There’s a funny saying the Cockneys have to describe something ghastly coming in the wake of something lovely: ‘After the Lord Mayor’s show…’
One online dictionary describes it thus: ‘Said of a disappointing or mundane event occurring straight after an exciting, magnificent or triumphal event… from the proverb “After the Lord Mayor’s show comes the dust-cart”… Bringing up the rear of the Lord Mayor’s Show is a team to clean the manure of the pageant’s horses.’
How better to describe Anneliese Dodds succeeding Kemi Badenoch and becoming Minister of State for Women and Equalities? On one hand a bold, beautiful woman – so fearsome to cry-bullies that they wished she didn’t exist – who put herself through college by working at McDonald’s and who defines what differentiates women from men as ‘Puberty, menstruation, menopause… it is very biological’. And on the other, the over-privileged and expensively-educated Dodds, who has never had a job outside of politics and academia and seems to be utterly baffled about basic biology.
Of course, the Labour benches are the natural habitat of what I coined the ‘Transmaid’. This monstrous regiment has quite a few sub-divisions but Labour is where you’ll find their dominant type, the Bossy-boots Transmaid, though her prototype was Nicola Sturgeon (whose drastic demise should be a warning to this horrible herd). I’d reckon that a lot of them were unpopular at school and now get a kick from the male approval they are rewarded with for attacking the more accomplished of their sex. If 1997 saw a Labour landslide of ‘Blair’s Babes’ then this shower are what the wit Jo Brew calls ‘Starmer’s Cisters’.
Just listen to the silly things they say! Lisa Nandy, on being asked whether a man who had been convicted of five counts of child rape should be housed in a women’s prison after identifying as a woman: ‘I think trans women are woman and trans men are men. So I think they should be accommodated in the prison of their choosing.’ Dawn Butler: ‘A child is born without a sex.’ (How about gay giraffes, as promoted by Butler – are they born without a sex too?) Emily Thornberry: it is ‘factually inaccurate’ to say only women have cervixes. (Is it factually inaccurate to suppose that it is odd to fly an English flag?) Yvette Cooper, asked what a woman is: ‘I’m not going to get into rabbit holes on this.’ (Can she define what a rabbit is?) Stella Creasy: ‘Do I think some women were born with penises? Yes.’
Sometimes the line between silly and sinister blurs. See Harriet Harman, currently touted as a candidate for the next head of the Equality and Human Rights Commission. In 2014 she said she ‘regretted’ the civil liberties group she worked for having links to pro-paedophile campaigners in the 1970s but insisted she had ‘nothing to apologise for.’
And when working for the NCCL, she ‘suggested that a pornographic photo or film of a child should not be considered indecent unless it could be shown that the subject had suffered, and that prosecutors would have to prove harm rather than defendants having to justify themselves’, to quote the Telegraph. (Her spokesperson said: ‘NCCL’s approach to the protection of children’s Bill was to argue for clear definitions in the Bill to make sure the law was precise so that it was about child protection and not about censorship.’)
In the light of the horror that is Harman, Anneliese Dodds seems perfectly harmless when waffling on – as she did on Woman’s Hour in 2022 – that:
I have to say that there are different definitions legally around what a woman actually is. I mean, you look at the definition within the Equality Act, and I think it just says someone who is adult and female, I think, but then doesn’t say how you define either of those things. I mean obviously, that’s when you’ve got the biological definition, legal definition, all kinds of things…’
But she is far from benign. All these idiocies add up into something which will, given the chance, trample all over the hard-won rights our mothers and grandmothers fought so hard for. Don’t be fooled by the fact that Dodds sounds like she’s about to wet herself every time she speaks; my husband amusingly remarked that‘Whenever she’s on Newsnight or whatever, talking about 14 years of Tory misrule, you feel like someone ought to put a hand on her shoulder and say, “Come on – what’s really the matter?”’
Despite their slick technocratic talk, there is something darkly archaic about all this. In the past, women were encouraged to ‘Be Nice’ to men who had more power than them – especially in the work-place – in order to advance. Knowing that this wouldn’t wash today, ‘Be Kind’ has replaced it. As the social commentator Laura Bishop told me: ‘While shopping for my kids I noticed that there are so many items of clothing which say “Be Kind”. They are all in the girls’ and women’s section. Every. Single. One. It’s like indoctrination.’
But the Be Kind mob are far worse than the Be Nice broads of the past, who merely used their sexual capital to get ahead; that was all they had over other women. This lot suck up to men by abandoning the most powerless women in our society – the raped, the sick, the beaten, the imprisoned. Annaliese Dodds and her simpering, sell-out Cister’s are never going to find themselves locked up in jail with a rapist called Rosalind, that’s for sure. And there are so many of them! I never dreamed I’d be complaining about the number of female MPs, yet more proof that we live in strange days indeed. But after the Lord Mayor’s show, le deluge.
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