to have surgery. And for some of them that indeed may be the right thing to do. For others though, it clearly isn’t and to question that is not anything phobic, it is to care.

Why, as feminists, can we not talk about this epidemic of young women who cannot bear their bodies and the thought of what is happening to them: breasts, periods, unwanted sexual attention, the works? Why can you not be a young butch lesbian these days?

In an ideal world, feelings of masculinity or femininity could be achieved without surgery or hormones that may cause infertility. We are far from such a world and I respect the decisions of adults who go through this long, difficult process in often impossible circumstances. Brave, brave people.

My argument to my newspaper, though, has always been if we don’t have this discussion then the Right will, and indeed that has been the case. The Spectator and the Times have covered stories we haven’t, and I have had to write what I wanted to in the Telegraph. Investigative journalism means going into no-go areas. Why can’t we? The liberal Left looks not virtuous but naïve.

Less sexy subjects such as the appalling low rate for rape convictions, the Covid pandemic causing women to lose jobs and be forced back into the home, the complete lack of childcare… all of these things fall by the wayside when the main discussions of feminism appear to be by men telling us men can just say they’re women and if we say otherwise we deserve all the rape threats we get.

There is no actual interrogation of gender and I say this as someone who has written about and studied this subject for decades. There is a simply a belief system.

The Witches They Cannot Burn

For such thoughts, I have been denounced, alongside bigger and better people such as JK Rowling. The words “compassion” and “kindness” are often used by trans activists. Can we all just not be kinder? Well, yes … I never have and never would be unkind to someone because of their gender identity. I reserve the right not to kowtow to certain blokes, though. What I would like is some kindness towards women, some empathy towards our fears and our concerns, but I don’t see much of that. What have you done for us lately?

Since my denouncement, I have received nothing but support from all sorts of people in private, including many at the paper who are now afraid for their jobs. I didn’t stop writing, I carried on. “Don’t mention the war, Suzanne.” It felt quite schizophrenic, the split between the groundswell of women who are thinking along the same lines as me and the lack of support from the institution I work for.

The censorship continues and I cannot abide it. Every day another woman loses her job and a witch-burning occurs on Twitter. My fear is not about trans people but an ideology that means the erasure of women — not just the word, but of our ability to name and describe our experience. We are now cervix-havers, birthing parents, people who menstruate. On Amnesty’s latest posters to support the women’s strike in Poland, the literal translation from Polish for the thousands of women who were protesting the awful tightening of abortion laws was: “I stand with people in Poland”. Which people? Women forced to give birth on a plastic sheet to a dead baby with foetal defects? Say it.

Nor do I buy the idea that all of this is a purely generational issue. In part it is, sure, but it can at times be an issue of unfettered misogyny and a failure to understand that many women’s rights are fairly recent and always contested.

The Left — well, I guess I mean the Labour Party with its mad insistence on conformity — just stopped listening. As the Corbyn project collapsed, the cultural battle around trans issues became a proxy war of insane proportions. The Labour leadership contenders were ordered to sign a pledge which called Woman’s Place a “hate group”. With the exception of Keir Starmer, they did. “Transphobe” was now a slur to throw at anyone who didn’t keep the faith. You lose the electorate so what happens. Do you reflect?

No, apparently armed with misread Gramsci and a smidgeon of Chomsky you decide you will redefine common sense without persuading people to your side. Calling everyone unconvinced by your politics racist homophobes as an electoral strategy never sat well with me. Call me precious. The utter failure of the People’s Vote told us that, surely? The haute Remain position consisted mostly of telling Leave voters they were idiots.

Likewise, alienating women who are lifelong Labour supporters, because of their refusal to sign away what they feel to be their hard-won rights, is a performative gesture that I am unconvinced provides any actual “wins” for anyone.

Yet this one tiny issue has somehow come to dominate every debate now on feminism. It’s boring. Something has got terribly skewed here. Something has been lost and I am lost in it.

There is obviously bigger and more important stuff to deal with than the issue of the liberation of women. There always is. My hurt at being ejected from cults I never belonged in anyway is not self-pity. That dissolves the moment I have the freedom to speak my truth.

The things I want to talk about — the deep unhappiness of women, the suffocating girdle of masculinity, the ever growing and bleak inequalities, the falling fertility rates which will mean girls don’t get to be born, rape as a war crime, FGM — these things are hard enough to do anyway. To understand that women’s bodies are used and abused however we might feel about them is not a comfortable place to be. Our relationship with our bodies is not straightforward. I am sure it’s the same for many men.

Now that I have personally transitioned — my uterus no longer works, my estrogen has dropped — I have even less fucks to give than I did before. You can denounce me as much as you like but you cannot deny my life’s work of living somehow inside this female body. You cannot tell me it’s not real. It’s as real as it gets.

This, then, is a story about a woman journalist who “made it”, who never thought it would be easy.

This is a story about a feminist who started to see things going backwards and wanted to tell the world. This is not a story about trans people at all. Really it isn’t. It’s a story about not belonging. Not knowing my place.

Sure I understand the clichéd trajectory that as one grows older, one moves from Left to Right. Actually, I would say in my case this is not so: class politics becomes ever more pertinent to me, not less. In these fearful reactionary times, I will not be fearful and I will not be reactionary, but I will centre women and children and the possibility of freedom, as I always have, at the heart of my work.

The consequences of this have been tough in a tough year. The support both within and without the paper for which I write has been huge and I am grateful for it. I remain flame-retardant.

All this is then just a little story about being given a warning to shut up. And refusing to. I have had a lifetime of such warnings. Class will out. This is just something I wanted to tell you about a woman saying no. And the ways we say no.

That’s all it is. That’s the rub.

That’s all it takes sometimes.

This article first appeared on 25 November, 2020

Listen to Suzanne Moore’s interview with UnHerd’s LockdownTV:

Distraction has always been a triggering word for me. In a good way. My PhD supervisor told me I was “a woman of too many distractions”. This was because I was venturing into journalism, frustrated by the dead language of academia. She also asked me whether having a grant made any difference. It turns out that my distractions were paying the rent, as they have been ever since.

Even though I’d been writing for them for decades, editors consistently try to steer me towards “lifestyle” subjects for my column. One even suggests that I shouldn’t touch politics at all. And yet I won the Orwell Prize for political journalism the year before. This was for articles on Brexit and war remembrance, among other things.

Maybe they were steering me away from certain subjects because they thought they were dealing with some mad old bint, or maybe they were scared and had been indoctrinated into the cult of righteousness that the Guardian embodies. At its best, the paper deserves to see itself as a beacon of the Left, but lately it has been hard to define what the Left consists of beyond smug affirmation. During the Corbyn years the paper had a difficult job to do: support Labour but to be honest about Corbyn and his cronies’ monstrous failings.

Of course, not every editor is nervous; but the anxiety around certain issues remains tangible. It has often been this way and none of this is new to me. Bad columns don’t come from bad opinions, they come from a lack of conviction. Readers know that instinctively, so to steer writers away from what they want to write about is a strange thing for an editor to do.

But, then, journalism has been in a strange place lately, unsure of itself and what it should be doing and giving itself away for free. A case of low self-esteem one might say, but not in my paper which makes journalists redundant even as it pays moderators to delete comments calling me a cunt under one of my columns about Scottish independence. Have I got issues? More than enough to go round.

My relationship with the paper has always been slightly odd, I guess.

So, I finally get to write a piece on trans issues. And 338 “colleagues” write a letter of complaint to the editor, alluding to that column.

Strung out to cry

Now, six months on, I have resigned. And I am still trying to work out why I have been treated so appallingly.

My hurt is obviously minuscule compared to so much of what has happened in the world. It’s a flesh wound and I shouldn’t make a fuss. But, do I look like a doormat with Welcome written on it?

There were no such upset letters organised regarding the various hot Tory takes about difficult subjects that we sometimes publish. Seumas Milne even reprinted a sermon by Osama Bin Laden. What about that? Not a word. So what did I do that was so terrible? I stepped outside the orthodoxy.

Perhaps I need to put my denunciation into a larger context. At the end of the year one reflects, right?

When I was first at the paper, in the 1990s, there were no women on the Comment pages. My column featured in the “Women’s pages”, which was seen as Features. The editor at the time, Peter Preston, took me out for an awkward lunch after I won Columnist of the Year at the British Press Awards and said: “It must be nice to be a lady columnist. You can write about painting your toenails.”

I had been meaning to raise the idea of an actual pay rise, but I had no idea how to do it. I don’t understand middle-class people and money (not that Preston was middle class but certainly his environment was totally bourgeois). So when he asked if there was anything he could do to make me happier, I just blurted out: “Give me more money.”

Preston’s power lay in silence. He had, after all, spent time in an iron lung. His ability to not speak was quite something, and I admired his refusal to make others comfortable. In one way. But I may as well have just farted loudly. I had made some awful faux pas: asking to be paid the same as men who were not as good as me. That was the end of the meal.

The thing is, I had found out I was being paid less than half what my male counterparts were earning. So I got an agent. She wore very short skirts and had a way of rattling her BMW keys that seemed to unnerve men. The one and only time Preston ever called me was to frantically beg — no uncomfortable silences — that he would never have to see her again. Result.

Another part of not knowing my place was that I also asked to be moved from the Women’s pages to the Comment pages. They offered a Monday slot which would mean I had to work on Sundays. As the only woman in the section, and single parent to boot, I asked them if they had ever heard of equal opportunities. Again I was not only unclubbable but unspeakable. No movement was possible. Madly, I suggested that Hugo Young be moved. I didn’t even realise he was Jesus in the hierarchy, floating above us all.

Watch Suzanne Moore’s interview with UnHerd’s LockdownTV:

The truth was, and remains that I never fitted in at the Guardian. The personal becomes political at the moment you never feel clean enough. I was always somehow inappropriate. As the anthropologist Mary Douglas said, dirt is “matter out of place”. Matter out of place. I know this feeling. I would describe it as an essential part of my political formation, this knowledge that I could scrub myself raw and it would never be enough.

Back then, I was in the office a bit, but was never given my own desk and grew bored hearing conversations about cricket and having various guys yell the names of Oxbridge colleges that I hadn’t been to at me. Telling them that I had been to a polytechnic was information some of them basically couldn’t compute.

The only people who were nice to me were Will Hutton and Richard Gott, who I was very fond of, although it turned out he had taken “red gold” from the KGB and he had to resign. A shame really, but not unfamiliar to me as I had worked at Marxism Today, which it turns out had similar “funding issues”. Let’s not go there now. I liked Richard because he would tell me fabulous stories about finding Che Guevara’s body one day and the next talk about a great Spanish fashion designer. The politics guys were dull, living on Planet Westminster. Plus ça change.

Listen to Suzanne Moore’s interview with UnHerd’s LockdownTV:

Leaving home

Fickle power-crazed harpie that I was, though, I got poached. I love that word. Off I went to The Independent, enticed by Andrew Marr’s exciting vision of having no news on the front page. Also there was no question that I wouldn’t be on the Comment page. It was great working there, I loved it, though it was all to go tits up.

The relevance of this? This was my original sin. No one leaves The Guardian. I had left the cult.

It was to get worse, as when I left the Independent, I went to The Mail on Sunday. The Indy was collapsing and The Mail on Sunday offered me a bit more money and many more readers. I thought it would be interesting to talk to the people who would decide the future of the country and I was bored with preaching to the converted.

Plus, there was the challenge of doing a tabloid column. This is much harder than long rambling pieces: The Times’s Matthew Parris told me so, bless him. The great and the good told me again that I was making a terrible mistake and I would lose my voice. This was another denunciation of sorts. Once again I was in the headmistress’ office chewing gum and telling my teachers I didn’t need them. I left school at 16 because rules did not interest me. Reading did.

This new idea, though, of talking to floating voters appealed. Politically. The very idea! And yet they were the ones deciding who was in power. They are now the ones the Left still despises while needing to win over. The Left could not and still cannot represent those whose “false consciousness” stops them from seeing the true and rightful path.

I cannot say how much I despise this way of thinking, having grown up in a Tory-voting working-class household. Don’t ask me to hate those I love in the name of socialism.

Mind you, clearly at one point I did think just like this. I wanted them all executed and joined the Workers Revolutionary Party in this hope.

Then I grew up. Not much, it must be said.

Now I was at The Mail on Sunday I was no longer pure. The dark side had claimed me. This was utter bollocks but it’s the way so much of the Left thinks, in binary terms. Electoral politics, which could be about persuasion, instead becomes a series of war games.

The Marxist philosopher Eric Hobsbawm, of all people, thought it a good idea for me to talk to “Middle England”. Middle England is a fantasy in my book. An imagined community. Still, my contract said I could write what I liked and that was honored. Anyway, I presumed it was a temporary job, like all jobs in journalism. I didn’t even start hackery till I was 30. I had a life before that. Thank god.

I lasted for several years at the Mail on Sunday, although I hankered to write longer pieces, which I did elsewhere. The lesson I learned was that I could get through to the paper’s readers on almost every social issue except immigration, where I could make no headway. This was to become key to so much of what has followed since. Facts are not feelings.

As I live in North London, when I moved to the Mail on Sunday, most people I knew who had read me regularly in the Guardian or the Indy thought I had just died. Actually I had gone from a readership of 300,000 to two million. Some of us didn’t need the arrival of social media to know about bubbles. Some of us couldn’t see a bubble without wanting to burst it. It’s a class thing.

At one point I was writing columns for both the Mail on Sunday and the Guardian (somehow, neither audience noticed) and eventually a new editor arrived at the former and wanted changes. That was fair enough, so I recommitted to the Guardian.

Back to the nest

Back among the righteous. Now, in the North London playground, other parents would talk to me — I became a “Guardian Writer” again. Resurrected somehow, absolved, I was more and more aware of the conservatism that was rising, politically and culturally.

We were being enveloped in beigeness. Especially women. When I had taken my older children to school in the late 1980s and 1990s, we had all just dropped them off and hurried to work. By 2010, mothers hung around the playground: “Lattes or pilates?” They didn’t have jobs, and made cushions. They had husbands, dogs and camper vans. Violin lessons were a thing and no one seemed to notice that the school had been ethnically cleansed. This was the work of property prices. They thought David Cameron seemed nice. This is, it’s true, a class issue, and something that’s particularly noticeable in my corner of North London. But there was definitely a wider move in modern conservatism to push women back into the home.

The electoral coalition that had brought Labour to power was collapsing. I didn’t find this out from Planet Westminster — for all my sins, I met and lunched Cameron — but from the playground. He will be prime minister I told the pol guys at the Mail. They put this down revoltingly to me fancying him. How could a woman know such things otherwise?

During my time at the Mail on Sunday there was no politician to whom we did not have access. They knew they needed that paper’s support. I have dined with every Right-wing bogeyman and every Labour bore you can imagine.

Going back to The Guardian brought another challenge. What should I be doing? I would describe my approach as: lobbing in some Molotov cocktails, some cultural analysis and some jokes. Not to buy into groupthink and in the end . . . entertainment. People should want to read what you write. I know this is verboten: actual pleasure. I chose not to go into the office. I still did not belong, having strayed from the true and rightful path.

Some debates had remained the same, some had changed. The Labour Party seemed to be imploding. Again. So I returned to my real passion: cultural politics and good old-fashioned feminism.

Seeing Red

In 2012, I contributed to an anthology of essays edited by the great poet and journalist Cathy Galvin. The theme was red. My piece was about the need for female anger and it was called “Seeing Red”. Feminism had become way too polite and we were going backwards. Fast.

The essay was about how and why women should be angry. I quoted the Liberian Nobel Peace Prize winner Leymah Gbowee: “Anger is like water; the shape it takes comes from the container you put it in.” Let it flow, I said. How little I knew.

The book came and went and the following year 2013 my essay was reprinted in the New Statesman. It contained this line: “We are angry with ourselves for not being happier, not being loved properly and not having the ideal body shape — that of a Brazilian transsexual.”

That was wrong — in that it was of its time. Now it’s a different body shape: the Kardashian ribless tits and ass. But hey, let’s roll with the times.

Suddenly I was inundated with tweets about the murder rate of Brazilian transsexuals which is appallingly high. Many of them are forced into sex work (I prefer the term prostitution but the new feminism likes to pretend all jobs are equal when they clearly are not. “Phoebe got four A-stars but hopes to become a sex worker” is not something you hear often.) But it’s true I had carelessly used a certain phrase to talk about the then fashionable shape for women; slim hips and big breasts. Indeed, transsexual models did appear on catwalks.

While I was trying to emphasise the impossibility of the ideals for women, maybe I had been thoughtless. I hadn’t actually killed anyone. Yet the backlash that hit me, online and offline, was like nothing else. And you have to understand I have been threatened in the past by the fascist group Combat 18 for my columns — on multiculturalism, immigration, being pro-choice and in favour of gay rights…  My crimes, back then, were “nigger-loving”, “paki-loving”, and “whore”. Sometimes they called me a “Jew”. I had panic buttons installed in my house. I would get phone calls at home with threats saying they knew I had kids so they wouldn’t kill me, just disable me. As ever I just got on with it. What else can you do?

But this time around, after the Red piece, the abuse was from the Left. It was a taste of what would happen in Labour a few years later with anti-Semitism.

When the big row over anti-Semitism happened, it was strangely no surprise; it had all just finally risen to the surface. I had spent enough time on the far-Left to know how the righteous thought. And it’s not so different from the far-Right. In the name of rights for Palestinians, this most elemental racism was once more permissible. A giant conspiracy theory that places itself on the moral high ground was not discouraged by the Labour leadership. It disgusts me.

Yet the abuse I got over the trans issue was different, and worse than anything that had come before. Social media was beginning to flex its muscles. It was a mindfuck. Twitter was full of people telling me how they were going to rape me, decapitate me, ejaculate inside my head, burn me. This was all somehow to do with the Brazilian transsexual remark. The police came round but they didn’t really get Twitter. They said things like: “Don’t email them back, love”. The worst threats were from people who knew where I lived and said that they would give my then 11-year-old a good fisting.

The sewer was opening, a torrent of women-hatred was pouring out, no one seemed to be able to control it. (Was this helping trans people? Was it coming from them? Mostly I think not.) I made the mistake of losing my temper and insulted my antagonists back. I would not be lectured on feminism or womanhood.

There was a new word. TERF. It posed as an acronym — trans exclusionary radical feminist — but it was used as a slur. On this row went. The label “transphobe” may as well have been tattooed on my forehead. My own history and activism was irrelevant: my years with Act Up, campaigning around Section 28, my lifelong commitment to campaigning for abortion. Nada!

I watched woman after woman denounced as a TERF. Attempted suicides of young trans people were the fault of women like me. The murder of trans people by men was somehow refracted onto feminists. Masculinity is never the problem, you see. Masculinity sets the rules. Women are always the other, the outsiders. Yet suicidal ideation is a growing issue for all young people — I studied counselling and psychotherapy for two years at this time — and suicide rates for young women are rising, too.

The Right Side of History

Why did I speak up? I have no hatred or fear of trans folk. As a feminist, I would argue that gender is socially constructed, and it can be reconstructed.

Under the professions of radicalism and the vitriol and stupidity, though, I was witnessing a new conservatism, the revenge of gender stereotypes. Pink and blue. Girl toys and boy toys. The female role models, such as Sam Cameron and Kate Middleton, were mute. Nostalgia was everywhere dressed up as irony.

During the Aids crisis, I was involved in queer politics, where difference was argued over endlessly. But we were on the same side against a straight world that hated homosexuality and women who wanted equality. Then that world fragmented. The queer alliance was fragile and the theories began to be more important than the practice. When academia moves in, activism moves out.

At the same time, women were getting ahead in the workplace by imitating men and pretending that children didn’t interfere with their wage slavery, now defined as “having it all”. Some act to pull off. I tried and failed. I had three children and worked the entire time. In my entire life, I have had eight weeks’ maternity leave.

Gender roles were becoming more fixed even as gay rights campaigners won the “victory” of gay marriage. I agreed with David Cameron that this was a basically conservative move and it cost nothing, and made people feel somehow that they were a bit modern. Gay rights and feminist campaigners were no longer the natural allies they had once been.

Looking back, I see that by the late Eighties and early Nineties, I had already picked up on something that perturbed me. A denial of female biology, of our ability to name and define our experience. Some of this came from certain strands of postmodern theory where objective reality gives way only to multiple subjectivities. A kind of gender tourism became possible. Everyone could be everything. A new kind of feminism came into being, one in which flesh and blood women and our desires became somehow a bit dull. Feminism without women. Grow a child inside you and push it out of your body and tell me this is a construct. (NB: no one has to have children.)

I believe quite simply bodies exist. I have been there when babies are born. And been there when people die. I know what happens when bodies no longer work…what shall we call my view? Materialism?

As trans ideology came into being, to question this was to question trans people’s “right to exist” — how is that even possible? They obviously exist! — when really we were questioning the ways in which we think about gender and oppression and how complex this all is.

It remains so. Yet somehow morality had entered the debate. To be good — ie, modern — one didn’t interrogate the new trans orthodoxy. Sex was no longer binary, but a spectrum, and people didn’t need to change their bodies to claim a new identity. All this was none of your business, and had no effect on your life.

I disagreed. By 2018, the atmosphere was poisonous. A fellow columnist at The Guardian replied to a message I sent about being civil at the Christmas do with: “You’ve prompted the most sickening transphobia, for which you have never apologised, you called islamophobia a myth and you publicly abuse leftwingers.” This person went on to say that I felt insecure “because a new generation of younger leftists have caught the public mood”. I didn’t even understand the accusation of Islamophobia. More broadly, I understood that the possibility of a left-wing government was exciting, but unlike half the paper, I didn’t believe that Corbyn had actually won in 2017. I also didn’t like the macho, bullying culture around him propped up by writers at my place of work.

I complained to my editor about this person at the time but was told that as neither of us were on staff, nothing official could be done. Really?

So there we have it. Here comes the “new generation”: the new Left, same as the old Left. Full of misogyny, utter pricks and those with the emotional intelligence of whelks. Misogyny in the name of socialism. Again.

Ladies who Lurch

Around this time I was in Armenia covering a story on foetal sex selection. Women were aborting female fetuses as they wanted boys. The UN population fund was doing fantastic work there, knowing that as fertility rates drop, sex selection becomes ever more prevalent. This world was a long, long way from those people who think sex is just a matter of personal choice. Foetal scans at 12 weeks mean generations of girls go “missing”. In rural Armenia I visited class rooms of 27 little boys and 5 girls, while at home I was told sex is simply “assigned at birth”.

Other women were now starting to be disturbed by the idea of transwomen with working male genitalia in womens spaces. The idea of the predatory trans person is not one I am particularly invested in, really. We are talking about a tiny percentage of a tiny percentage of the population. I am not that bothered about toilets or changing rooms. My youth was spent in gay clubs and with wonderful trans people who looked after me in New Orleans. Refuges, though? Prisons? Surely that can be sorted out and it has to be.

No, what I most didn’t and don’t like is the erasing of female bodies and female voices and female experience and our ability to name it.

What I care about fundamentally is the right of women to meet in single sex spaces and assert themselves as a class, a sex class — one that is oppressed by a patriarchal system. By men, even sometimes the good ones. As for the bad ones, they are the ones who rape and kill trans folk, too.

Feminism has to be able to talk about bodies. Many of the advances women have made in my lifetime — reproductive rights, more choice over how we give birth, discussions of menstruation and menopause — depend on biology, the biology we were now told was irrelevant.

When I walked past the Woman’s Place meeting in Brighton at the Labour Party conference last year, people were banging on the windows. More TERF-hunters. It hardly affected me, I was in a blur of distress about anti-Semitism, and a friend of mine who was dying. Her lung and bone cancer was missed and she had been told to do more yoga. Bodies fail us all in the end.

What sort of people would stop other people meeting, though? What good did it do the cause of trans people, some of whom were present at the event? Why can feminists not organise?

The moral climate had shifted from “trans rights are something we need to discuss and we must support trans people in all the ways we can” to a denial that such rights may at certain points compete with women’s rights. Friends were under threat, no-platformed in schools and universities if they questioned what had become a fixed set of beliefs.

Women who said that they were subject to threats of violence were told they had to suck it up. Any discussion of trans rights had now mutated into a denial of the existence of trans people and therefore actual violence.

Debate became murder

So while I and many others were receiving vile threats, we were somehow also responsible for the awful violence that is meted out to trans people. Social media blurred the conversation: very few trans people are murdered in Britain (around one a year) but the American stats are worse, so these are the ones used. In Britain at least two women a week are killed — estimated at 3.5 during lockdown — but women are never a marginalised group. We have it all!

In the States, trans healthcare is not free, either. So when American feminists tell us we are “behind” on trans rights, it rankles somewhat. Get your own house in order. We live in a country where abortion is free and legal and where health care for trans people, though not perfect, is free; and we have maternity leave. Neither country is perfect.

Various people who had not been there for the fight around Section 28 told us this was a re-run of that era, with trans folk being described as paedophiles and predators in the place of gay men. (As ever, lesbians were somehow invisible. Except the ones who wanted to transition.) This is revisionism. No one was being asked to give up anything for Section 28 to be dropped.

Gay people have chosen how they were to be referred to. In the trans debate, however, women were not consulted about their terms of reference. They are “Cis”. And “Cis” women are higher up the privilege ladder than trans women. We had become the oppressors — a subset of men.

Then came the rise of “non-binary”. Phew! Finally! By any definition of non-binary, this is what I am. The knowledge that since I was a tiny child my inner and outer selves did not match in any way. Knowingly, I upped the signifiers of femininity to be able to use the power of my mind. This was what I got in trouble with Germaine Greer for: hair, heels, tits. To me, just my drag. Presumably it is the same for everyone.

The Bad Column

Which brings us to March 2020. Eventually, I was allowed by a great editor to write about how gender critical women wanted to assert their basic rights. A professor of working-class history at Oxford, Selina Todd, was disinvited from an event. I noted, referring to this incident, that it is women again, never men, who were losing jobs, incomes and public platforms if they spoke up. Many of them were emailing me: not on one side or another, but generally worried. I wrote that I believed biological sex to be real and that it’s not transphobic to understand basic science. To my mind the column was fairly mild.

It was published. The next thing I know there are loads of people on social media thanking me for saying what needed to be said. And then another lot: the “die in a ditch terf” lot, amazingly telling me to die in a ditch. Again.

Seven years of this sort of abuse now, and no one from the Guardian had ever spoken to me about it. I just carried on. Do they care? Why should they? They should care, if they truly want more “diversity” in journalism, but that’s a lie which liberals tell themselves. How can you bring on working-class writers if you damn them for not knowing the codes upon which the media runs? If you won’t tolerate the heresies of outsiders? If — gasp — they haven’t been to Oxbridge?

In the new orthodoxy, where do I fit in? What is my place in the tickbox set of Left beliefs? I was Brexity, though I voted Remain. I want independence for Scotland and a united Ireland. I want England to be England. I don’t believe in the monarchy or the UK. I think biological sex is real… I have never hidden any of these views.

My experience is that I have been censored more by the Left than the Right and it gives me no pleasure to say that. Laziness of thought is my big fear, this unthinking adherence to some simplistic orthodoxy. There are values and there is experience and there are people. Complicated fuckers, all of us. The Guardian. Labour-supporting except for its Lib Dem blip in 2010. Endlessly “good”. Yeah; right.

I was discussed at “conference”, the newspaper morning meeting open to all: editorial, digital, advertising, everyone. (It looks like equality, but some people sit on the floor and others get seats, let’s put it that way.) I never go in to the office, or attend conference, but it was reported that a trans woman developer, who had already resigned some weeks earlier, resigned again that morning, because my words, my column, had made her feel unsafe. According to the news story: “the column was ‘the straw that broke the camel’s back,’ the trans employee said, following a series of pieces that pitted trans people against women and against women’s rights.”

Apparently, my fellow columnist Hadley Freeman defended me and I am grateful for that. It appeared to be an extremely upsetting incident for all concerned. I am sorry that it happened. No one will believe that, but I am.

The Letter

Then came the letter to the editor, expressing dismay about the Guardian being a publication “hostile to trans rights and trans employees”, since three trans people had apparently resigned in the last year. This was news to me. Although I wasn’t named in the letter, it was very clearly a response to my column. Three hundred and thirty-eight people signed it.

Not one of them had the decency to pick up the phone to me. Should The Guardian be a welcoming place for trans people to work in? Yes of course it bloody well should. Should it be a place where we discuss complicated issues? Again yes.

The letter made it clear to me that it wasn’t just social media activists who wanted me out of the paper. My fellow staff were gunning for me: time to hand over my job to the young Corbyn crew who spend their lives slagging off the mainstream media but cannot wait to be part of it. Could they write a good sentence? Say something from the heart? Does that matter? Apparently not, they simply think the right things.

The letter was then leaked to Buzzfeed and then the names were made public. I was devastated to find people who I like and had worked with had done this. In 30 years of journalism I have often disagreed with people and had stand-up rows with them but no one has ever done something so underhand as to try and get someone fired because of one column.

I listed the names of my denouncers on Twitter. I read one of them saying I doxxed them, not the case as the names were already in the public domain. I wrote a distraught and emotional letter to the people who I knew, asking how could they do this? What kind of victory had they achieved?

I felt fucking awful. Well, how would you feel if 338 colleagues basically bullied you? But off I went to Amsterdam to do a mushroom retreat because life goes on.

Mistakenly, I thought my editors would stand up for me because that was my experience at other papers; or they might issue a public statement. They didn’t. There was some internal email, and I hear it was discussed at the Scott Trust, which governs the paper. What this means I genuinely have no idea. Nor do I understand what editorial independence means any more. Do they? Not in my book.

This to me was utter cowardice. Shouldn’t you stand by your writers? But on this issue the Guardian has run scared. I suspect this is partly because of Guardian US sensitivities and, partly because the paper receives sponsorship from the Open Society foundation, which promotes trans rights.

This also might explain some of the utter gender gobbledegook we run about how HRT has taught someone to cry and all categories are porous. Whatever.

As a feminist, I have limited interest in all this, in the holes in which other people do or do not wish to put their bits. Sorry it’s rather dull. I am with Foucault in that I don’t believe sexuality is the essential soul or truth of an individual. My concern with this issue is only to do with the rights of women and the welfare of children.

So much of the discussion is about trans women, but the unhappiness of teenage girls must concern us. We have known since 2017 — earlier in fact — that there has been a huge uptick in female teenagers wanting to transition. Presenting to the Tavistock with self harm, eating disorders or suicidal ideation, these girls may end up on puberty-blocking hormones and then go on to have surgery. And for some of them that indeed may be the right thing to do. For others though, it clearly isn’t and to question that is not anything phobic, it is to care.

Why, as feminists, can we not talk about this epidemic of young women who cannot bear their bodies and the thought of what is happening to them: breasts, periods, unwanted sexual attention, the works? Why can you not be a young butch lesbian these days?

In an ideal world, feelings of masculinity or femininity could be achieved without surgery or hormones that may cause infertility. We are far from such a world and I respect the decisions of adults who go through this long, difficult process in often impossible circumstances. Brave, brave people.

My argument to my newspaper, though, has always been if we don’t have this discussion then the Right will, and indeed that has been the case. The Spectator and the Times have covered stories we haven’t, and I have had to write what I wanted to in the Telegraph. Investigative journalism means going into no-go areas. Why can’t we? The liberal Left looks not virtuous but naïve.

Less sexy subjects such as the appalling low rate for rape convictions, the Covid pandemic causing women to lose jobs and be forced back into the home, the complete lack of childcare… all of these things fall by the wayside when the main discussions of feminism appear to be by men telling us men can just say they’re women and if we say otherwise we deserve all the rape threats we get.

There is no actual interrogation of gender and I say this as someone who has written about and studied this subject for decades. There is a simply a belief system.

The Witches They Cannot Burn

For such thoughts, I have been denounced, alongside bigger and better people such as JK Rowling. The words “compassion” and “kindness” are often used by trans activists. Can we all just not be kinder? Well, yes … I never have and never would be unkind to someone because of their gender identity. I reserve the right not to kowtow to certain blokes, though. What I would like is some kindness towards women, some empathy towards our fears and our concerns, but I don’t see much of that. What have you done for us lately?

Since my denouncement, I have received nothing but support from all sorts of people in private, including many at the paper who are now afraid for their jobs. I didn’t stop writing, I carried on. “Don’t mention the war, Suzanne.” It felt quite schizophrenic, the split between the groundswell of women who are thinking along the same lines as me and the lack of support from the institution I work for.

The censorship continues and I cannot abide it. Every day another woman loses her job and a witch-burning occurs on Twitter. My fear is not about trans people but an ideology that means the erasure of women — not just the word, but of our ability to name and describe our experience. We are now cervix-havers, birthing parents, people who menstruate. On Amnesty’s latest posters to support the women’s strike in Poland, the literal translation from Polish for the thousands of women who were protesting the awful tightening of abortion laws was: “I stand with people in Poland”. Which people? Women forced to give birth on a plastic sheet to a dead baby with foetal defects? Say it.

Nor do I buy the idea that all of this is a purely generational issue. In part it is, sure, but it can at times be an issue of unfettered misogyny and a failure to understand that many women’s rights are fairly recent and always contested.

The Left — well, I guess I mean the Labour Party with its mad insistence on conformity — just stopped listening. As the Corbyn project collapsed, the cultural battle around trans issues became a proxy war of insane proportions. The Labour leadership contenders were ordered to sign a pledge which called Woman’s Place a “hate group”. With the exception of Keir Starmer, they did. “Transphobe” was now a slur to throw at anyone who didn’t keep the faith. You lose the electorate so what happens. Do you reflect?

No, apparently armed with misread Gramsci and a smidgeon of Chomsky you decide you will redefine common sense without persuading people to your side. Calling everyone unconvinced by your politics racist homophobes as an electoral strategy never sat well with me. Call me precious. The utter failure of the People’s Vote told us that, surely? The haute Remain position consisted mostly of telling Leave voters they were idiots.

Likewise, alienating women who are lifelong Labour supporters, because of their refusal to sign away what they feel to be their hard-won rights, is a performative gesture that I am unconvinced provides any actual “wins” for anyone.

Yet this one tiny issue has somehow come to dominate every debate now on feminism. It’s boring. Something has got terribly skewed here. Something has been lost and I am lost in it.

There is obviously bigger and more important stuff to deal with than the issue of the liberation of women. There always is. My hurt at being ejected from cults I never belonged in anyway is not self-pity. That dissolves the moment I have the freedom to speak my truth.

The things I want to talk about — the deep unhappiness of women, the suffocating girdle of masculinity, the ever growing and bleak inequalities, the falling fertility rates which will mean girls don’t get to be born, rape as a war crime, FGM — these things are hard enough to do anyway. To understand that women’s bodies are used and abused however we might feel about them is not a comfortable place to be. Our relationship with our bodies is not straightforward. I am sure it’s the same for many men.

Now that I have personally transitioned — my uterus no longer works, my estrogen has dropped — I have even less fucks to give than I did before. You can denounce me as much as you like but you cannot deny my life’s work of living somehow inside this female body. You cannot tell me it’s not real. It’s as real as it gets.

This, then, is a story about a woman journalist who “made it”, who never thought it would be easy.

This is a story about a feminist who started to see things going backwards and wanted to tell the world. This is not a story about trans people at all. Really it isn’t. It’s a story about not belonging. Not knowing my place.

Sure I understand the clichéd trajectory that as one grows older, one moves from Left to Right. Actually, I would say in my case this is not so: class politics becomes ever more pertinent to me, not less. In these fearful reactionary times, I will not be fearful and I will not be reactionary, but I will centre women and children and the possibility of freedom, as I always have, at the heart of my work.

The consequences of this have been tough in a tough year. The support both within and without the paper for which I write has been huge and I am grateful for it. I remain flame-retardant.

All this is then just a little story about being given a warning to shut up. And refusing to. I have had a lifetime of such warnings. Class will out. This is just something I wanted to tell you about a woman saying no. And the ways we say no.

That’s all it is. That’s the rub.

That’s all it takes sometimes.

Listen to Suzanne Moore’s interview with UnHerd’s LockdownTV: