Mick Hartley

The Tories may now be making noises about the spread of gender woo and the malign influence of Stonewall, but they've been in power now for 13 years. It's happened under their watch.

Gareth Roberts in the Spectator:

Steve Barclay is appalled. A source close to the health secretary has told the Mail that he is ‘appalled to hear some NHS managers are failing to respond’ to a directive that told them not to let Stonewall write their ‘inclusivity guidance’. But fear not! He ‘will be discussing with officials what further steps to take’. Phew.

Along the ministerial corridor, Kemi Badenoch says she would ‘never have guessed how much time I would spend looking at toilet policy,’ and that ‘increasingly, my job is spent legislating for common sense and stopping people determined to do destructive things’.

It has taken the Conservative government 13 years and 95 days to stagger breathlessly to this point. Thirteen years in which almost every public and private institution in the country has capitulated, to a lesser but usually greater extent, to the imported American ideology of intersectional progressivism. Everything – from the BBC to the National Trust to every library, gallery and museum in the land – is stuffed to the gills with this guff. The Tories outsourced sex education in schools and didn’t bother to check who was hired. They stood back and shuffled, tongue-tied, as progressivism gobbled up all before it.

It’s hard to do justice to the enormity of their failure on this front….

What were the Tories doing while the institutions fell? Either answer – they were not in control, or they were not interested – is damning. Wilful blindness is not something one looks for in a politician. For Barclay to wake up now, to shake his head, suck air through his teeth and say ‘You’ve had some cowboys in here’ is unacceptable. You were one of the cowboys, Steve.

Kemi Badenoch, by contrast, is more clued up. It sometimes feels like she is, in fact, the only shield protecting the public from what she calls ‘destructive things’. Although she has many remarkable qualities, this feels somewhat precarious. It’s like sheltering in a downpour at night in a shop doorway – you may be just about dry, but it would be better to be inside.

It's hard to shake the feeling that they're only interested now because it's about their sole weapon against a Labour Party which has been until very recently going around shooting itself in the foot over trans rights, and an inability to define what a woman is. They've just realised – Labour, that is – what a huge electoral liability they've incurred by supporting all this Stonewall-inspired pseudo-progressive nonsense. It's a massive voter turn-off – as the Tories now realise. But it's all a bit late in the day, and suggests that no one in the Conservative Party, with the exception of Kemi Badenoch, actually cared very much. Their natural instinct, to sit back and do nothing, won out.