The Labour Party has never had a permanent woman leader. Its supporters are surprisingly quiet, complacent even, about this fact, but former minister Jess Phillips broke ranks on Monday. Speaking at the Hay Festival, she described Labour as “a bit sexist” for its failure to produce an electable female candidate, but even she was careful not to put too much blame on the party.

“Every institution that every single person in this room works for is led by the patriarchy,” Phillips blithely told the Hay audience. She evidently feels liberated by her resignation earlier this month as minister for safeguarding, returning to her old style of flinging out soundbites, but Labour’s record on this front surely deserves more serious scrutiny.

The big question of the day — can Andy Burnham topple Keir Starmer? — is a reminder that the Labour top ranks very much remain a boys’ club. The party that claims to stand for equality has failed spectacularly on this score, while the Tories are on their fourth female leader. Many women who are no fans of Margaret Thatcher say that growing up under a female prime minister in the Eighties had a huge influence on their expectations of what women could achieve.

So what is wrong with Labour? Straightforward sexism is too glib an answer for such a longstanding failure. The old adage “think Left, live Right” comes closer, exposing the gap between rhetoric and reality. Labour is peculiarly prone to it, as though professing a passionate belief in equality is enough; the party is self-evidently the champion of women’s rights, so there’s no need or time for introspection. The famous photo of Tony Blair surrounded by Labour’s new female MPs following the 1997 general election was telling, suggesting that the women were window dressing.

The party is rightly credited with introducing all-women shortlists. But the fact that they were needed says something about the barriers facing women who wanted to be parliamentary candidates. If Labour members were genuinely committed to equality, why weren’t women being selected as often as men? It’s a signal of how hard it is to shift underlying attitudes, especially when the people holding them are convinced they are on “the right side of history”.

Consider Harriet Harman, who has twice served as acting leader following the resignations of Gordon Brown and Ed Miliband. She has disappointed many female Labour members through her stance on “trans rights”, the bitterly divisive issue that’s driven so many women, including me, out of the party. “So far as I’m concerned, women are women who are born women but women are also women who are trans women,” Harman said in 2022, tying herself in verbal knots. When Harman was appointed Starmer’s adviser on women and girls earlier this month, the author J.K. Rowling expressed incredulity, saying: “You cannot defend what you’re afraid to define.”

Five years ago I found myself on an LBC programme with Margaret Beckett, who was at the time chair of Labour’s ruling body, the NEC. I raised the issue of bullying of women in the party by trans activists. She appeared to know nothing about it, so I wrote to her afterwards. “I am in touch with Labour councillors who say they are too frightened to speak publicly about their support for single-sex spaces in refuges, hospitals and prisons,” l told her. I got nothing back, apart from a pro forma acknowledgement, so I wrote again. Still no answer.

The ease with which Labour has succumbed to trans activism has puzzled many observers. The top echelons of the party are stuffed with politicians who have made fools of themselves, repeating activist slogans and denying biology. But the party’s failure to put even one woman in the top job speaks for itself. Labour may no longer be the party of the working man, but the urge to put men first appears to be as strong as ever.

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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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