‘Samantha Niblett’s Summer of Sex’ sounds like something that the police would have shut down during the grubbiest era of Soho peep shows. Not so: it is – just as the world teeters on the brink of geopolitical collapse – an actual initiative by a Labour MP announced today.
The dignity-phobic South Derbyshire MP Samantha Niblett has launched a campaign to make 2026 the ‘summer of sex’, calling for ‘more open, inclusive, lifelong sex education’. Niblett wants to have ‘a national conversation’ about pleasure, including the benefits of masturbation, and said she intends to ‘talk about sex all summer’. Never has the case for earplugs been more compelling.
Niblett wants to have ‘a national conversation’ about pleasure, including the benefits of masturbation
Niblett has teamed up with someone who was apparently not created by Jilly Cooper called Cindy Gallop and together they are planning events in Westminster, including one in which they intend to bring sex toys into parliament. This will apparently encourage open conversations about sexual pleasure – though she is currently in discussions with the parliamentary security team about whether the devices will be allowed through the Portcullis House security scanner. I was once in a pub where a man referred to Sir Keir Starmer as ‘a dildo’. I might write to him and tell him that he was much closer to reality than he ever realised.
Niblett, Gallop, creator of the website Make Love Not Porn, and Love Honey, a sex-toy manufacturer helping the MP with her Westminster wankathons, sound like they should be the names of the lead characters in one of the later, muckier Carry On films. But no, as with every other sexually incontinent person in Britain, they demand to be taken seriously. Niblett in particular seems unaware of the innate comedy of it all, telling reporters today that she wanted to use education as ‘the biggest tool’. She’s even come up with a promotional slogan for her sex campaign: ‘Yes Sex Please We’re British’.
‘Yes Sex Please We’re British’ is a tagline so appalling and incoherent that it resembles a clue sent to police by a semi-literate serial killer. It not only makes absolutely no grammatical sense but also has as its zinger pop-culture reference – for a campaign directed at young people – a West End farce from 1971.
Of course, the original play made a much more pervasive point about the British erotic life. Contrary to Ms Niblett’s aspirations, we know little of sex, and even less of summer. Her campaign doesn’t exude seriousness at the best of times – you can’t really imagine, say, Harold Macmillan flogging dildos in parliament – but it feels even less appropriate given the myriad problems currently facing Britain. Amid war, downgraded growth forecasts and soaring energy bills, we might call this onanistic focus ‘diddling while Rome burns’. A recent viral video of MPs dancing the Cha Cha Cha with Strictly Come Dancing cast members similarly went down like a vat of warm vomit with the general public.
The double standards are evident, too. If a straight, male MP organised such an event in parliament, he would be widely condemned as a randy freak, and the whips would probably intervene. Though this might give them even more ideas. Why Ms Niblett should get a free pass, just for being a woman, remains unclear.
The campaign is reflective not only of Labour’s sex blind spot and of the frivolity of politics nowadays but also of a political class that believes that literally no area of life should be free from government intervention. Grown adults should engage in ‘lifelong sex ed’, encouraged by parliamentarians. Even in the bedroom, the hectoring voice of the Sex-Niblett 3000 must be obeyed, lest you accidentally engage in some non-Adolescence-compliant rumpy-pumpy.
The New York Times wrote in a review of the original No Sex Please, We’re British that ‘its triviality is beyond contempt’. Such words might have been written for Niblett and co.
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