James Kirkup

To an old Westminster lag like me, there is something slightly grating about MPs complaining about nasty whips and political intimidation. I’m thinking about William Wragg, who says the government is ‘blackmailing’ MPs to support Boris Johnson and suggested the police should get involved. Wragg says that MPs are facing threats over constituency funding and even their personal lives unless they fall into line. Some people are surprised and outraged to learn that governments threaten to do horrible things to their own MPs. Those people have not spent much time in Westminster, where such things are quite mundane.

A few years ago, there was some controversy about the facts relating to people in prison who identify as transgender, and the proportion of those people jailed for committing sexual offences. The controversy started in 2018 when Fair Play for Women, a feminist campaign group, analysed English prison service data and estimated that 41 per cent of transwomen in prison were there for sexual offences. This conclusion was debated, often poorly, and disputed, unconvincingly, in several places. Four years on, this remains a heated, disputed topic. To some 'gender-critical' people, prisons are where the sex-gender debate becomes very real and very awkward.

Almost three years ago, I spoke on the phone to a man called Harry Miller. A Lincolnshire businessman, he’d just been interviewed by the police because someone had complained about things he’d written, on Twitter, about sex and gender and transgenderism. He was angry, and rightly so. After all, he’d broken no law, and even the police force involved confirmed that. Instead, he was contacted and a record was made of his conduct under rules around ‘non-crime hate incidents’ (NCHIs). These were introduced after the 1993 murder of Stephen Lawrence, with the intention of giving the police a means of tracking behaviour that, while not crossing the threshold of a crime, gave a fair indication that a person’s actions were likely to escalate to full-blown crime.

Boris Johnson is not short of troubles, or advice. Most of that advice, from colleagues and commentators alike, comes down to the same thing: he’s got to change. Change his team, change his approach. Change the way he does things. That argument is a familiar one at Westminster. When a Prime Minister hits trouble – and this one has hit it harder and faster than most – those of us who comment on politics reach for ‘change’ as the answer. It’s often good counsel, too. It is logical that the best way out of a situation is to change the fundamental causes of that situation. But there’s a problem with the argument that this Prime Minister – or any PM, come to that – must change. It won’t happen.

They seem like completely unrelated questions: 'Is sex work real work?, and 'Who will replace Yvette Cooper as chair of the Commons Home Affairs Committee?' Yet the two are deeply linked. Sex work first. If you’re not familiar with the phrase 'sex work is work', get used to it, because you’re going to be hearing it a lot more in public debate in the next few years. The phrase has been around since at least the 1970s, but is now being used with growing frequency and energy by people on the self-appointed 'progressive' side of politics. As a result, 'sex work is work' is looking like being a new dividing line for people who enjoy identity and culture politics.

The BBC has produced its annual 100 Women list, a showcase for women who have done interesting, important things. There’s a lot to like about this year’s list: half the women on it come from Afghanistan; some of them, tellingly, can’t be pictured for their own safety. Perhaps if fewer British resources had been deployed getting Pen Farthing's dogs out of Kabul in the summer, some of those women wouldn’t live in fear for their lives. But that’s another debate. There’s something else interesting about the BBC’s 100 Women, which says something about the Corporation’s ongoing struggle for impartiality. At least two of the people on the 100 Women list were born male and now identify as transwomen.

How long could you cope without electricity, dear reader? And how many days could you endure without running water? Imagine your home was without power or water for four or even five days. What would you expect to happen? How do you think your country and your government would respond to your plight? There’d be a bit of a fuss, right? I mean, this is an advanced industrialised economy where we have, quite reasonably, come to take the supply of basic utilities as a given. If thousands of people were left without power, heat and water -- and in winter too – for the better part of a week, it would be a deal, wouldn’t it? Actually, no. Not if those people were somewhere in the north of England.

This morning saw a profound breakthrough in the trans debate. I say that on the basis of an interview Nancy Kelley, Stonewall's CEO, did with the BBC’s Emma Barnett on Woman’s Hour.  What’s important is not really anything that Kelley said, though some of that was indeed interesting and I’ll come to it in a second. What matters is that the interview took place at all, since that constitutes a significant shift in the way Stonewall does its work. Stonewall's instinct has been to largely avoid mainstream media and other political debates about its work on trans issues that is now its primary focus.

What are the long-term political implications of the government’s clown show over Owen Paterson? My guess is that voters won’t pay too much attention, but MPs certainly will. And that could matter at least as much. Start with the public. Do voters feel angry that their Prime Minister doesn’t play by the rules — written and unwritten — of politics and government? There’s a lot to be angry about, and ripping up the rules against cash-for-lobbying certainly justifies rage. And maybe in time, the idea of the PM as leader of a privileged clique who don't play by the same rules as the rest of us will indeed prove harmful to the Conservatives’ vote.

My first full-time job, at the age of 18, was working for an MP. In the following 27 years, almost my entire career has been spent in or near Westminster. I know and have known lots of MPs. To coin a phrase, some of my best friends are members of parliament. This, of course, means I’m biased on the topic of MPs, inclined by reason or familiarity to think well of them as a group. But it also means, I hope, that I have a bit of knowledge — knowledge that might be worth sharing as the Commons remembers Sir David Amess and James Brokenshire. It’s hard to generalise about an inherently diverse group, but MPs as a whole are not, in an important way, like the rest of us. To reach the Commons requires a type of drive and motivation that most people lack.

I have often criticised BBC journalism on the issues of sex and gender because that journalism has often been quite bad. So it’s all the more important to for me to highlight instances when the Corporation does good journalism here. Stephen Nolan of the BBC has done that this week, and more. You might not be aware of the series of outstanding podcasts that Nolan released this week, examining the influence that Stonewall, a charity that lobbies on sex and gender issues, has over public bodies including the BBC itself. One reason you might have missed those podcasts is that the BBC itself has hardly bothered to promote them, even though they represent the very best of its journalism, the sort of inquiry that a public service broadcaster exists to carry out.

This gas crisis has hit Britain because we rely too much on gas. That’s not a reason to abandon net zero. It’s a reason to do it. Gas prices are soaring, energy companies are failing. A few people are blaming government environmental policies for that. Their apparent hope is that Boris Johnson proves wobbly on green causes and backs away from net zero. I think they’re wrong, both about the policy and about the politics. Start with the policy. The net zero decarbonisation of the UK economy isn’t the cause of the gas price crisis. It’s the solution.

Gavin Williamson was the worst education secretary in history, according to Sam Freedman, a former Tory education adviser. In the wake of Williamson’s departure from the Department for Education, many other commentators are being even less generous. No one has a good word to say about the man. No one except me, that is. I write here in defence of Gavin Williamson. To be utterly clear, my defence is a very narrow one. I am speaking up for Williamson over only a portion of what he did as Education Secretary, and not the largest part either. While a lot of things Gavin Williamson did were indeed dismal, not everything he did was bad or wrong.

Having written here at least once before that Boris Johnson is the heir to Blair, my first thought on the Prime Minister's tax-to-spend announcement on the NHS and social care is a petty one: I told you so. The striking thing about making the Boris-Blair comparison is how resistant some people are to it. Among Bozza fans on the Leave-voting right, there is often fury at the suggestion that their man, the hero of Brexit, is anything like the Europhile they used to call ‘Bliar’. On the left, there is an almost pathological determination to believe that a Tory PM must, by definition, be a small-state free-marketeer intent on starving and privatising public services. That latter point is why Labour people sometimes struggle to respond to Johnson.