Keir Starmer used violence against women and girls as a shield when the Peter Mandelson scandal “bubbled up”, according to one of his own ministers. This astonishing claim appeared in the resignation letter of safeguarding minister Jess Phillips, whose departure from Government on Tuesday afternoon was swiftly followed by that of the victims minister, Alex Davies-Jones.

“It would be remiss of me not to say that real change and direction in this area usually came from threats made by me in light of catastrophic mistakes,” Phillips wrote, claiming that the Mandelson saga “made Number 10 kick into gear on the subject in order to prove our credentials”. She added that “demands were made and some were met”, saying she was willing to use a crisis to make improvements for women and girls.

This is a terrible state of affairs, but it confirms what some of us have long suspected. Two summers ago, Starmer won a general election with a “landmark mission” to halve violence against women and girls within a decade. It always felt like a soundbite, raising flippant questions about “which half” and serious ones about how it was to be achieved. The fact that publication of the new government’s VAWG strategy was delayed three times didn’t inspire confidence, finally appearing only after Starmer had been Prime Minister for 18 months.

While the timing, coming as it does during a Government crisis, might seem opportunistic, Phillips’s letter is useful in revealing what was going on behind the scenes. It goes some way towards explaining why Phillips, who was widely admired as a backbench MP for highlighting the number of women killed by men each year, seems to have underperformed in Government. She managed refuges in the West Midlands before she entered Parliament in 2015, and then quickly became one of the most outspoken MPs on the subject of VAWG.

As a junior minister, however, she has often been mysteriously quiet, especially after an unfortunate row with survivors of the grooming scandal last October. Five victims called on Phillips to resign over suggestions that she wanted to expand the scope of a public inquiry. Earlier in the year, she was accused of obfuscating details of the abuse. Some survivors suspect, rightly or wrongly, that the Government fears what might emerge about the role of Labour councils in keeping the scandal out of the public eye.

Now, though, Phillips’s resignation letter has fired a missile not just into the heart of Starmer’s government but also at his personal commitment to tackling an epidemic of sexual and domestic violence. The Prime Minister never misses an opportunity to grandstand about his experience as a prosecutor and his determination to protect women, yet he now faces serious allegations. He’s accused not just of dragging his feet on a key pledge, but also of using it to deflect attention away from his decision to appoint the friend of a convicted sex trafficker as Britain’s man in Washington.

Phillips’s resignation letter marks a return to her old frankness. She cheerfully acknowledged telling the veteran Labour MP Diane Abbott to “fuck off” during a heated exchange in 2015, just four months after her own election to Parliament. But it was her response to a mass outbreak of sexual violence in Cologne on New Year’s Eve of that year that dismayed even her admirers.

According to the police, 1,200 women were sexually assaulted in German cities that night. There were more than 650 assaults in Cologne, including 22 rapes, and many of the attackers were identified as men of North African and Arab origin. To widespread astonishment, Phillips downplayed the Cologne attacks, comparing them to “a very similar situation” on Broad Street in Birmingham every week where “women are baited and heckled”.

Phillips’s hasty dismissal of the women’s experience could have been a misstep by a rookie MP, but it left questions hovering over her judgement. Can a woman truly be an ally to other women if she can’t “see” some predators?

Many feminists were willing to give Phillips the benefit of the doubt, although her recent performance as a minister has been disappointing. Now she has come out all guns blazing, leaving Starmer seriously exposed. But her own legacy as a champion of women and girls is hardly assured.

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Joan Smith is a novelist and columnist. She was previously Chair of the Mayor of London’s Violence Against Women and Girls Board, and is on the advisory group for Sex Matters. Her book Unfortunately, She Was A Nymphomaniac: A New History of Rome’s Imperial Women was published in November 2024.

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