April 30, 2024 - 3:20pm

If you want to see a human being squirm, just say the words “Rosie Duffield” to Sir Keir Starmer. He immediately looks like a man who wishes he was somewhere else — at the dentist, maybe, or having an intimate medical procedure. It happened again this morning, when he was asked by Susanna Reid on Good Morning Britain whether he was going to apologise to the Canterbury MP after finally admitting she was correct to say in 2021 that only women have a cervix.

The Leader of the Opposition tried, as usual, to swerve the question. “Rosie Duffield and I get on very well, we discuss a number of issues, she’s a much respected member of the Parliamentary Labour Party and I want to have a discussion with her and anybody else about how we go forward in a positive way,” he rambled.

This is not how Duffield sees it. She says Starmer hasn’t spoken to her for two-and-a-half years, and it’s not for want of trying on her part. Her efforts to talk to him about the bullying she’s endured from party members (and indeed anything else) have come to nothing, as she revealed in an article earlier this month.

“Have I heard a word from [Starmer]? Or from senior colleagues?” she wrote. “No!” She added that the party leader has “almost no personal contact with his backbenchers. The last message I sent to Keir, practically begging for support, was ignored.”

Duffield is certainly in need of support. She regularly encounters hostility in the House of Commons, where she says some of her Labour colleagues mutter about “fucking terfs” as she walks past. Worse, she’s been targeted by violent men, one of whom appeared at Westminster Magistrates’ Court yesterday. Glenn Mullen, 31, admitted sending threatening messages to Duffield and the author J.K. Rowling, one of which was a threat to shoot the MP.

Starmer’s refusal to apologise to Duffield is bad enough. It’s part of his mulish reluctance to admit he has said any number of risible things about sex and gender, as though we all have short memories and he can rewrite the past. He wholeheartedly embraced gender ideology after he became leader and now seems to be having second thoughts, which is hardly surprising in light of the casualties it’s already claimed — Nicola Sturgeon and Humza Yousaf in Scotland, Leo Varadkar in Ireland.

A decent man would throw up his hands and admit he was wrong. Instead, Starmer takes refuge in platitudes — but they’re dangerous platitudes. He says he talks to Duffield. She says he doesn’t. He says he wants to have a discussion with her and “anybody else” about sex and gender. So why have I been waiting more than three years for a response to my letter on this very issue, which described attacks on women members of the Labour Party by trans activists? He still hasn’t replied after I spoke to him in person at a dinner in May 2022.

The question of where our likely next prime minister stands on the conflict between women’s rights and the outrageous demands of trans activists is not going to go away. And Starmer has made the situation a great deal worse by appearing to lie on TV about his dealings with one of his own MPs.


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.

polblonde