The unintended architect of its demise is a shaven-headed double rapist with a facial tattoo and a blonde wig. The appearance of Adam Graham, aka Isla Bryson, in a Glasgow court last week exposed the absurdity of insisting that anyone who claims to be a woman has to be treated as one. Trans women are women? Always? Every single one of them? Not any more, as even the most ardent advocate of this empty slogan has had to acknowledge. It’s a damning indictment of a former Director of Public Prosecutions, who should know a thing or two about the manipulative behaviour of sexual predators, that Starmer stuck to the line for so long.

Even before the Graham case, a growing number of Labour MPs were becoming disillusioned with Starmer’s stance. Few are as brave as Rosie Duffield, the Labour MP for Canterbury who, in an article for UnHerd, described her experience in the Labour Party as akin to being in an abusive relationship. Starmer’s refusal to uphold the right to oppose gender extremism has persisted for so long that Labour MPs concerned about the erosion of women’s sex-based rights have to meet in secret. The Sunday Times reported yesterday that they are among a cross-party group who receive briefings from concerned groups, such as Fair Play for Women. The report added that the group’s braver members wear dinosaur badges, a reference to a remark by the shadow foreign secretary, David Lammy, that compared gender critical feminists to dinosaurs who want to “hoard rights”.

For feminists, Lammy is a prime example of a Labour frontbencher who speaks confidently on the subject of humans changing sex — an impossibility, as rational people know — without seeming to know much about it. Starmer once chided Duffield for suggesting that only women have a cervix, while Lammy admitted that trans women don’t have ovaries but appeared to suggest they could acquire a cervix by taking hormones and having unspecified “procedures”.

This is pretty much what we had come to expect from Starmer’s Shadow Cabinet until the Graham case blew up the core tenets of trans ideology. The Labour Women’s Declaration estimates that at least 12 of the 31 MPs on the shadow frontbench are broadly gender-critical, but it’s also stuffed with shadow ministers who, until about five minutes ago, were wedded to the mantra that trans women are women. Now the party line is changing in the wake of events in Scotland last week.

Even Starmer’s deputy, Angela Rayner, who made a point of saying that all women, including trans women, are welcome in the party during a Labour Women’s Network dinner last year, has discovered a strand of trans-inclusive thinking she doesn’t like. “That person should not have been put into a women’s prison,” she said through gritted teeth, unable to bring herself to utter Graham’s name — or names. Elsewhere, while the party’s chair, and shadow women and equalities secretary, Anneliese Dodds, was last year unable to give a straight answer to the question “what is a woman?”, last week she was talking about the 2010 Equality Act setting out “protections for biological women” on the basis of sex. Speaking on Any Questions, she added that “every opinion poll” shows that’s what the public wants too.

Until very recently, that kind of public opinion would have been dismissed as disgustingly transphobic. Now, though, Labour’s leading figures are waking up to the fact that the public is less enamoured of extreme trans ideology than they imagined. Ordinary people don’t think male sex offenders should be placed in women’s prisons, and they might turn out to be unimpressed by the prospect of losing separate men’s and women’s toilets to appease a tiny number of trans women (48,000 in the whole of England and Wales). But if they want to hear what Starmer has to say on all these matters, they might be in for a long wait.

He might think that silence is the best option, but he looks weak and unprincipled. It’s not as if any of this is going to go away either, not least because another transgender prisoner — actually a man, and an extremely violent one at that — has been cleared to move to a women’s prison in Scotland. Andrew Burns, who now calls himself Tiffany Scott, has attacked officers and a nurse in his male-only prison, and is believed to be one of the most dangerous inmates of the Scottish prison estate. Why wouldn’t voters look at his mooted transfer and blame all those MPs and MSPs who kept repeating that trans women are women?

Conservative ministers, whether from principle, self-interest or a combination of the two, are running rings around Labour when it comes to protecting women. Starmer has yet to say what he means by promising to “modernise” the 2004 Gender Recognition Act, which already allows transgender people to acquire a new birth certificate wrongly stating they were born in their “acquired” sex. He failed to intervene 10 days ago when Duffield and a Conservative MP, Miriam Cates, were shouted down by two Labour MPs as they spoke in support of the UK government blocking Holyrood’s Gender Recognition Reform bill. Even after Duffield wrote about the experience, all Starmer did was repeat earlier calls for “respect and tolerance” in “all those debates”.

I don’t know how he has the nerve. Feminists in the party have been trying to engage him in debate for years. He doesn’t answer even the most polite letters from members, while leading women’s organisations — the Labour Women’s Declaration, FiLiA and the LGB Alliance — are banned from having stalls at the party conference. The hold transactivists have on the party is truly astonishing, with one frontbencher after another intoning that transgender people are the most vulnerable and oppressed minority in society. But they’re not — they have the same rights and legal protections as everyone else, while murders of trans people are rare in the UK. That’s a good thing, but it shouldn’t obscure the extent of violence against women, who are murdered at a rate of between two and three a week.

Some women in the party are optimistic, pointing to a change in tone and substance in the last few days. I’m not convinced. Since I first wrote about Starmer’s women problem two years ago, he has allowed things to get a great deal worse — just ask Rosie Duffield, or the other gender-critical Labour MPs and peers who feel they need to meet in secret, knowing that the leadership won’t defend them against a backlash from both transactivists and their own colleagues.

The problem isn’t that the party has equivocated on the conflict between women’s rights and the demands of transactivists. It’s that Labour has come down wholeheartedly on the wrong side. I’ve spent the last three years listening to frontbenchers, and Starmer himself, spout complete nonsense about biology. I’ve heard Labour MPs yell “transphobia” at women they disagree with. I’ve heard Labour councillors describe their fear of admitting that they don’t believe in gender ideology. I’ve heard grotesque smears and calls for feminists to be thrown out of the party.

The painful truth is that Labour, under Starmer’s leadership, has become a hotbed of misogyny. A current of nastiness has existed in the party since 2015; and while he has addressed one manifestation, antisemitism, he has allowed another to flourish. If women like me, lifelong Labour supporters, are to trust the party again, it will take more than a change of tone. What we need is a proper, serious apology — and an assurance that woman-hating will no longer be tolerated in a party that used to stand for equality and women’s rights.

The full scale of Carrick’s offending began to emerge at Southwark Crown Court this week when he admitted 47 rapes, nine sexual assaults, three counts of coercive control, two of false imprisonment, and a string of other offences. The charges relate to attacks on 13 women in London and Hertfordshire over a period of 17 years. The court heard that Carrick remained a serving officer throughout that time, even though the Met were told about repeated allegations suggesting he was a threat to women. The senior officer who eventually investigated the case concluded that Carrick had an “appetite for degradation and control”. Surely someone should have noticed – and suspended him?

The parallels with the case of PC Wayne Couzens, the Met police officer who raped and murdered Sarah Everard, are staggering. He too had a nickname among colleagues: “the rapist”. Both men served on the parliamentary and diplomatic protection squad, where firearms are routinely carried. Both passed vetting procedures to get onto the squad, despite the allegations against them — rape in Carrick’s case, indecent exposure in Couzens’.

Both men, and this is perhaps the most frightening aspect from the point of view of public protection, used their warrant cards to deflect suspicions. Before attacking a woman in September 2020, Carrick flashed his warrant card to persuade her he wasn’t a threat. Couzens did the same to persuade Sarah Everard to get into his car in south London during a Covid lockdown in March 2021.

Carrick told his victims they would not be believed if they complained about a policeman – and he was right. He forced some women into a tiny understairs cupboard, where they were kept naked and cramped for hours. In all, the Met police received nine complaints about him for a range of alleged offences that included domestic abuse, burglary, harassment and assault. No action was taken.

The question of how Carrick and Couzens came to be on the force and remain there goes to the heart of what is wrong with policing in this country. It is the harshest possible indictment of selection, training, supervision and disciplinary procedures, all of which appear unequal to the task of dealing with even the most flagrant predators. Complaints take years to move through the system, are sometimes handled by colleagues of an accused officer, and appear to start from a point of scepticism towards the complainant.

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It’s not so much a “get-out-of-jail-free” card, as a way of avoiding detection and punishment altogether. The first complaint against Carrick during his police career was filed more than 20 years ago, when he was accused of actual bodily harm against a girlfriend who was trying to leave him. No action was taken and he was reported by another girlfriend in 2004, but the Met’s department for professional standards did not investigate.

Five years later, Carrick qualified as a firearms officer and was almost immediately accused of abusing a girlfriend. The Met was informed but took no action. And so it went on: there were other allegations leading up to July 2021, when a former girlfriend went to Sussex police and accused him of rape. Even then Carrick wasn’t suspended, but was placed on ‘restricted duties’ for a few weeks. It was decided he had no case to answer and he was allowed to carry a firearm again. Carrick has now pleaded guilty to raping both women. He was finally caught in October that year, when a woman he had met on a dating site accused him of rape.

The urgent question that the Met needs to answer is “how many more?” How many other serving officers have been accused of sexual assault or domestic abuse, yet are still serving on the force? An answer emerged just after Carrick’s guilty pleas were reported, when the Met admitted it is investigating 1,000 sexual and domestic abuse claims involving around 800 of its 35,000 officers. Those of us who live in London are policed, in other words, by a force where about one in every 50 officers is under investigation.

The new Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir Mark Rowley, has admitted that “hundreds” of his officers need to be sacked. Rowley believes it is too difficult at present to get rid of bad officers, but we are entitled to ask what is being done about the ones who shouldn’t be there. Have they been placed on restricted duties? Rowley inherited this mess from his predecessor, the unlamented Dame Cressida Dick, who appeared to be in denial about the scale of the problem. “Sadly, on occasion, I have a bad ‘un’,” she said after Ms Everard’s murder, falling back on the tired old “bad apple” defence.

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At least Rowley admits it’s worse than that, and he has some notion of how Carrick was able to stay on the force. “We failed as investigators, where we should have been more intrusive and joined the dots on this repeated misogyny over a couple of decades,” he said on Monday evening. He acknowledged that the failures were “systemic” and that senior officers should have been more determined to root out a misogynist like Carrick.

Most of the questions being asked at present are about the role of senior officers, but police forces are supposed to be held to account by elected Police and Crime Commissioners. They are paid generous salaries, in excess of £80,000 a year, but it’s hard to see that they have had any impact at all on the culture of misogyny and impunity that exists within so many police forces. Decent officers have been complaining for years that they aren’t listened to or, worse, that their careers suffer if they try to report anxieties about colleagues. Four years ago, the Centre for Women’s Justice launched a super-complaint against a number of police forces, alleging that they were letting off male officers accused of domestic abuse. Some of the women who spoke out were themselves police officers, and one of them described how her partner warned her he had friends in high places. An official response, in June last year, recognised “systemic deficiencies” in the way some forces deal with allegations against officers and staff.

Carrick’s admission of large-scale offending confirms the widespread feeling among women that we can’t trust the police — and that the actions needed to regain public trust aren’t being taken swiftly enough. Three months ago, an interim report into the culture and standards of Met by Dame Louise Casey recognised a raft of failings, including officers facing multiple accusations from colleagues being allowed to stay on the force. Rowley said at the time that the findings of the report moved him to tears, but his remarks about the difficulty of sacking criminal officers make him sound alarmingly helpless.

“We have some very worrying cases with officers who’ve committed criminality whilst police officers and yet I’m not allowed to sack them,” he said last week. He says he has the backing of ministers to change the police recruiting system, which is an urgent priority in the midst of a drive to employ thousands more officers, but it’s hard to know why someone didn’t think of this earlier. Surely blocking men with criminal records of a history of allegations against them should have been a priority years ago?

Rowley spent much of Monday apologising for failures in the Carrick case, and he knows that the Met will face another drubbing when the final Casey report is published later this year. She has written to the Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, suggesting that the non-statutory Angiolini inquiry into the rape and murder of Sarah Everard should be expanded to look at Carrick’s conduct and the missed opportunities to identify his pattern of behaviour. “If this is not possible,” Casey adds crisply, “I am willing to volunteer myself.”

It’s hard to avoid wondering why we need so many inquiries, when the obvious course of action is to combine them into one, along the lines of the Macpherson inquiry into institutional racism. I called for exactly that more than 18 months ago, when I was Co-chair of the Mayor of London’s Violence Against Women and Girls Board, but the result was a resounding silence.

Labour has now promised to introduce new national standards of police vetting, but over a period of decades, a hierarchy has developed in which misogyny and bullying have been normalised. Our perverse police culture is unable to identify burglars and rapists, yet apparently willing to tolerate sexual predators in uniform. What woman would trust them again?

“It’s crisis upon crisis,” says Dr Shonagh Dillon, CEO of Aurora New Dawn, a charity that provides services for victims of domestic and sexual abuse in Hampshire and the Thames Valley. Organisations like hers have not yet fully recovered from having to deal with the increased demand caused by Covid, and now they are braced for a flood of new calls for help. Back in March 2020, government ministers were warned by MPs, charities and campaigners against domestic violence about the deadly impact lockdown was likely to have on vulnerable women and children. “Stay home” was a bitter message for women who suddenly found themselves shut up, 24 hours a day, with abusive partners. And lo and behold, calls to the national domestic violence helpline rose by 60%, some of them made by concerned neighbours who heard alarming noises from next door.

Dillon recalls the early days of lockdown, when staff trying to deal with a deluge of calls from desperate women had to wait weeks for the government even to designate them as key workers. I tell her about sitting in on remote meetings organised by City Hall in the spring of 2020, as charities and local authorities struggled to respond to the crisis: attempts to set up emergency accommodation to save women from injury and worse were being frustrated by government departments, each of whom — Home Office, Ministry of Justice, Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government — claimed it was someone else’s responsibility. Perpetrators fully exploited the situation, telling police officers summoned by a 999 call that they couldn’t enter the family home because someone inside had Covid. They put trackers on phones and cars in case a woman managed to escape on the rare occasions she was allowed to leave the house, to go shopping or take the kids to the park. Social workers moving women to emergency accommodation had to learn how to check for such devices to prevent the victim being followed.

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Today it is not lockdown that is being exploited, but the high cost of living. Anxiety about making ends meet is creating ideal conditions for coercive control, a form of abuse that is not as widely understood as physical violence. Of course, the two often co-exist, with a history of financial abuse being revealed only when a victim is being treated for physical injuries. Money problems do not cause abuse but they make it worse, providing extra “leverage” for men who are already threatening and isolating their partners. “My abuser would check accounts when I had the debit card,” one survivor of financial abuse told Women’s Aid. “If I was food shopping, he would ask how much I’ve spent to see if I was truthful as he had already checked online. He would not top up the gas and electric meters so I had to spend all day with no gas or electric.”

Dillon is all too familiar with how coercive control operates. Survivors have told her about men who say: “You’re not feeding your kids. They’ve got holes in their shoes. I’m going to tell social services you’re a bad mother.” That is a terrifying threat to make to a woman who, through no fault of her own, is struggling to put food on the table or having to rely on charity shops to clothe their children. They already feel intense shame about their supposed shortcoming as mothers, something perpetrators understand very well and are eager to exploit. Women fear losing their children above all else — and abusive men can sound very plausible. How can a woman prove she’s not to blame — that money is being kept from her deliberately — when her partner sounds so reasonable to outsiders?

Shortage of money increases the pressures within relationships in other ways, as men who can’t afford to go to the pub or a football match spend more time at home. Researchers used to wonder why intimate partner abuse rises during big sporting occasions, such as the football World Cup, speculating that perpetrators were punishing women when their team lost. The answer turned out to be much simpler: domestic abuse increases whenever men spend more time at home, which is why the big rise during the Covid lockdowns came as no surprise to anyone. There were a spate of domestic homicides — 16 in three weeks — in the first month of lockdown.

Eventually, the government noticed. Covid “acted as an escalator and intensifier of existing abuse”, a joint report from the Home Office, National Police Chiefs’ Council and College of Policing belatedly admits. “It seems to have been weaponised by some abusers as both a new tool of control over victims and… as an excuse for domestic abuse and even homicide.” Two men, Anthony Williams and Hussein Egal, blamed stress caused by Covid when they were charged with killing their wives. Egal inflicted 70 injuries on his wife, Maryan Ismail, after (he claims) she had threatened to throw him out for having the virus. Williams strangled his wife to death, and then pleaded guilty to manslaughter, having told the police that lockdown restrictions had had a negative impact on his mental health. He received a reduced sentence of five years. It remains to be seen whether, in a few months times, men accused of murder will claim they were driven to it by anxiety about not being able to pay the mortgage.

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Homicides were not the only deaths linked to domestic abuse: there were also 38 suspected suicides of victims in the first year of the pandemic, a phenomenon so under-researched that we do not have previous years’ figures to compare it with. It attests to the desperate circumstances some women found themselves in, locked in with their abusers, as well as important questions about whether the women’s actions were voluntary.

Surely, surely, ministers would never make the same mistake again? But that appears to be exactly what is happening. “The suicide rate will definitely increase,” Dillon predicts. “It will happen if women can’t flee safely.” She asks herself every day how she can help victims, knowing that her organisation is struggling with its own costs, including soaring heating bills. Some of her employees are single mothers and survivors of abuse, and the cost of living is already hitting them hard. “I’m worried about my staff,” she says. Most earn between £24,000 and £26,000 a year, when they could get more than £30,000 in less stressful occupations. “We are going to lose staff hand over fist. We’re constantly fire-fighting,” Dillon says wearily.

Women’s Aid has addressed the looming crisis in an August report, offering a stark warning: “The cost of living is preventing women from fleeing domestic abuse.” Two-thirds of survivors told the organisation that abusers were using the cost of living increase as a tool for coercive control, “including to justify further restricting their access to money”. Almost three-quarters said that shortage of cash had prevented them from leaving. With private rents beyond the means of most victims, and mortgages prohibitively expensive, women feel trapped. “I feel like my only option to keep my kids is to go back to the marital home where he nearly killed me,” one survivor told the organisation.

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Two months ago, a group of charities said they were “disappointed” by the lack of government action on tackling the cost of living crisis. Women’s Aid is calling for mortgage payment holidays for victims, an emergency domestic abuse fund, and discounts on energy bills for organisations that provide services for women and children. Refuge has asked for the £20 universal credit uplift to be restored. The government says it is working across departments to ensure that victims, survivors and their families are fully supported, citing a £230m investment in its Tackling Domestic Abuse Plan.

What the government did not say, however, is just as important. The plan was announced in March, under a different administration, and some of the money is earmarked for long-term projects such as training to recognise abuse. The vast scale of the economic crisis has since become clear, yet one of Liz Truss’s first actions as prime minister was to abolish the role of women’s minister. The decision has been criticised by some Conservative MPs, including the chair of the women and equalities select committee, Caroline Nokes. Having a dedicated women’s minister gives us a voice — and also acts as a brake, forcing government departments to think twice about the impact of policies on women and girls.

If the government is planning a substantive response to a situation many women regard as an emergency, it is keeping very quiet about it. This time round, with so much evidence of the disastrous consequences of its predecessor’s tardy action in lockdown, it has no excuse. Another crisis is playing into abusers’ hands — and there is very little time left to save their victims.

Are feminists welcome in the Labour Party? I mean the old-fashioned kind of feminist, who knows the difference between men and women. The answer appears to be that we’re not. Delegates to this year’s party conference in Liverpool will be able to browse stalls outside the main hall, talking to activists about everything from climate change to animal welfare. What they won’t be able to do is speak to representatives of the Labour Women’s Declaration, an organisation that advocates for women’s sex-based rights and single-sex spaces. It has been denied a stall at conference along with FiLiA, which last year organised the largest feminist conference in this country for decades.

Women hoping for an unequivocal statement from Sir Keir Starmer about our right to speak openly about biological sex will be disappointed. The Labour leader has repeatedly failed to condemn harassment of feminists in the party, who have been targeted by “pledges” and motions threatening “transphobes” with expulsion. Instead of standing up for free speech and women’s rights, as you might expect a former Director of Public Prosecutions to do, Starmer has proved himself anything but an ally. “Trans women are women,” he intones, holding to this line as firmly as devout Catholics preach transubstantiation.

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In the Seventies, Labour governments passed ground-breaking legislation on equal pay and sex discrimination. Now the party has been captured by an extreme ideology which, to anyone with half a brain, is an excuse for an outpouring of misogyny. We don’t know the exact number of trans people in this country but they appear to be vastly outnumbered by self-styled trans activists, who turn up at women’s events wearing home-made masks and balaclavas. They threaten us with sexual violence and their aim is to intimidate women into silence, driving home the message that we are no longer entitled to single-sex spaces. But instead of getting support from leading Labour politicians, all we get is trans slogans and hyperbolic claims about the “oppression” of trans people.

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It is hard to recall now, when we are used to seeing women with careers and children in Downing Street, what a break with tradition Booth represented. Blair replaced John Major, the quintessential grey man, whose wife Norma was described on the prime minister’s official website as providing ‘sterling support’ to her husband. As for the wives of previous Labour prime ministers, all been born before or during the First World War. The world had changed radically between the birth of Harold Wilson’s wife, Mary, in 1916 and Cherie Booth in 1954, and nowhere more so than in relation to the role of women.

Booth is a baby boomer, belonging to the post-war generation that challenged class barriers, sent millions of working-class kids to university for the first time and embraced feminism. She was already a QC when she moved into Number 10 and it soon became clear that the Downing Street press operation was struggling to handle media interest; at one low point, it even issued a press release explaining Booth’s recent weight loss. Every aspect of her appearance was commented on, an affront to any woman who wanted to be known for her professional achievements. But Booth seemed particularly uncomfortable in her own skin.

I knew Booth slightly, having met her and Tony Blair at a dinner party when we all lived in Hackney a few years earlier. Blair had not yet become party leader but he was on the shadow front bench and one of Labour’s rising stars. Booth was born in Lancashire, one of actor Tony Booth’s eight children by five different women; he left her mother, Gale Smith, when his daughter was eight. She has talked about the struggle her mother faced, bringing up two children on her own in Sefton, just north of Liverpool. The class difference between Booth and Blair struck me at once; he displayed the easy charm of a public schoolboy but she was less at ease, almost as though she expected to have to deflect criticism. I also thought she was in the difficult position of being married to a man who would be perceived by much of the world as the more attractive of the couple.

The next day, I got a call from our mutual friend: “Tony wanted you to know that everything he said last night was off the record.” I said it had been an unmemorable evening, with the exception of a slightly baffling conversation about how many members of the band Frankie Goes to Hollywood were gay. Years later, one of the other guests remarked that she had never met Blair or Booth when she lived in Hackney. She was astonished when I reminded her that she had once spent an entire evening with them.

I ran into Booth shortly before the 1997 election at a party thrown by my then publisher. There was a buzz in the room, created by the knowledge that the guest of honour was married to the man who was about to become prime minister. But the contradictions were already evident; to my generation of feminists, being known as someone’s wife was not something to celebrate. The discomfort I felt was underscored when I had a short conversation with Booth, who knew I now lived in west London. She mentioned Chiswick Women’s Aid, the famous refuge founded by Erin Pizzey, and suggested I should visit the residents. “They’d love a visit from a local author,” she told me. I winced, feeling like a character in a Jane Austen novel.

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When the doorstep photo was published the weekend after the election, Booth hated it. Almost 20 years later, in 2015, she told the Guardian that “I look back at this picture and feel mortified”, even though other people thought it was “very human”. “I was very upset when the press said I was wearing some sort of nylon thing; it was a high-quality, cotton nightie from Next and I bought it especially for the campaign… It was a lot better than you might expect from a mother of three.”

Booth’s defensiveness is hard to understand. She was 42 at the time the photo was taken and looked girlishly young, but her anxieties about class are evident in the comment about what she was wearing (definitely notnylon). Her fear that the snap would damage her might seem paranoid, were it not for an extraordinary column written years later by the journalist Liz Jones. In 2019, Jones recalled the reaction in an unnamed newspaper office when the photo “was slapped on the editor’s desk”. ‘[Booth] was in a Next cotton nightie, hair a bird’s nest,’ Jones wrote. “She was suddenly no longer Superwoman, but Everywoman: fallible. I remember the glee in the office: a fissure! Bad news always sells better than good. We discussed headlines, ways to humiliate her further; we even sent a pretty intern round with another bouquet.”

The collision between Booth’s deep-seated insecurity and the reflexive misogyny of some sections of the media goes some way to explaining the rough time she had in Downing Street. She eventually acquired a lifestyle guru, Carole Caplin, a move that backfired and created excruciating headlines. A photograph of Caplin applying Booth’s lipstick on the marital bed at Number 10 raised questions about her judgement.

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Sometimes Booth’s reaction was to lash out, but she also had a habit of over-sharing. Jaws dropped when she revealed in her autobiography that she had become pregnant with her fourth child, Leo, during a visit to the Queen at Balmoral in 1999 because she had left her “contraceptive equipment” at home. The omission was caused by “sheer embarrassment”, she said, after the staff unpacked the contents of her toilet bag the previous year. It was an astonishing admission from a woman who got a first at LSE, yet was so embarrassed around servants that she was willing to risk an accidental pregnancy rather than being caught with contraception in her luggage.

Anxieties about class and money often go hand-in-hand. One of the most damaging criticisms of Booth was that she was obsessed with money, much more so than other adults with working-class backgrounds. I once ran into her at a reception in the Speaker’s House in Parliament, where she asked what I had been writing recently. I told her I had recently interviewed the designer Vivienne Westwood for The Times. “You should wear her clothes,” I suggested. “They suit curvy women.” It was a throwaway remark but Booth’s response took my breath away: “How can you afford Vivienne Westwood?” she demanded.

“It always struck me that she was insecure,” one of Blair’s former ministers told the Guardian after the couple left Downing Street. “And that is down to her background. Everything flows from that: the need for money.” Perhaps this explains why Blair, five years into his premiership, was forced to deal with embarrassing questions about Booth’s relationship with a financial advisor, Peter Foster, who happened to be a convicted fraudster as well as Caplin’s boyfriend. Booth was accused of accepting Foster’s help to get a discount on two flats in Bristol, where the couple’s eldest son Euan was at university. Number 10 initially denied the story, but the Daily Mail published emails between Booth and Foster in which she called him “a star” after he managed to reduce the price of the flats.

Booth made a tearful apology, but the episode earned her a reputation as greedy, which was reinforced the following year when a department store in Australia invited her to “take a few gifts”. The Mirror reported that Booth helped herself to 68 items, enough to fill five boxes, and left staff at the Melbourne store open-mouthed. It was as if she had little or no capacity to predict how her behaviour would appear, and the excuse of her impoverished childhood had begun to wear thin.

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Of course, the role of prime minister’s wife was never going to be easy for an ambitious woman from a generation shaped by radical ideas, including feminism. Booth inherited an unofficial position that already felt like an anachronism, something that was underlined when she was told by Downing Street that she would have to appear on official documents as Cherie Blair QC.

And yet sympathy for her, particularly over her unfair treatment by the media, must be tempered with an acknowledgment that she made some very unwise decisions, remaining ungracious to the end. “I won’t miss you lot,” she called out to reporters as the couple left Downing Street for the last time in 2007. It was an undignified exit, suggesting that Booth had never become accustomed to the scrutiny that comes with being the prime minister’s wife.

Perhaps she made a mistake, being bounced into moving to Downing Street in May 1997 before she had had time to consider the consequences, but a more confident woman would not have cared. Booth’s reaction to the doorstep photo signalled a vulnerability that some sections of the press seized upon, creating a conflict that lasted for as long as Blair was in power. Sarah Brown and Samantha Cameron were not always happy with the media but there hasn’t been such a polarising spouse in Number 10 until Carrie Johnson. Perhaps the kindest thing history could say about Booth is that she struggled to cope with a role she almost certainly never wanted.

It actually isn’t, but let’s leave that fact aside for the moment. Is this man stupid? A couple of years ago, I wouldn’t have said so. A couple of years ago, I voted for him in the Labour leadership contest, not because I thought he would be brilliant, but because I imagined he would at least be adequate. My expectations weren’t high, but they’ve still been disappointed. Last week he showed himself to be either stupid, or so committed to an extreme ideology that he has lost sight of its disastrous impact on women.

What did his hosts make of it, I wonder? Earlier in the day, Starmer had a meeting with the Estonian defence minister in Tallinn, around 230 miles from St Petersburg, the hometown of Vladimir Putin. I’m just guessing here, but I suspect Estonia’s top brass have more pressing worries on their minds than the hurdles faced by trans-identified males in North London who want a gender recognition certificate. How they must have applauded when Sir Keir’s trip created headlines about wanting greater “respect and dignity” for transgender people. And in the week of International Women’s Day, too. All this reveals quite starkly where the Labour leader’s priorities lie.

What is really terrible about Starmer’s “intervention” is that it feels deliberate. Two members of his shadow Cabinet had stumbled over the “what is a woman?” question earlier in the week, so it was entirely predictable that journalists would confront him with it. He could have said that it wasn’t the time or the place to talk about domestic politics. He could have responded “adult human female” and left it there. But he didn’t. He had his answer ready — and it could not have been more confrontational.

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There can be little doubt that this is Starmer throwing down the gauntlet. In the past he has appeared shifty and uncomfortable when asked questions about biology, spouting nonsense about women’s bodies while looking like someone taking part in a hostage video. No, he told Andrew Marr, it isn’t right to say only women have a cervix. (I once had to have treatment for a pre-cancer of the cervix. I can assure you, and the leader of the Labour party, that all the patients at the clinic were women.)

But last week, Labour couldn’t hide any longer. On Tuesday, the shadow women and equalities minister, Anneliese Dodds, tied herself in knots on Woman’s Hour when asked to give Labour’s definition of a woman. She began by suggesting “there are different definitions legally around what a woman actually is”, as though she was a hapless barrister, trying to pacify a prickly judge. Then she said it “depend[s] what the context is”, without explaining the context in which a woman might not be a woman.

Next she tried a blatant appeal to emotion: “You know, there are people who have decided they have to make that transition. You know, I’ve spoken with many of them. It’s been a very difficult process for many of those people. And you know, understandably because they live as a woman, you know, they want to be defined as a woman.” Yes, but that doesn’t mean they’re exactly the same as someone born a woman, does it?

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The next day, the shadow home secretary, Yvette Cooper, dodged the question by declaring she wasn’t going to go down that rabbit hole, prompting mocking cries of “what is a rabbit?” (Does that depend on context, too?)

Then it was the turn of Harriet Harman, veteran Labour MP and former acting leader of the party, who faced the question in a wide-ranging interview with Sky’s Sophy Ridge. My spirits rose when I saw the headline: “Labour has a woman problem”. But it turned out Harman was talking about the fact that the party has never had a woman leader.

Later in the interview, using the awkward language Labour MPs habitually adopt when talking about this issue, she came out with this belter: “So far as I’m concerned, women are women who are born women, but women are also women who are trans women.” By Harman’s logic, the party’s first woman leader could be a man.

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To be cruelly frank, women are being gaslighted. Labour’s leaders say they believe in single-sex spaces, but what does that mean when they also insist that trans women are no different from natal women? Starmer’s own position is a statement of the law as he would like it to be, rather than as it actually is, as the barrister Naomi Cunningham pointed out at the weekend. Cunningham’s area of expertise is the interaction between the 2004 Gender Recognition Act and the 2010 Equality Act, both of which were cited by Starmer during his interview in Estonia. Asked whether the law says that trans women are women, her admirably concise answer was: “No.”

It is true that the GRA can change some people’s legal sex, but it obviously doesn’t change biological sex; it can say they should be treated as women for most legal purposes, but allows that a trans woman can be refused access to a female-only space if there’s a good reason.

This goes to the heart of the mess Labour has got itself into. Starmer and his colleagues have confused a polite fiction — “trans women are women” — with reality. A piece of legislation that was passed almost two decades ago to make the lives of transgender people easier is now being used in a way that was never intended, making safeguarding of vulnerable women and girls difficult if not impossible.

You might think someone who used to be Director of Public Prosecutions would know that. You might think Starmer has first-hand experience of how predatory men operate, and be aware that they pretend to be all sorts of things — from harmless taxi drivers to trans women, on some well-documented occasions — to get access to potential victims. His staggeringly ill-judged interview in Estonia suggests otherwise. Back in the UK, women feel utterly betrayed — and many of us are wondering if we will ever be able to vote Labour again.

This might seem an uncontroversial policy for organisations providing accommodation for female victims of domestic violence — but that was far from the case. Research by Dr Shonagh Dillon, CEO of an organisation that supports victims of domestic violence in Hampshire, found that service providers “understood that they risked their funding if they spoke up in objection to trans women in female-only spaces”.

And so in the summer of 2020, I wrote to Sophie Linden, Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime, warning her about the chilling effect of Sadiq Khan’s mantra that ‘trans women are women’ on organisations that might seek funding from City Hall. I didn’t get the clear assurance I sought so in October that year I wrote to the Mayor, asking whether he believes that single-sex spaces are lawful in certain circumstances and necessary for the protection of the most vulnerable women in London.

It should have been an easy question to answer: back in 2009, when he was a Labour MP, Khan voted for what became the 2010 Equality Act and its list of exemptions, one of which allows organisations to provide single-sex spaces. In my letter to the Mayor, I said we are entitled to know if he has changed his mind about a piece of legislation that’s vital for the protection of women. That was sixteen months ago — and he still hasn’t replied.

My sacking as Co-chair of the VAWG Board came the following summer. I was aghast at the insensitive way it was done — by email, on a Friday afternoon when the entire country was stunned by a horrific mass shooting in Plymouth the previous evening. The killings were carried out by a young man who appeared to be an incel, a phenomenon I had written about in Home Grown, my book on the links between misogyny, domestic violence and terrorism. I was in the middle of doing broadcast interviews, explaining the background to the harrowing events in Plymouth, when the email arrived from City Hall. Within days, more than 4,000 women had signed a petition calling for my reinstatement. They’re still waiting for the Mayor’s response.

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At the time, Linden dealt with press inquiries, insisting that my removal was due to a restructure and had nothing to do with my views on transgenderism or any other issue. In a phone call, she apologised for the way I was informed and asked me to stay on as an ‘advisor’ to the board. I couldn’t see any point, given that I would no longer have any influence over the agenda. All the while, violence against women was reaching epidemic levels, with the number of rape reports in London climbing to a ten-year high in March 2021.

In that very month, Sarah Everard had been abducted, raped and murdered by a serving Met Officer. On the morning after Cressida Dick revealed the news that Ms Everard’s remains had been found, I received a phone call from Linden. Somewhat to my astonishment, she said she was calling to ask me what Khan should say about it. A few weeks later, I got another call from Linden, asking what the Mayor should say about VAWG during his campaign for re-election.

None of this inspired confidence in the regime at City Hall, to put it mildly. I kept on raising important issues, however, such as the Met’s egregious failure to identify sexual predators within its own ranks. I insisted that senior officers should attend the next meeting of the VAWG Board to tell us how they intended to deal with violence committed by police officers, and I called for a public inquiry into misogyny at the Met. I got no support from City Hall; suffice it to say that I wasn’t surprised by the series of scandals that culminated in Dick’s sudden resignation earlier this month.

After my phone conversation with Linden in August last year, amid a blizzard of emails cancelling all my scheduled meetings at City Hall, I agreed to write to her formally. I reiterated my view that the board needs a Co-chair who isn’t a salaried employee of the Mayor, and asked for a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer to my question about Khan’s support (or otherwise) for the crucial exemption in the Equality Act. In a pattern I’ve come to expect from the current administration at City Hall, Linden did not write back for five months.

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In a letter that finally arrived earlier this month, Linden says that she and Khan “have always been clear that the commissioning of all of our services will be based on the best interests of the user”. But if we are talking about a women’s refuge, who is the user? Many of us would say it means natal women, but here is Linden’s answer: “It is vital that anyone seeking refuge is able to access the services they need and that women, including trans women, fleeing abuse from men should be able to access spaces where they feel safe”. (My italics.) If the Mayor intends to fund separate refuge spaces for people who are transgender, no one would argue with that. But does he?

I also doubt whether service providers will feel reassured by the legalistic language in Linden’s letter, which stands on its head to avoid offering an unequivocal endorsement of single-sex spaces: “Our approach in commissioning services does not penalise any agency that is working within the boundaries of the law… No agency we fund is required to act any differently from the requirements of equalities legislation.”

So what happens if the board of a refuge has a different interpretation of the Equality Act from the Mayor? If the CEO refuses access to a male-bodied trans woman, prompting howls of outrage from activists, will her organisation be treated by City Hall as “working within the boundaries of the law”, or accused of transphobia? Would any service provider funded by the Mayor dare take the risk?

There is one significant revelation in Linden’s letter. In a major climb-down, City Hall now accepts that the VAWG Board needs an independent Co-chair. It’s back to the status quo, in other words — but I’m not going to be reinstated. Despite offering fulsome thanks for “the vital work you have done for women and girls through your role on the VAWG Board”, City Hall has been having discussions about appointing an “external expert”. Members of the board will be ‘notified’ when an appointment is made.

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Forgive me thinking there is a bitter taste to all this. Khan went on supporting Cressida Dick, calling into question his judgement, long after I pointed out that the Met’s culture was mired in misogyny. Now Dick has gone and the country’s biggest police force has been left rudderless. Four and a half million women and girls live in London, where they face quite unacceptable levels of violence, yet the Mayor’s attachment to gender ideology appears to mean that no one at City Hall can talk about women without instantly adding ‘including trans women’.

More than ever, women in London need someone to stand up for their rights and make sure their voices are heard. As a feminist who believes in biological reality, that person evidently won’t be me.

Dick promised to make tackling violent crime her priority but the figures tell a very different story: recorded rapes have soared, domestic violence is rising and last year saw the highest ever level of teenage homicides in London (30, compared with 17 in 2020). Last March a vigil for Sarah Everard, raped and murdered by a serving officer, was a PR disaster for the Met, while Dick was forced to defend policing at the Euros 2020 final in July after scenes of violent disorder at Wembley.

The force is currently the subject of two inquiries, one ordered by Dick and the other, announced only a day later, by the Home Secretary, Priti Patel. The latter announcement was hardly a vote of confidence in the review ordered by Dick since both inquiries were prompted by the abduction of Ms Everard. Last week the Met was hit by another round of terrible publicity as a toxic culture of misogyny, racism and homophobia was exposed by the Independent Office for Police Conduct at Charing Cross police station in central London.

The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, was said to be “furious” and reported to have put the Commissioner “on notice”. What took him so long? His volte face came only five months after Patel offered Dick an extension to her term without so much as a squeak of protest from Khan. Patel apparently believed that the extension would provide “continuity”, although it’s hard to imagine many Londoners welcoming a continuation of the disasters that have taken place under Dick’s watch.

By the time she was granted an extra two years in September last year, the scandals accumulating around the Met were becoming impossible to ignore. PC Wayne Couzens had been accused of indecent exposure on at least two occasions, the most recent just three days before he murdered Ms Everard, but he wasn’t suspended and was able to use his warrant card to get her into his car. A PC in North London was sacked for using his baton to repeatedly strike a black teenager with learning difficulties who approached him for help after she became separated from her carers. Two Met officers had been charged with taking and sharing photos while guarding a crime scene in another area of north London where two black sisters, Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman, had been horrifically murdered. Both officers were jailed at the end of last year.

Last October, it emerged that 326 Met officers and special constables had been accused of domestic abuse between 2017 and 2020, but “no action” was recorded in 265 cases. In a case that says much about the Met’s culture, two female officers who accused a colleague of rape had to wait three years before he faced a misconduct hearing.

In yet another case, reported by the Sunday Times, a senior detective is said to have kept his job despite being found guilty last year of gross misconduct for sexually harassing a woman who called 101 for help after she was mugged. DCI James Mason, who was a DS at the time of the incident in 2011, told the woman, Kristina O’Connor, she was “amazingly hot” and warned her that rejecting an officer’s advances was “frowned upon”. Her robber was never found. Embarrassingly, Mason later worked as a staff officer to Cressida Dick in 2019. O’Connor is now suing the Met for “enabling and normalising” misogyny after Mason was allowed to keep not just his job but his rank.

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It is something of an understatement to say that the force has problems with recruitment, training, supervision and disciplinary procedures. What this means is that women in London who report a traumatic experience, such as domestic violence, have no way of knowing whether the officer in front of them is implicated in such behaviour himself.

Dick has talked about every force having the occasional “bad ‘un”, an exceptionally ill-chosen turn of phrase that she used on the very day that Couzens appeared in court for sentencing. It’s a threadbare excuse, entirely discredited now that the IoPC has declared that the incidents at Charing Cross were “not isolated or simply the behaviour of a few bad apples”. What they expose is a permissive culture where misogyny, racism and homophobia are normalised, so much so that decent officers fear blowing the whistle because of the reaction of colleagues, or what it might do to their careers.

Many hoped that the murder of Ms Everard would be a watershed moment in terms of protecting women from sexual violence. But the situation in London has worsened since then, with the number of recorded sexual offences increasing dramatically; they rose from a rolling annual total of 18,608 in March 2021, the month Ms Everard was abducted, to 23,647 in December last year. The rolling 12-month figure for reported rapes increased from 7,479 in March to 8,740 in December, an increase of almost 17%. That’s one every hour, on average, and it hardly suggests that the police in London are effective when it comes to protecting women.

Some observers always doubted whether Dick was the right candidate for the top job. They pointed to her role in a disastrous counterterrorism operation in 2005 that ended in the death of an innocent Brazilian electrician, Jean Charles de Menezes. Dick was cleared of any blame but she was in charge of the operation, a circumstance some believed would block any ambition she had to lead the Met.

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In 2014 Dick sanctioned Operation Midland, an investigation prompted by the outlandish claims of a man called Carl Beech. He claimed to have been a child victim of a VIP paedophile ring operating in Westminster. Beech falsely accused a series of public figures before his lies were exposed and he was himself sent to prison for perverting the course of justice. Officers were so taken in by Beech’s claims that they encouraged him to repeat them on TV, his identity disguised as “Nick”. Dick was in charge of supervising the detective who publicly described Beech’s allegations as “credible and true”.

In 2016, Sir Richard Henriques published a damning report on Operation Midland that identified 43 failings by detectives who spent 16 months and more than £2m pursuing Beech’s allegations. Dick’s response to the criticism came in 2018, when she reversed the Met’s policy of believing individuals who report a rape. No one had ever suggested that complaints should not be investigated thoroughly or that detectives should rush a male fantasist into a TV studio before carrying out basic checks on his credibility. But it’s women who have suffered as the bad old days of scepticism have returned, with almost two-thirds of rape cases in London now ending in victim withdrawal.

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Despite all this, politicians fell over themselves to praise Dick’s credentials when she got the top job. “Cressida’s skills and insight will ensure the Metropolitan police adapt to the changing patterns of crime in the 21st century and continue to keep communities safe across London and the UK,” declared the then Home Secretary, Amber Rudd. No one was more fulsome than Khan: “This is a historic day for London and a proud day for me as mayor”, he gushed. “It was absolutely essential that we found the best possible person to take the Met forward over the coming years and I am confident that we have succeeded.” Khan’s pronouncements often sound performative, and it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that he was excited by the fact that Dick was not just the first woman but the first lesbian to hold the position.

Last summer, another dark cloud brooded over Dick’s head. It originated from the independent inquiry into the murder of Daniel Morgan, a private investigator axed to death in a pub car park in 1987. No one has ever been convicted of the killing, and the Met had previously admitted that corruption undermined the original investigation. The inquiry panel described the force as “institutionally corrupt” and criticised serving officers including Dick, who was accused of obstructing its work and causing delays that added further distress to Morgan’s family. Dick apologised to the family but denied the accusation and insisted, to no one’s surprise, that she was not going to resign.

Whether either of the inquiries currently under way will force Dick out is impossible to predict, given that she refuses to resign almost as often as Boris Johnson. But Londoners deserve better, and there is a bitter irony here. The appointment of the first woman Commissioner has been a failed experiment, exposing the urgent need for a Macpherson-style inquiry into misogyny within her own force.

Like many women in this country, Rosario Sánchez has been targeted by trans activists, some of them fellow students. Within weeks of beginning her research on men who pay for sex, she started to receive online abuse and was accused of being a Terf, scum, trash and a bigot. The campaign of vilification has continued for four years, delaying her PhD and putting a question mark over her visa, which she needs if she is to stay in this country and graduate.

Rosario Sánchez’s story would be extraordinary if it did not follow an all-too-familiar pattern. She has joined a growing list of women who have been let down by British universities: from Professor Kathleen Stock, who resigned last year from Sussex University, to Professor Jo Phoenix, who is taking action against her former employer, the Open University. What is different about Rosario Sánchez is that she is a young woman, still only 32, and a postgraduate student — albeit one with degrees from universities in Utah and Oregon State.

Rosario Sánchez is also an immigrant, who knew no one in this country when she arrived from the Dominican Republic to begin her research. “I started my PhD programme very late, at the end of November 2017, because of problems with my visa,” she says. “The only person I knew was my supervisor, who had met me via Skype. I was very isolated.”

Yet Rosario Sánchez was never going to slip through academia unnoticed. She already had an international reputation as a feminist campaigner and was soon invited to chair a meeting in Bristol by Woman’s Place UK, a feminist organisation that campaigns against gender self-identification and has repeatedly been smeared as a ‘hate’ group.

The meeting was scheduled for February 2018, but the lies and abuse began before it had even taken place. An ‘open letter’ was posted on Facebook by someone claiming to be a Bristol student, calling for the meeting to be cancelled. More than 200 people signed the letter, some of them adding abusive comments. “I cannot believe someone from the Centre for Gender Violence Research is organising this,” one student wrote. “It’s atrocious. Total TERF shit. Signed and shared.”

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Rosario Sánchez was not the organiser and the meeting had no connection with the university’s Centre for Gender and Violence Research — but facts don’t matter to trans activists. In a later post, the author of the open letter boasted about wanting to “punch them terfs [sic]”. Someone else posted a link to the WPUK meeting, suggesting that “trans allies” should target the meeting with eggs. “Oh and feel free to slap a TERF upside their bigoted, hateful face,” the message continued.

Concerned about her physical safety and afraid that the open letter might lead to her losing her PhD place, Rosario Sánchez made a complaint to the university, pointing out that the posts breached its “unacceptable behaviour” policy. To her relief, the meeting went ahead without incident, but only because WPUK managed to keep the venue secret.

But it wasn’t a secret for long: days later, a motion explicitly targeting free speech was tabled at a meeting of the Bristol students’ union. Its stated aim was to “prevent future Trans-Exclusion Radical Feminist – Terf – Groups from holding events at the University”. The motion was passed; those students who objected were swiftly shouted down.

This sequence of events stirred the university into action. It issued a statement, reaffirming its “commitment to freedom of speech and to the rights of all our students and staff to discuss difficult and sensitive topics”. Ominously, however, the statement repeated false assertions about the WPUK meeting from the open letter and included this sentence: “We believe that calls for this event to be banned were largely founded on the sincere desire to show support and solidarity for transgender people in our society and in our university community.”

Unsurprisingly, Rosario Sánchez did not feel supported. Feminists are used to hearing excuses for the appalling behaviour of trans activists, but here was an academic institution explicitly downplaying threats and abuse levelled at one of its students.

“Every aspect of my life was centred around the university, which exacerbated the situation,” she tells me. She chose Bristol over other universities that offered her a place because she believed the city to be an open and welcoming environment. So the hostility from fellow students came as a shock: “In my case, it was like they couldn’t comprehend that I was a woman from the Caribbean who was not compliant. The Dominican Republic is a very conservative country politically but conservatives and religious people would never try to get meetings cancelled. The right of freedom of speech for feminists is guaranteed.”

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What Rosario Sánchez didn’t know, when she arrived in the UK, was that Bristol has some of the most vocal trans activists in the country. A couple of months later, another feminist event in Bristol, attended by prominent feminists including Julie Bindel, was disrupted by masked protesters. Rosario Sánchez could not attend the meeting but she recognised the author of the open letter, known as AA in legal documents, in video footage. It allegedly shows AA trying to force entry to the meeting and being forcibly removed by the police.

Rosario Sánchez had not complained specifically about the behaviour of this individual, but AA was the only student who faced disciplinary proceedings. A hearing was scheduled for June 2018 and Rosario Sánchez cancelled a speaking engagement in Chicago so she could take part. According to her lawyers’ submission, she asked the university to consider how to protect those attending, but masked protestors turned up and intimidated her outside where the hearing took place.

During the proceedings, Rosario Sánchez was cross-examined by AA’s barrister, an experience she found “distressing, intimidating and demeaning”. The student, she says, was not questioned at all. Although the hearing was supposed to be confidential, it was followed by a barrage of social media posts against Rosario Sánchez, to the point where she became afraid of travelling alone at night.

One of her most explosive claims relates to a subsequent meeting that took place without her knowledge, when a representative of a hate crime charity is alleged to have argued that the disciplinary proceedings should be dropped because AA identified as trans. According to Rosario Sánchez’s lawyers, the university applies a policy of “not sanctioning students who rely on ‘trans rights’ activism to justify their conduct”. In July 2018, around three weeks after the disciplinary hearing where Rosario Sánchez was cross-examined, the university published a press release announcing it had signed a “pledge” in support of trans people.

The next few months were a miserable period for Rosario Sánchez, in which meetings with the university authorities were scheduled and then cancelled, causing her growing distress. She did not discover that proceedings against the student had been dropped until June 2019, when a Twitter account bearing AA’s name posted a topless photograph with this message: “The face (& nipples) of someone deciding what new hobbies to pursue, now that the University of Bristol have dropped their transphobic joke of a disciplinary case. So many options…. Eat your hearts out WPUK.”

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On the same day, Rosario Sánchez was informed that a decision to drop the disciplinary proceedings against AA had been taken several weeks earlier. In December that year, her wider complaint about bullying and harassment was dismissed. And so she believed that the only course open to her was to pursue legal action. She accuses Bristol University of victimisation, indirect sex discrimination and sexual harassment, the latter on the ground that her views on sex and gender reassignment are protected under the 2010 Equality Act.

A university of Bristol spokesperson told me: “We are committed to making our University a place where all feel safe, welcomed and respected, regardless of gender, race, sexual orientation, disability or social background.” Would Rosario Sánchez agree? Since she was first hounded, she has been diagnosed with a “prolonged adjustment disorder” whose symptoms include loss of concentration, energy and motivation. “I don’t particularly like to dwell on the negative aspects,” she says, “but one of the reasons it’s so important for me to be vocal is so other women get the message.

“You don’t have to be afraid. You can endure this and survive and get on with your life. That’s what trans activists don’t want. They wanted me to see the campaign of violence and shut up forever. I decided I’m going to do the opposite.”

I jumped at the chance, even though I am a member of the Labour party, and we worked amicably together for the next three years. Fast forward to 2021: Johnson is prime minister, Lord Greenhalgh (as he now is) is a government minister and I am out. Now I am in a peculiar situation: I have voted Labour all my life, yet was brought into City Hall by a Conservative administration — and sacked by its Labour successor.

The dismissal arrived last Friday afternoon, as I was writing and giving interviews about the dreadful murders in Plymouth less than 24 hours earlier (I have written a book about the relationship between misogyny, domestic abuse and terrorism). The last thing I expected, in the middle of such horror, was to be sacked by email.

After eight years of unpaid work on behalf of women and girls in London, it seems reasonable to expect that Sadiq Khan or Sophie Linden, the deputy mayor who replaced Greenhalgh, would have wanted to tell me themselves. But I have not heard a word from Khan and I only had a call from Linden yesterday after the Times published a story about the incident. Before that, all I had received was a series of diary notifications from her office, cancelling all the meetings I was supposed to have with her over the next twelve months.

The news was delivered in an email from Diana Luchford, a former civil servant at the Home Office, who is now CEO of the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime. I had to read it twice before the meaning sank in: I am out, thus removing independent scrutiny at a moment when the behaviour of the Metropolitan police towards women has been fiercely criticised.

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Take the kidnap and murder of Sarah Everard by a serving officer, followed the force’s callous handling of a vigil to commemorate her. Or its failure to investigate when two murdered sisters, Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman, were reported missing last year. If ever an outside voice were needed to raise women’s anxieties at City Hall, it is surely now.

My sacking has been attributed to a “governance review”, even though I made it clear months ago that I wanted to stay on as Co-chair. Luchford’s email did offer a sop: that I could remain on the board as an “advisor”. But that would remove my influence over the agenda and access to important meetings behind the scenes.

As Co-Chair, I was able to make sure that vital issues raised by recent events were discussed. For example, I argued that we needed to know what the Metropolitan Police intend to do to improve the way they identify sexual predators in their own ranks, and to make sure that complaints of domestic abuse against serving officers are handled properly. I also expressed my concern, privately, that the Mayor’s focus on issues such as knife crime risked diverting attention from crimes against women, including black women in London who suffer disproportionately high levels of rape and sexual assault.

At the end of March, just weeks after the abduction of Ms Everard, the number of rapes reported in London reached a ten-year high. The figures are shocking, and I thought they would be discussed at the most recent meeting of the London Crime Reduction Board, which is chaired by the Mayor. When I asked why we were not talking about the rape statistics, I was told they would be on the agenda of the next meeting — in October.

Linden has insisted that the sacking has nothing do with my attempt to protect women-only spaces in refuges, which receive key funding from City Hall. Last year I became aware that some women’s organisations were becoming alarmed by tweets from the Mayor’s official Twitter account. They felt under growing pressure to admit male-bodied trans women — men who have not undergone surgery but “identify” as women — to spaces currently reserved for female victims of domestic violence. No one is suggesting that trans women who suffer domestic abuse don’t need services, but they should be provided without affecting the principle of women-only spaces.

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“Trans women are women, trans men are men,” Khan declared in February, repeating the mantra of trans activists. “Trans people deserve the dignity and safety of being recognised as their gender,” he tweeted a few months later when it was reported that the government had dropped plans to allow people to self-identify as the other sex. “I’m dismayed that the Govt has made a U-turn on its own consultation to make the Gender Recognition Act more straightforward.”

It didn’t matter that trans activists were demanding almost total deregulation of the legal process of “changing” sex, which would make it less onerous than adopting a child or getting a driving licence. Or that self-ID has huge implications for women, most obviously for vulnerable women who need spaces away from men in refuges, hospitals and prisons. Sadiq Khan was fully on board — and had ignored requests from women’s organisations, including the Labour Women’s Declaration, for a meeting.

I discussed the Mayor’s tweets with Karen Ingala Smith, indomitable CEO of nia, the organisation that provides services to victims of sexual and domestic violence in east London. We decided to write to Linden, warning her about the impact Khan’s statements were having on organisations that depend on City Hall for funding: “How can it have anything other than a chilling effect when the Mayor publicly takes sides with a group of activists on such a contentious issue?” we asked.

We received an equivocating reply, repeating the Mayor’s view that “trans women are women” and making the dubious claim that the “basic human rights [of trans people] remain unmet”. Linden told us that the Mayor’s approach to providing services “is led by the needs of victims and survivors on a clear principle of non-discrimination”, a puzzling statement since women’s organisations are highly unlikely to discriminate on grounds of age, race, religion or disability.

They might exclude someone with male genitals from a women’s refuge — but that would be a lawful use of the exemptions in the 2010 Equality Act. We wrote again, seeking an assurance that no women’s organisation supported by the Mayor would be penalised financially for doing so. Linden did not reply.

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Women don't feel safe with Starmer

By Joan Smith

Then, last October, we wrote directly to Khan, reminding him that he voted for what is now the Equality Act when he was a Labour MP in 2009. “If you no longer support the Act in full, including the provision to restrict access on the ground of biological sex in certain circumstances, we believe that such a significant shift should be publicly acknowledged and debated,” we wrote. Ten months later, we are still waiting for a response.

Now I’ve been ousted. Yesterday, Linden took to Twitter to deny claims that I had been sacked after raising concerns about transwomen in refuges. She reiterated: “This is simply not true. The structure of all our boards at City Hall is being changed. [My dismissal] has nothing to do with any views Joan has expressed.” In response, all I can say is that I’ve spent years advocating for the safety of women and girls — and having an outside expert at City Hall seems to me as important as ever.

Many took to social media, using the hashtag #LabourLosingWomen. “I’ve voted @UKLabourfor 35 years – until today. I feel bereft, but I just can’t vote for a party that treats women with such contempt,” wrote one on Twitter. “If you keep telling people they
are bigots and you don’t want their votes, then you have only yourself to blame. When will you start listening?” asked another.

And what has Keir Starmer done to put his party in order? A hamfisted reshuffle which has allowed Angela Rayner, one of the party’s strongest advocates of gender ideology, to gain more influence within the party.

During the leadership contest last year, Rayner signed a pledge to expel members with “transphobic” views – otherwise known as feminists who stand up for women’s rights – from the party. She said she was “absolutely petrified” by the idea that some members “do not think [trans people] are valid”, casually distorting the arguments of those of us who believe there’s a conflict between the demands of trans extremists and women’s rights. She was also quick to condemn Tony Blair when he sensibly suggested that the party should be wary of starting a “culture war”.

Rayner is far from being alone in the party. She is the most recognisable face in an influential lobby that includes the former shadow minister Lloyd Russell-Moyle, who had to apologise for a baseless attack on the author J K Rowling last year, and the shadow minister for tourism and heritage, Alex Sobel, who opposes single-sex spaces for women in hospitals, schools, refuges and prisons. “And that is why so many women no longer vote Labour – enjoy being in long-term opposition,” one woman told Sobel in an exchange on Twitter.

I wrote to Starmer three months ago, politely asking him to get a grip on the nastiness that’s spreading through the party like wildfire. I’d heard that he doesn’t answer emails so I resorted to the charmingly old-fashioned method of putting a letter in the post, but it made no difference. I didn’t even get an acknowledgement, an experience shared by other women who’ve tried to contact him about this issue.

The continuing prominence of figures such as Rayner and increasing prominence of shadow foreign secretary Lisa Nandy, who signed the same unpleasant pledge last year, doesn’t suggest that the leadership has had a change of heart.

Yet violence against women is a major issue for many — if not all of us. All the more so after a recent succession of particularly vicious murders – Sarah Everard, Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman in London, and Julia James in Kent to name the most high-profile ones. But it hardly featured in the election campaign. Rape convictions have fallen to a historic low, domestic violence is rife, sexual harassment is an everyday experience for girls and women and confidence in the criminal justice system has collapsed.

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Leading figures in the party, however, seem more interested in ticking off fellow MPs and activists who “like” social media posts from feminist organisations than meeting any of the women’s groups expressing concern.

At the end of last week, the Labour MP and former frontbencher Khalid Mahmood homed in on identity politics as one of the causes of Labour’s poor showing, arguing that the party has been captured by “brigades of woke social media warriors”. But he’s a rare voice of sanity in a party that seems to have surrendered to a form of magical thinking. I wonder what Labour voters would make of the kinds of discussions that take place in local party meetings. In the midst of a pandemic and worsening economic crisis, members have been proposing motions declaring that “transwomen are women” and chastising anyone who objects to being described as “cis”.

Labour used to be described as a broad church, in which different factions more or less co-existed – not happily, to be sure, but dissent was permitted. Not any more. I know Labour councillors who are terrified to say openly that they are gender-critical, fearing the vitriol they will face. I’ve been told by party insiders that some MPs feel the same but they dare not speak out while the party is led by people who so vociferously support an extreme version of trans rights.

When Labour MP Rosie Duffield was the victim of a pile on by trans-activists last summer after liking a tweet suggesting that only women have a cervix, she might have expected sympathy from the most senior woman in the party; instead, Rayner told Duffield she should ‘reflect’ on her views about trans people.

It isn’t a Left-Right split within the party, it’s wholesale capture. The surrender to gender ideology began under Jeremy Corbyn, when transwomen were allowed to stand for positions as women’s officers and admitted to women-only shortlists. It has continued under Starmer, ensuring that women across the party now feel betrayed and angry.

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It’s not only Labour that’s gone down this rabbit-hole, of course. Scotland’s first minister, Nicola Sturgeon, recently made a campaign video announcing that her pronouns are ‘she’ and ‘her’, clearing up a longstanding source of confusion. The Greens and Lib Dems, too, without appearing to be punished electorally, although the former leader of Plaid Cymru, Leanne Wood (‘she/her’), lost her seat in the Senedd last week. But both these parties have always tended to be a broader coalition than Labour, embracing people who would never identify as socialist or align with feminism.

Last year, when Starmer had been leader for six months, I suggested he had a woman problem. He still does, and recent events have only made it worse. I don’t know whether he genuinely doesn’t care about losing women’s votes; or whether he’s too frightened of Angela Rayner and the rest of Labour’s gender warriors to do anything about it. But a witch-hunt of uppity women is being carried out in the party, and someone in charge needs to take notice. Even witches can vote – and our loyalty is being stretched to the limit.

It wasn’t that late when Jacqueline got off the bus. At 9.23pm on 17 November, she crossed a busy main road, not realising she had been spotted by Peter Sutcliffe, a 34-year-old lorry driver. Sutcliffe later told the police that he had just finished eating a portion of fried chicken in his Rover when he saw her. “I decided she was a likely victim,” he said.

She was only 100 yards from safety when he drove past, parked his car and hit her on the head with a hammer. He dragged her into a lane that led to some rough ground, struck her again but paused when he heard someone walking past. Then he returned to the attack, using a screwdriver to slash and stab her several times. Jacqueline had just become the final victim of the man known as the Yorkshire Ripper.

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A week ago, a women’s group, Leeds Spinners, placed a plaque close to where Jacqueline died. It bears an inscription that tries to fill in the character of a young woman most of us only know, if at all, as a victim of one of this country’s worst serial killers. The gesture gained extra poignancy when Sutcliffe’s death at the age of 74 was announced on Friday. He outlived his last victim by almost exactly four decades.

Rage at the incompetence of West Yorkshire police lives on, though. Sutcliffe was careless, leaving so much evidence that he was interviewed by detectives on nine occasions — but never once put on an identity parade or arrested in connection with the murders by the Ripper squad.

After Sutcliffe’s death, West Yorkshire’s current Chief Constable, John Robins, made a belated apology for mistakes in the inquiry. But even then he couldn’t resist a whinge. He complained that the hard work of bringing the Ripper to justice had been overshadowed by the language used by the upper ranks, who had described women as pawns and seemed to belittle the death of prostitutes.

Robins’s apology was all very well, but his force didn’t bring Sutcliffe to justice. The arrest was made in Sheffield in January 1981 by a traffic patrol from South Yorkshire, who were suspicious about the stolen number plates crudely taped to his car. And it’s not as though the language used by senior officers in the 1970s was incidental to the conduct of the investigation. On the contrary, it reflected a deep-seated misogyny that led to indefensible judgements about the victims and persuaded senior officers to doubt — and in some instances ignore — crucial evidence. To put it bluntly, some of the early victims, while definitely not involved in prostitution, didn’t meet West Yorkshire police’s exacting standards for female conduct. One woman had a black boyfriend! Another went to the pub without her husband!

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From early on in the case, detectives and the press wrongly assumed that the killer’s motive was a hatred of prostituted women. It didn’t bear a moment’s scrutiny: the first four attacks, all in the second half of 1975, had nothing to do with women who were selling sex. It did, however, appeal to the detective in charge of the inquiry, Assistant Chief Constable George Oldfield, who was convinced he was hot on the heels of a latter-day Jack the Ripper. He overlooked the fact that Sutcliffe’s first three victims, who all survived, were attacked in quiet residential streets and a country lane nowhere near Leeds’s red light district. One was a 14-year-old schoolgirl, Tracey Browne, who provided a photofit of her attacker that turned out to closely resemble Sutcliffe. But detectives decided she was too young and had been in the wrong place to belong in the series, thus ruling out a vital piece of evidence.

Another early victim, 46-year-old Olive Smelt from Halifax, also offered crucial testimony. She encountered Sutcliffe twice on the night of the assault in August 1975 — first in a pub, where he made an obscene remark, and later when he spotted her on his way home. Sutcliffe stopped his car and spoke to her again before striking her twice on the head with a hammer. He was slashing her buttocks when a passing car scared him off. Mrs Smelt described her attacker as around 30, with dark hair and a beard. She was also certain that he had a local accent. Sutcliffe was 29 at the time and matched her description closely.

Unfortunately, detectives were sceptical about Mrs Smelt’s value as a witness. In a secret report summarising the murders, she was dismissed in astonishingly pejorative language: “She is of loose morals,” the report declared, adding that “it was her usual custom … to visit public houses in Halifax on her own”. What detectives really believed about Mrs Smelt was revealed in a slip by then Chief Constable, Ronald Gregory, who described her in a newspaper article as “a prostitute”. It fitted the “prostitute killer” narrative and damaged Mrs Smelt’s credibility in the eyes of the inquiry, even though it had nothing to do with reality.

Sutcliffe’s fourth victim, and the first to be killed, was 28-year-old Wilma McCann, a mother of four. She was not involved in prostitution either. But Sutcliffe was tired of having his attempts to kill women interrupted and he targeted her in Chapeltown, a red-light area in Leeds where kerb crawlers didn’t attract attention. His fifth victim, 42-year-old Emily Jackson, whom he attacked in January 1976, was selling sex in Chapeltown as a result of a family financial crisis. Sutcliffe had realised prostituted women were easier targets, desperate for money and willing to get into his car. Mrs Jackson was the second woman to die, and her injuries were horrific.

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By the following year, evidence that should have led to Sutcliffe was mounting up. In October 1977 he made his biggest mistake, leaving a brand-new £5 note in the bag of one of his two Manchester victims. In a rare piece of effective detective work, officers traced it to a consignment of notes that had gone to a small number of firms in West Yorkshire, one of which employed Sutcliffe. He was convinced the game was up, but the line of inquiry petered out. Even so, Sutcliffe was a local man with a Yorkshire accent, his appearance matched photofits produced by another surviving victim, Marilyn Moore, and his car had been spotted in red light districts hundreds of times.

Yet when a junior detective, DC Andy Laptew, interviewed him as part of the £5 note inquiry and suggested that Sutcliffe deserved further investigation, Oldfield banged the table with his fist. “Peter Sutcliffe is not the Yorkshire Ripper,” he shouted, threatening anyone who disagreed with a return to traffic duties. There was a reason for Oldfield’s bizarre behaviour, though not a good one. Increasingly desperate about his failure to catch the killer, Oldfield was easy prey for an amateurish hoaxer who sent him anonymous letters and a tape. The man had a distinctive Wearside accent, something none of the survivors had described — but hey, what did they know? I questioned the tape’s authenticity when I first heard it but it flattered Oldfield, addressing him personally and reinforcing his ideas about the killer’s motives.

In the summer of 1979, he decided to ignore the surviving victims, with their regrettable personal habits, and release the tape to the public. West Yorkshire police wasted £1m on a publicity campaign, asking people to look out for a killer with a North-East accent. In Halifax, Olive Smelt was outraged; she told me so when I interviewed her after Jacqueline’s murder in 1980. But a floundering investigation had taken a catastrophic turn and three more women — Jacqueline, Barbara Leach and Marguerite Walls — would die as a result.

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West Yorkshire police’s apology has come too late for Mrs Smelt, who died in 2011. But I’m troubled by Robins’s claims about modern policing, not least the idea that misogynist attitudes have been “consigned to history”. It is true that police forces have better technology than they did in the 1970s, but I see no end to victim-blaming. The “short skirt” defence in rape cases has been replaced by a “digital strip search”, where victims are asked to hand over medical records, school reports and mobile phones, allowing detectives to access intimate photos and messages.

The result is evident in crime statistics: around 55,000 women report a rape to the police in England and Wales each year, but there were only 1,439 convictions in 2019-20. Victims are still being discredited and having their stories disbelieved; it’s more sophisticated than West Yorkshire police’s division of Sutcliffe’s victims into “innocent girls” and the rest, but the underlying impulse is pretty much the same. The situation is so dire that the Victims’ Commissioner, Dame Vera Baird, has argued that rape is being decriminalised.

In Leeds itself, women challenge Robins’s assertion that policing is now “wholly victim-focused”, ensuring that “those harmed by crime are at the heart of what we do”. His force operates the controversial “managed approach” to prostitution, allowing men to kerb crawl in Holbeck, a light industrial area to the south of the city centre, without fear of arrest — as long as they stick to certain hours. It didn’t prevent the murder of a young Polish woman, Daria Pionko, who was kicked to death in Holbeck by a sex buyer in 2015.

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The commercial sex trade always attracts predators, putting women who sell sex at risk, while local women say they are pestered for sex while out shopping or on their way to work. Last week a local headmaster, Ben Mallinson told the BBC he was afraid one of his female pupils would be abducted by men looking for sex, as several had already been propositioned. Holbeck is only four or five miles from Headingley, where Jacqueline Hill was murdered by a man who hated women, yet it now seems to be operating as a “managed misogyny” zone.

It has been painfully clear for a long time that Hill’s death and those of other women could have been avoided if West Yorkshire police had put aside their prejudices and listened to Sutcliffe’s surviving victims. On this tragic anniversary, it is hard not to think of everything Jacqueline might have done in those four lost decades: the friends she would have made, the career she might have have followed, and the children she could have had.

It is also hard to contemplate the fact that women in Leeds and other parts of the country still don’t feel safe from predators, let down by a criminal justice system that seems incapable of locking up violent men. Misogyny is as entrenched as ever — and I’m as angry now as I was when Jacqueline was murdered all those years ago.

Take the past few days. The latest book by the author J.K. Rowling, who gave £1m to Labour in 2008, hadn’t even been published when the smears started to appear. Rowling, who writes crime fiction under the pen name Robert Galbraith, was accused of being an evil transphobe who had deliberately written a novel about a ‘transvestite serial killer’ to distress trans men and women. The menacing hashtag #RIPJKRowling trended on Twitter, while hundreds of fake 1* reviews were posted on Goodreads.com, the world’s largest reader recommendations website, by people who openly admitted they hadn’t read the novel.

Not a word of it was true. Troubled Blood isn’t about a “transvestite serial killer” and it doesn’t feature a single trans character. There is a minor character, a murderer who uses a variety of tricks and disguises to fool his victims, but he is only one in a long list of suspects. What none of these self-appointed literary critics mentioned, because they hadn’t read it, is that the novel’s real subject is the myriad forms of violence suffered by women. Several writers pointed this out, myself included, but it didn’t stop the vicious and completely baseless attacks on Rowling. Such tactics are unlikely to affect her sales but they could be employed against less well-known authors, damaging their prospects of being published again after they’ve been saddled with the deadly ‘transphobe’ label.

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What it also didn’t do was bring out the great and the good who would normally rush to the defence of one the country’s leading authors and philanthropists. Starmer, who was doing a round of interviews prior to this week’s Labour conference, had ample opportunity to condemn the attempts to intimidate Rowling. He didn’t, any more than he’s had anything to say in support of the hundreds of gender-critical women in the party who can no longer hold a meeting without trans extremists shouting abuse, banging on the windows or setting off smoke bombs.

He even remained silent in June when a member of his own shadow Cabinet launched a nasty attack on Rowling, accusing her of using her own experience of sexual assault and domestic violence to justify discrimination against trans people. Starmer could easily have signalled that he won’t tolerate such behaviour by sacking the Brighton Kemptown MP Lloyd Russell-Moyle from the front bench, as he did when the shadow minister Rebecca Long Bailey shared an article about the actor Maxine Peake that contained an antisemitic conspiracy theory. But he stayed quiet and allowed Russell-Moyle to stay in place until the following month when the MP resigned after another row, this time about a blatantly antisemitic remark.

Why wouldn’t Starmer defend Rowling? I’m afraid there’s a pattern here: lots of longstanding Labour members would welcome the opportunity to meet him and describe how miserable they’ve been made to feel for defending women’s existing rights, but as far as I know it hasn’t happened. Starmer is quite rightly tough on antisemitism but he seems unwilling to confront misogyny, despite the fact that it’s now more widespread and shameless than at any period I can remember.

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Trust me, I know what I’m talking about: when it comes to woman-hating, I really did write the book. Misogynies is still in print three decades later and if I were writing it now, I would have plenty of material for new chapters. But Starmer wouldn’t even defend one of his own women MPs, remaining silent when the Canterbury MP Rosie Duffield was bullied by trans activists last month. Duffield’s ‘offence’ was to state the obvious fact that only women have a cervix, an observation that led an organisation called LGBT+ Labour to demand not just an apology but ‘reparations’. Duffield, who has spoken movingly in Parliament about her own experience of domestic abuse, received no support from her leader or (to my knowledge) other Labour MPs.

The activists’ slogan “trans women are women” (TWAW for short) is repeated like a mantra by any number of Labour politicians. Has no one stopped to think and realised how misogynist it is? Far from being ‘nice’ or inclusive, it tells women to accept that male-bodied individuals — only a small minority of trans women have had surgery — are women just like those of us who were born female. It demands that we give people with male genitals exactly the same rights, including access to women-only spaces such as refuges and hospital wards, that previous generations of women fought to achieve. It’s a form of gaslighting, painfully familiar to women who have been told not to believe the evidence of our own eyes, yet anyone who objects is accused of ‘transphobia’.

The word is used so often, and so inaccurately, that it no longer means anything. Most of the people damned as wicked transphobes, like Rowling, are absolutely clear that they believe trans men and women should have the same rights as everyone else. But what’s being demanded by trans extremists isn’t equality — it’s submission. That’s the whole point of the TWAW mantra, and it misrepresents the slightest squeak of disagreement as ‘hate speech’. Anyone who supports women’s rights and free expression should be horrified by these tactics, yet Starmer signed up to the TWAW slogan during the Labour leadership contest earlier this year. The five women candidates went even further, signing a rival set of pledges that threatened dissenting women with expulsion from the party.

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One victim of all this is Karen Ingala Smith, founder of the Femicide Census and CEO of a charity that provides services for victims of male violence. Her application to rejoin the party earlier this year was refused on the ground that she had supposedly engaged in conduct online that demonstrated “hostility based on gender identity”. It would be interesting to know whether Starmer, who had an admirable track record of prosecuting crimes against women when he was Director of Public Prosecutions, seriously thinks there is no place in the party he leads for one of country’s foremost campaigners against sexual and domestic violence.

To be fair, other political parties are just as bad as Labour. The Lib Dems went into the last general election with a leader, Jo Swinson, who is reluctant to say whether or not she believes that biological sex exists. When she lost her own seat, one of the candidates to replace her was the Oxford West MP Layla Moran, who thinks that some women have beards. (She lost to Sir Ed Davey, who has tweeted that TWAW.) In Scotland, the SNP is pressing ahead with a dreadful hate crimes bill that creates a new offence of ‘stirring up hatred’ against trans people, even if you had no intention of doing so. Feminists on the left have been forced to pin our hopes on the Conservative Minister for Women and Equalities, Liz Truss, who is expected to announce this week that the government won’t press ahead with plans to deregulate self-ID.

What’s going on here is institutional capture, as one organisation after another (the BMA is the latest) bows to the demands of trans extremists. Starmer may think he has more important things to worry about, such as the impending publication of the Equality and Human Rights Commission report on the party’s handling of antisemitism. But if his stance on that issue is principled, as it surely is, it’s hard to see why the same argument doesn’t apply to another group of people who’ve been singled out for vicious personal attacks and smears. Just to make a practical point for a moment, these are the very same Labour activists that the leadership relies on to knock on doors and stand for hours outside polling stations during election campaigns.

If Starmer believes he can ignore the rising anger of feminists in the party, who are sick to the back teeth of being told our concerns about single-sex spaces are ‘transphobic’, he needs to think again. Labour has a misogyny problem — and it’s not going away.

Everyone involved in the play — playwright, actors, the producer, the director, even people who handed out flyers on the streets of Edinburgh — could find themselves under investigation. In time, they might be charged with a new criminal offence, whose penalties include up to seven years in prison.

Sounds like scare-mongering? It’s not. A whole section of the bill, snappily titled “culpability where offence is committed during public performance of play” [sic], has been drawn up with theatrical performances in mind. Its definitions are so widely drawn as to catch stand-up, one-person shows, even opera. One of the bill’s critics, the Faculty of Advocates, has pointed out that there does not have to be “any intention on the part of the performer, director or presenter to stir up hatred”.

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Have MSPs ever been to the theatre? Read a book? Don’t they know that authors often create unattractive characters without endorsing them or condemning an entire group? There would be no way of knowing in advance what might lead someone to use the new law to close down a production that offends their views on religion, say, or one that focuses on gay men using surrogacy to have a child. The chilling effect on the performing arts is not hard to imagine, but the legislation would also have the bizarre effect of criminalising performances in Scotland that would be perfectly legal in England.

What kind of government blithely steams ahead with legislation that would muzzle one of the world’s most successful arts festivals? Let me introduce you to the SNP’s Justice Secretary, Humza Yousaf. The 35-year-old MSP for Glasgow Pollok has managed to create an impressive coalition of opponents to his Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) bill, even though it’s being presented as a tidying-up exercise that merely brings together existing hate crimes laws into a single piece of legislation. Its critics, who include everyone from the crime writer Val McDermid and the comedian Rowan Atkinson to the Humanist Society Scotland, the Scottish Police Federation and the Catholic church, take a very different view. Earlier this week, McDermid was among 20 writers and performers who signed an open letter warning that the bill could stifle freedom of speech.

Yousaf’s response is best summed up by a tweet he posted last month, which managed to be patronising and dismissive while also getting a core part of his own legislation wrong. “The Bill will not prevent you expressing controversial or offensive views”, he lectured his critics. “Just don’t do it in a threatening or abusive way that is likely or intended to stir up hatred”.

https://twitter.com/HumzaYousaf/status/1286690052479877123

As I’ve already pointed out, you don’t have to intend to stir up hatred to be caught by the legislation, something that the Justice Secretary should surely know. Rank-and-file police officers in Scotland are horrified: “We are firmly of the view this proposed legislation would see officers policing speech and would devastate the legitimacy of the police in the eyes of the public,” says Calum Steele, the SPF’s general secretary. New powers to forcibly enter and search premises in pursuit of an offence of “possessing inflammatory material”, whatever that may be, are hardly likely to improve relations between the police and the public.

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The Scottish government has fallen into a familiar trap, in assuming that we all agree on the definition of subjective words like ‘hate’, ‘insult’ and ‘offence’. We don’t — and there isn’t even agreement on which groups need enhanced legal protection. To return to my theoretical example for a moment, if I were offended by the negative portrayal of the feminist in the play, I would just have to lump it. I’m not complaining about that — I’ve campaigned for the right of authors and performers to offend for years — but it’s striking that women have been left off the list of people who will receive additional protection under the bill. (Age is being added to the protected characteristics, joining disability, race, religion, sexual orientation and transgender identity.)

This is par for the course: misogyny isn’t a hate crime anywhere in the UK and senior police officers baulk at the very notion, on the grounds (I paraphrase) that there’s so bloody much of it. The omission speaks volumes about the motives behind hate crime legislation, which are well-meaning — but only up to a point. Governments are selective about who they see as vulnerable, even though women are far more likely than men to be on the receiving end of sexual harassment, murder and rape threats.

The Scottish government says it is considering adding women as a protected group at a later date but the bill won’t protect Edinburgh’s most famous resident, the author J. K. Rowling. She has been the target of a vicious campaign of abuse in recent months, facing nonsensical accusations of ‘literally’ killing trans women for defending women’s rights. If the legislation is passed in its present form, however, Rowling might well find herself reported to the police for stirring up hatred against trans people, an offence that will be very much in the eye of the beholder. Indeed the legislation seems to have been drafted by people who haven’t given any thought to the possibility of vexatious or misguided complaints.

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Countless people have been driven off social media sites, not for “stirring up hate” but for posting material that zealots of one sort or another disagree with. The acronym DARVO — deny, attack, reverse victim and offender — refers to a common tactic used against feminists, describing the way hateful people turn the tables and present themselves as victims. That’s bound to happen if the bill isn’t amended, and women will be among the biggest losers. Genuine hate speech — threats to kill, rape or hurt someone’s family — is already a criminal offence and should be prosecuted under existing legislation, without putting authors, comedians, playwrights and campaigners at the mercy of malicious reporting.

To be fair, there is one aspect of the hate crimes bill that has been almost universally welcomed, and that is the abolition of blasphemy. It is an outdated law, incompatible with the values of a modern, secular society, and it has not been prosecuted in Scotland for almost two centuries. Yet the very same legislation threatens to criminalise the free expression of ideas that challenge prevailing orthodoxies, whether they are religious or (more likely) rooted in social movements. It would be ironic if Nicola Sturgeon’s government was to go down in history as the administration that got rid of blasphemy, only to introduce a secular form of heresy into Scottish law.

Why do 999 calls shoot up at Christmas and in the summer holidays? Because abusive partners find themselves at home with their families for a few days. Imagine, then, what’s going to happen when these angry, frustrated and violent men are shut up inside for weeks on end because of the coronavirus. The nation’s pubs are closed and there isn’t even any live sport to distract them.

According to the ONS, an estimated 1.6 million women suffer domestic abuse in England and Wales in a normal year. (Men are at risk, too, but the statistics show that women suffer more repeat incidents and more severe injuries.) With the lockdown, all those women will have even fewer opportunities to ring for help or go online for advice. In some places, they can’t even escape to the park to make a discreet phone call for help or support, because they have been shut. Thanks Hammersmith and Fulham. But this council isn’t alone in its short-sightedness. Very little has been done to address the problem. In fact, it has barely even been acknowledged by Government.

It’s as though our ministers live in a rose-tinted world where home is the safest place to be, oblivious to the mass of statistics that tell a different story. We know that domestic abuse — the type that gets reported to the police, at any rate — is linked to deprivation, insecure employment and over-crowded housing. And those in the least secure jobs, the cab drivers and construction workers who are mostly self-employed, are the immediate losers amid the pandemic. They’ve had to wait 10 days longer than employees to find out what the Chancellor proposes to do for them. Frustrations and tensions will have been ratcheting up.

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Our dangerous approach to misogyny

By Joan Smith

We also know that anxious, depressed men are likely to turn to drink, with a quarter of victims of domestic violence reporting that their abusers were using drugs or alcohol at the time of an attack. During lockdown, a spike in alcohol abuse is inevitable — and people are already drinking more. Off-licences are being allowed to remain open, following reports that some supermarkets can’t cope with increased demand for beer, wine and spirits.

It’s not as though we don’t know what to expect. In China, a police station in the worst-affected province received three times as many reports of domestic abuse in February, compared with the same period last year. Some governments, notably those of Germany and Spain, have acknowledged the probable impact of coronavirus lockdowns. The German family ministry has posted emergency phone numbers for anyone experiencing ‘conflicts arising at home’, offering counselling to teenagers, pregnant women and victims of domestic abuse. In Spain, the government has set up an instant messaging service and an online chatroom to provide immediate support to victims. Such measures are welcome, even if they fall short of providing desperately-needed emergency accommodation.

When Boris Johnson was asked about the risk of a surge in domestic violence a couple of weeks ago, he replied with his usual combination of bluster and bragging, insisting that he had just put “record funding” back into councils even though the money wasn’t earmarked for — and is unlikely to be allocated to — services for victims of abuse. But the truth is that organisations trying to help women escape violent relationships were in dire straits before the coronavirus sent the country into quarantine. It was already the case that two-thirds of women in need of a refuge place were being turned away, forcing them to move in with relatives, risk becoming homeless or stay with a man who had beaten and raped them.

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By Joan Smith

Some of these women may now end up being killed in their own homes. Domestic homicides were already at a five-year high before the epidemic broke out. The latest Femicide Census makes sombre reading, listing 149 killings and demonstrating once again that that women are most likely to be killed by a current or ex-partner; in cases where perpetrator and victim were known to each other, more than half of the deaths occurred in households with a history of domestic abuse.

Perhaps Boris Johnson’s masculine War Cabinet should flick through it. The statistic that should really worry them is the fact that 68% of such killings took place in or immediately around the family home – the very place where they’ve told women to isolate.

During Gov briefings am I the only one thinking ‘where are all the women?’ Why are there no senior women in the “war cabinet” or used to convey those critical messages? Equality means better decisions. Don’t pack the women away during a crisis.

— Amber Rudd (@AmberRuddUK) March 18, 2020

In Greater Manchester, there have already been reports of abuse linked to the lockdown, according to Beverley Hughes, deputy mayor for policing and crime. Avon and Somerset police, too, reported a 20.9% increase in domestic abuse incidents in the last two weeks, from 718 to 868. And Police in Cumbria have asked postal workers and delivery drivers to look out for signs of abuse.

But thus far, despite an array of individuals and organisations — including Women’s Aid and the recently-appointed Domestic Violence Commissioner, Nicole Jacobs — pleading for some sort of Government provision, little seems to have been done.  The only concession the Government has openly made is to exempt those fleeing a violent relationship from lockdown enforcement fines.

But there’s absolutely no mystery about what the ministers could and should do. They urgently need to provide extra financial support for victims’ organisations to help cope with increased demand; they should instruct the police to check on households with a known history of domestic abuse; they should use domestic violence protection orders (DVPOs) to get the worst abusers out of their homes; and they should use empty hotels to provide emergency accommodations for women and children. They should also do everything within their power to promote the services that are already available for these vulnerable women.

As the scale of the pandemic was starting to become apparent, the Prime Minister boasted in the House of Commons that his Government has an “outstanding record in tackling violence against women and girls”. It was a dubious claim before coronavirus changed the landscape of the UK, emptying the streets and sequestering the population behind closed doors. It looks even more suspect now as thousands of vulnerable women look forward to the next few weeks not just with the anxiety we all feel during a global pandemic, but outright terror.

Acquaintances and colleagues reveal that the perpetrator, whose actions have official sources scratching their heads, has been sending out warning signals for months, if not years. It happened in August this year, when a 24-year-old man who murdered nine people in a mass shooting in Dayton, Ohio, turned out to have been previously suspended from high school for writing a list of boys he wanted to kill and girls he wanted to rape. Some of the teenage girls targeted by Connor Betts had refused to go on dates with him.

“There was a kill list and a rape list, and my name was on the rape list,” a former classmate recalled. A few years later, in the run-up to his rampage, Betts provided vocals for a ‘pornogrind’ band called the Menstrual Munchies, whose song titles include “6 Ways of Female Butchery”. Like many mass killers, Betts included a female relative — his only sister, Megan, 22 — among his victims.

There is plenty of evidence to suggest that both mass murderers and terrorists hate women. Elliot Rodger, who murdered six people in Isla Vista, California, in 2014 left behind a video and ‘manifesto’ railing against women who wouldn’t go on dates with him. Seung-Hui Cho, who killed 32 people on the Virginia Tech campus in 2007, had previously turned in work full of violent fantasies, stalked female students and was caught ‘upskirting’ in class. Robert Dear Jnr, a domestic terrorist who murdered three people in Colorado Springs in 2015, had been accused of domestic violence, voyeurism and rape. I found many more examples when I was researching my book Home Grown, which looks at the history of dozens of men who went on to kill complete strangers.

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Despite all this, the post-attack trajectory from official incomprehension — what on earth inspired this apparently blameless individual to commit such an atrocity? — to a grudging admission of missed warning signs has become horribly familiar. It’s so routine, in fact, that I had begun to think I was used to it. But the sequence of events that followed last week’s horrific massacre at police headquarters in Paris — described as “a scene of extreme violence” by France’s anti-terrorist prosecutor, Jean-Francois Ricard — has me almost lost for words.

On Thursday, a civilian computer expert called Mickaël Harpon, 45, left his office near Notre Dame cathedral at lunchtime and purchased two kitchen knives. He then returned to police HQ, one of the most security-conscious buildings in Paris, and began hacking and slashing at colleagues in a rampage that lasted seven minutes. Four people died and a fifth person was gravely injured before Harpon was shot dead by a trainee police officer who had joined the force only six days earlier.

In the immediate aftermath of the massacre, France’s interior minister, Christophe Castaner, claimed that the attacker had “never shown any behavioural problems” or given the “slightest reason for alarm”. Yet it quickly emerged that Harpon, who had converted to Islam a decade earlier, had suddenly started refusing to speak to female colleagues about 18 months before the attack. I am resisting the urge to use block capitals here: this is not normal behaviour. Refusing to interact with women, other than family members, is a classic sign of a type of misogyny associated with Islamist extremism. How was such a huge red flag missed in a department whose very purpose is combating terrorism?

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It’s all the more startling because the scene of the crime was a police intelligence unit charged with tracking extremists. They had more reason than almost anyone in France to know that extreme misogyny was a missed warning signal in one of the most notorious terrorist attacks in recent years, the massacre at the Charlie Hebdo office in Paris in January 2015 in which 12 people died. The younger of the two perpetrators, Cherif Kouachi, had made a point of refusing to stand up in court before a female judge when he appeared on terrorist charges; his elder brother, Said, was sacked from his job with a local authority because he refused to shake hands with women.

By last Saturday — that crucial third day from the point of those who study such ghastly events — the idea that the massacre at police HQ in Paris was a purely criminal matter completely fell apart. The prosecutor, Ricard, revealed that Harpon was a radicalised Islamist who slit the throat of at least one of his victims. At police HQ, he was known to have expressed support for Islamist murders, including the Charlie Hebdo massacre. And, with a sickening sense of inevitability, we also learned that he had been taken to court in 2009 on charges of domestic violence.

The murder investigation is now in the hands of anti-terror police, a development that should surprise nobody. But the wider question of why misogyny is so often tolerated, misinterpreted or excused needs to be answered.

It isn’t just an issue for the French authorities. After Connor Betts’ list of potential rape victims was discovered at his school in Ohio, girls who were considered to be at risk were contacted and warned by the authorities. But Betts reappeared at the school without explanation a few months later, resuming lessons as though nothing had happened. Police records relating to the incident were sealed and later expunged, so it isn’t known why he didn’t face charges which might have prevented him acquiring firearms. The local school district has refused to release records that might show why he was re-admitted.

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In the UK, the violent misogyny of the Manchester Arena bomber, Salman Abedi, also failed to make it into official records. In May 2017, 22-year-old Abedi deliberately targeted a concert by the American singer Ariana Grande, who has a big following among teenage girls; this horrific attack resulted in the deaths of 22 people, three-quarters of them women and girls.

Five years earlier, Abedi had earned a reputation as a bully at the college he attended in south Manchester, targeting female staff and students in particular. Things took an even more alarming turn when Abedi punched a Muslim girl in the head for wearing a short skirt, yet he wasn’t charged with assault; the incident, which took place at college and in front of witnesses, was dealt with via ‘restorative justice’ where the perpetrator agrees to sit down with and apologise to his victim. This unequivocal evidence of an Islamist-inspired form of misogyny wasn’t even referred to Channel, the strand of the Prevent programme designed to deal with radicalised individuals.

After writing a book about misogyny at the beginning of my career, I know how often it is normalised or explained away. But that was a long time ago and it’s become clear, in the intervening period, that misogyny is even more dangerous than I originally thought. The men I’ve mentioned in this article made no secret of their contempt for women, openly displaying it at school, in college and at work. They rightly believed they would get away with it — and they went on to murder 35 people in three countries, as well as injuring hundreds of others.

If police and counter-terrorism agencies want to forestall future attacks, they need to recognise extreme misogyny as a warning sign — and put individuals who threaten and abuse women at the top of their suspects list.

Beech, who was convicted of perverting the course of justice at Newcastle Crown Court last week, spun lurid fantasies about a Westminster paedophile ring, dragging the names of a number of well-known individuals through the mud. His victims included the former prime minister Sir Edward Heath, the former Home Secretary Lord Brittan, the retired head of the armed forces Lord Bramall, and the former Conservative MP Harvey Proctor. His 18-year prison sentence is more than twice as long as that handed down to John Humble, the fraudster known as ‘Wearside Jack’ who did such terrible damage to the Yorkshire Ripper investigation in the late 1970s.

It is a troubling comparison, and not just because this is the second time senior police officers in this country have fallen for a not-very-subtle hoax.

Beech’s victims are rightly furious about Operation Midland, the Metropolitan Police investigation that left a whole series of well-known men under undeserved suspicion for years. Proctor, who lost his job and home as a result of Beech’s allegations, has called for Lord Hogan-Howe, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police at the relevant time, to return his peerage. The son of another victim, the late Lord Janner, has called on the Labour MP Tom Watson to step down as deputy leader of his party, accusing him of “whipping up a moral panic” over Beech’s allegations.

What hasn’t been noted, in the midst of the furore, is the existence of another, overlooked group that has been drastically affected by his actions – the thousands of women and girls, not remotely well-known, who report a rape each year.

On the face of it, the two crimes are very different: most rapes are committed on women by men, while Beech’s fantastical allegations related to child sexual exploitation involving exclusively male victims and perpetrators. Such crimes are often historical in nature, as they supposedly were in this instance, and involve witnesses who were children at the time. They require incredibly sensitive handling, yet when a middle-aged man came along, making far-fetched claims of rape, torture and murder against public figures, the response of senior officers in the Metropolitan Police was to put him on prime-time TV before they’d carried out a full investigation.

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In 2014, Beech was interviewed by the BBC under the pseudonym ‘Nick’ and claimed that the abusers were “quite open about who they were. They had no fear at all about being caught.” In December that year a senior officer, Det Supt Kenny McDonald, solemnly described Beech’s allegations in TV interviews as “credible and true”. But it was only months later, in March 2015, that the police finally got round to searching Mr Proctor’s home, followed by those of Lords Brittan and Bramall.

I happened to catch the BBC’s interview with ‘Nick’ and I didn’t believe a word of it.

It reminded me of a crucial moment in the Yorkshire Ripper investigation, when I was invited to a press conference to hear a tape recording made by a man claiming to be the killer. I listened to the monotonous voice with a Geordie accent, raised my hand and asked whether the tape had been edited; when I was told it hadn’t, I pointed out that everything on it was already in the public domain. The head of the Ripper squad brushed my objection aside, along with others made by experts who believed, like me, that the tape was a hoax. Three more women were murdered and several seriously injured as the Ripper cops dismissed suspects – including the real killer, a local man called Peter Sutcliffe – because they didn’t have a Wearside accent. The hoaxer clearly bore a heavy responsibility for derailing the investigation, yet Humble got only eight years in prison.

The question of why senior officers allowed themselves to be taken in by such melodramatic nonsense, in 1979 and again in 2014, needs to be addressed. Beech, now 51, is himself a convicted paedophile, having pleaded guilty to charges of voyeurism, possessing indecent photographs and fraud at a separate trial in Worcester earlier this year. But while the behaviour of a single male paedophile tells us nothing about the veracity of women who make allegations about current sexual crimes, it is they who are being penalised as a result of the mishandling of Beech’s allegations.

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Who's afraid of the feminists?

By Tom Chivers

In 2011, in the wake of Jimmy Savile’s exposure as a serial sexual predator, the Metropolitan Police announced a new policy of automatically believing rape victims. It didn’t mean that allegations wouldn’t be thoroughly investigated, but it did mark a break from the scepticism and outright disbelief that many women had encountered when reporting a rape – including those who told the police they’d been drugged and raped by a black cab driver, John Worboys. The Independent Police Complaints Commission conducted nine inquiries into the Met’s handling of sexual assaults, in one notorious case reporting that detectives in south-east London had ‘encouraged’ victims to withdraw rape allegations to make their clear-up rate look better. In effect, the new policy put victims on the same footing as anyone else reporting a crime; the police don’t immediately dismiss your account of events or accuse you of insurance fraud when you tell them your car has been stolen.

The new policy didn’t survive long.

When a retired judge, Sir Richard Henriques, reported on failings in Operation Midland in 2016, he zeroed in on the protocol requiring officers to believe rape victims, urging that it should be scrapped. A policy designed to raise scandalously low convictions rates in cases involving female victims of male violence, in other words, was being targeted after the police made egregious errors in a very different type of case. The criticism caused shock waves; in April last year Hogan-Howe’s successor, Cressida Dick, announced she had abandoned the policy. Organisations supporting rape victims were horrified, predicting a further fall in the number of rape cases getting to court – and that’s exactly what has happened.

On Friday, coincidentally the very day that Beech’s sentence made headlines, The Guardian published an analysis of Home Office figures showing an alarming drop in rape prosecutions in England and Wales. Last year, fewer than one in sixty-five rapes reported to the police led to a charge or summons, amounting to just 1.5% of the total. There has been a significant rise in the number of victims going to the police – from 35,847 in 2015 to 57,882 in 2019, an increase of 61% – but there is now less chance than ever of rapists being prosecuted, let alone convicted.

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What we have seen is a radical change in how complainants are treated. In a previous article, I described how victims are being asked to hand over their mobile phones and sign forms allowing police to access a massive amount of private data, including school reports, medical records and even counsellors’ notes made after an attack. It’s been described as a “digital strip search”, something which is now the subject of a complaint to the Information Commissioner.

There are two scandals here. One is about the gullibility of senior police officers who rushed into supporting Carl Beech’s frankly improbable claims about a VIP paedophile ring, causing immeasurable grief to the wrongly accused and their relatives. The other is about the denial of justice to thousands of women who have suffered serious sexual attacks, but have little hope of seeing their rapists held to account.

Genuine rape victims are being treated with unwarranted suspicion because senior officers in the Metropolitan Police bet the farm on a male fantasist.

Toxic masculinity didn’t damage Donald Trump’s chances, showing that millions of people still respond positively – or at least indifferently – to the near-parodic version of masculinity on display at his rallies.

Such behaviour, which takes traditionally masculine traits and exaggerates them to disastrous effect, isn’t innate to men, and is rejected by a growing number of them. But when it’s sanctioned at such a high level, we shouldn’t be surprised if individuals further down the food chain copy it and make similar assumptions about how they are entitled to behave.

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The UK, like many modern democracies, has a raft of laws that commit our society to sex equality. But the way people actually treat each other in private is another matter. Domestic abuse is widespread, suggesting that toxic masculinity taken to extremes continues to define and distort many intimate relationships.

At the same time, our understanding of the phenomenon has expanded: since 2015, the law has recognised non-physical forms of domestic abuse, such as keeping women short of money and ‘gaslighting’, a type of psychological manipulation that encourages self-doubt.

What’s gone underreported is the relationship between domestic violence and murder statistics. Men do become victims of domestic abuse, but they’re far more likely to be killed by strangers; fully half of female murder victims are killed by a current or former partner, compared to only 3% of male victims. Two women die at the hands of an intimate partner every week, according to official figures.

A significant proportion of those deaths involve ‘over-killing’ – the use of much greater force than is needed to kill the victim. It featured in two-fifths of cases recorded by the Femicide Census in 2017, including one where a woman was struck 40 times by an axe and another where the victim was stabbed 175 times. The following year, when the public conversation was all about knife crime, the number of domestic homicides in London more than tripled to 29.

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It’s a depressing fact that there isn’t outcry over these murders, harking back to a time when violence in the home was dismissed as ‘just a domestic’. It’s worrying, too: it’s gradually becoming clear that the impact of such high levels of anger, aggression and assaults isn’t limited to the private sphere.

In the US, where mass shootings without an obvious political motive are common, the link between what happens behind closed doors and acts of public violence has been showing up in research for some time. One of the best-known studies, carried out by an NGO called Everytown for Gun Safety, found that the perpetrator killed an intimate partner or family member in 57% of mass shootings between 2009 and 2014. In many of these cases, the victim had suffered abuse for years.

Devin Patrick Kelley, who had convictions for violence against his first wife and his step-son, was trying to kill the mother of his estranged second wife when he opened fire in a church in Texas in 2017, killing 26 people. Nine days later, Kevin Janson Neal riddled his wife’s body with bullets and hid her under the floorboards before rushing out of their home in rural California and murdering four more victims. The young man accused of killing 14 students and three teachers at his old school in Parkland, Florida, in 2018 was well-known to the police because his adoptive mother called 911 so many times, pleading for help when he verbally and physically abused her.

Violence in the home doesn’t always stay in the home – and a similar pattern has begun to emerge in relation to terrorism. People are surprised when I tell them that all four fatal attacks in the UK in 2017 were carried out by men with a history of domestic abuse; they’re even more taken aback when I explain that the same background turns up in relation to terrorist attacks in France, Germany, Spain, Belgium and Australia. That’s because the public thinks about terrorism as ideological, carried out by men who’ve been radicalised by Salafist videos or neo-Nazi propaganda.

The truth, as I’ve discovered while researching the histories of dozens of terrorists, is that many of them began in the same way as mass shooters: abusing their families – and, crucially, becoming desensitised to the effects of violence – behind closed doors.

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Last week, harrowing accounts began to emerge of the final moments of the eight people who died in the terrorist attack on London Bridge and Borough Market in June 2017. Two members of the gang, Rachid Redouane and Youssef Zaghba, are known to have abused female family members – his wife in Redouane’s case, and his elder sister in Zaghba’s. The ringleader, Khuram Butt, had previously tried to leave his pregnant wife to fight for ISIS in Syria, but was prevented from leaving the UK by members of his family. He led the London Bridge attack just weeks after his second child was born, leaving his wife a widow and his children fatherless.

Two weeks later, a right-wing extremist, Darren Osborne, staged a copycat attack, ranting about killing Muslims and driving another rented van into worshippers leaving a mosque in north London. Osborne had shown no interest in politics until a few weeks earlier, when his partner had finally had enough of his abuse (one of his many convictions was for ABH against her) and threw him out of the family home.

So many terrorists are men who have been abusing women for years before they become killers. And it’s not hard to see how domestic abuse lays the groundwork. Few men escalate their behaviour to the extremes of violence, but those that do are accustomed to terrorising women and children – and enjoy the sense of power that goes with it. Don’t forget that some of the ‘foreign fighters’ who turned up in Syria and Iraq to fight for ISIS admitted that they were attracted by the idea of owning ‘sex slaves’, surely the most extreme form of domestic violence it’s possible to imagine.

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Toxic masculinity is creating a pool of men who are susceptible to the propaganda of terrorist organisations – men who are responding positively to messages legitimising the use of lethal force against civilians.

Shocking as all this is, some good might come of it. Terrorism isn’t usually perceived as male violence – with all the connections that implies. But once we understand the link, we’ll have a tool to help us identify dangerous individuals before they launch an attack.

Eighteen months ago, MI5 revealed that it has a list of 3,000 active suspects who might be in the process of preparing a terrorist outrage, along with 20,000 others who have been investigated but aren’t believed to pose an immediate threat. The demand on resources is enormous, given how many agents are needed to watch just one individual. But those with a history of domestic abuse should be the highest priority.

Paradoxically, while toxic masculinity is facilitating terrorist attacks, it could also be one of the biggest warning signs for counter-terrorist agencies. Keeping tabs on it may be a means of saving lives.

Home Grown: How Domestic Violence Turns Men Into Terrorists by Joan Smith is published by riverrun on 16th May, £16.99

In this instance, disaster is not too strong a word for what’s happened to rape investigations. Victims who go to the police are already a tiny proportion of the estimated 510,000 women who experience rape or sexual assault each year, according to the government’s own figures. Now, though, the number of defendants being charged with rape has collapsed to a ten-year low. There was a drop of almost a quarter (23.1%) in 2017/18, with only 2,822 of the 41,186 rapes recorded by the police in England and Wales leading to prosecutions.

Women’s groups believe that much of the blame lies with draconian new rules on disclosure in rape cases, which are actively deterring some victims from cooperating with the police – and, it’s claimed, affecting decisions by the Crown Prosecution Service. Most people who saw the initial alarming headlines are completely unaware of what’s happening, even though it amounts to an unprecedented intrusion into just about every aspect of complainants’ lives.

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Victims (but not defendants) are being asked to sign ‘Stafford’ statements, which give the police blanket permission to get hold of school, college and medical records going back decades. Some forces have even asked for access to notes made in counselling sessions following a rape, raising the prospect of the victim’s most intimate feelings and fears being exposed to the defence and even her alleged attacker. Some victims have apparently been advised to delay seeking counselling, in case it leads to accusations in court that they’ve been ‘coached’.

To be clear, nothing like this happens in other criminal cases. If you were mugged on your way home from work, you would not be asked to release your entire medical records, revealing episodes of depression or an eating disorder when you were a teenager. You wouldn’t have to allow the police access to your school reports, which might show that you once lied to a teacher to get out of a PE lesson. But I’ve heard about a woman who pulled out of a case because she didn’t want the entirely irrelevant fact she’d had an abortion exposed in court. Another couldn’t face being questioned by defence lawyers about her history of anorexia, knowing that it would be used as evidence of her ‘instability’. I’ve even heard of a victim whose school records showed that she once forged her mother’s signature on a note, a long-ago indiscretion that was treated as evidence destroying her credibility as a witness in an adult rape case.

These rules were introduced following a review of rape and serious sexual assault cases ordered by the then attorney-general, Jeremy Wright QC, in January last year. It followed an outcry over the collapse of several widely-publicised rape cases including that of a student, Liam Allan, whose trial was stopped after late disclosure of material to the defence.

The Metropolitan Police later apologised to Allan, saying that the officer in charge had missed key evidence that led to the trial being halted among 57,000 messages on the alleged victim’s mobile phone. In London and elsewhere, the police acknowledge that they are swamped with data from mobile phones and other personal records, increasing the length and complexity of rape investigations.

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The Allan case prompted huge headlines, along with lurid claims that dozens of ‘innocent’ men might be languishing in prison because of disclosure failures in rape cases. But the results of the review ordered by Wright, published in June last year, were nothing like as widely publicised.

After examining 3,637 rape and sexual assault cases, the Crown Prosecution Service found 47 where the case was stopped amid concerns about disclosure – but concluded that none of them would have proceeded to trial even without the review process. In 18 of those cases, the police had felt under pressure to bring charges at an early stage because of fears that the defendant would abscond, commit further offences or interfere with witnesses.

No one wants men to be wrongly charged but the number of cases halted due to disclosure problems amounted to just 1.3% of the total under review. By then, Wright was about to move to a new job as Culture Secretary, and women reporting rapes were experiencing extraordinary levels of intrusion. I’ve even heard of a case where a rape victim was asked to take her mobile phone to a meeting at a police station so that her Facebook account could be accessed by the police and the defence.

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Some complainants find the process unbearable and have said they don’t want to go ahead with a trial. Others, who very much want to see their alleged attackers prosecuted, have been told that their personal data includes material, such as explicit text messages, which has destroyed their credibility as witnesses. Victims’ advocates point out that a text message between friends, written after a few drinks, doesn’t prove consent in a sexual encounter several months later. But the collapse in the number of cases leading to prosecutions suggests that access to such material, even when taken completely out of context, is having dire effects. In September last year, the Guardian claimed that prosecutors in England and Wales had become markedly more risk-averse, alleging that CPS staff had been urged to take “weak cases out of the system”.

Rape cases are hard to prosecute, especially when the complainant and defendant knew each other before the alleged attack. But in an area of the criminal justice system dogged by myths about false accusations, it’s important to point out that the withdrawal of a witness, or indeed an acquittal, doesn’t mean that a complaint was fabricated or malicious. Juries have to be convinced “beyond reasonable doubt”, which is a high bar for convictions, and that happens only in about half of rape trials. The conviction rate is even lower (under a third) in trials involving younger defendants.

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There is no doubt that last year’s moral panic about disclosure has had catastrophic consequences, not least in terms of the credibility of the criminal justice system. The new rules may not even be legal: following a complaint from myself, the Victim’s Commissioner for London and a number of women’s organisations, the Information Commissioner has launched a high-priority investigation into the way victims’ data is being handled.

The ICO is also investigating a separate issue into the practice of taking victims’ mobile phones, which are sometimes being kept for months while every last piece of data – some of it belonging to other people, who haven’t given consent for it to be examined – is extracted from them.

Victims don’t always realise, when they agree to hand over a phone, how long they will be without it. Last year, Dorset police were criticised by the Independent Office for Police Conduct for taking the phone of a stalking victim, Katrina O’Hara, leaving her unable to call 999 when she was attacked and fatally stabbed a few days later by an ex-boyfriend. “It is clear she was left afraid and vulnerable by not being able to contact police immediately,” the IOPC said.

Earlier this month, the Home Secretary, Sajid Javid, tacitly acknowledged the existence of a crisis when he announced a major review of rape investigations. At the same time, the conviction rate among rapes reported to the police is said to have reached a historic low of 1.9%. However you look at it, the criminal justice system isn’t working for rape victims, not least because of a bizarre role reversal in which they find themselves treated with as much, if not more, suspicion as their alleged attackers.

It has to be said at once that the case was lost on a technicality. The judge ruled that outlawing FGM is a matter for individual states, arguing that Congress did not have the authority to pass a 1996 law that prohibited it across the board. The judgment is likely to be appealed but one of its disastrous effects is to make further prosecutions of FGM practitioners extremely difficult at a time when it’s believed that the practice is becoming more widespread. Immigration from countries where FGM is common means that more than half a million women and girls in the US are believed to be at risk, according to the Centers for Disease Control.

Further reading

Why are so many left-wing progressives silent about Islam's totalitarian tendencies?

By Julie Bindel

Ominously, the failed prosecution has energised defenders of FGM, who claimed in court and TV interviews that all that was done to nine child victims was “female circumcision” or a “ritual nick”. The medic who carried out the procedure, Dr Jumana Nagarwala, belongs to a small Shia Muslim sect, the Dawoodi Bohra, some of whose members have their daughters cut in defiance of the longstanding (and previously unchallenged) federal ban in the US. Her lawyer claimed that she had merely carried out a protected religious procedure that didn’t involve removing the clitoris or labia, unlike the most extreme form of FGM.

In reality, FGM is much more a cultural than a religious practice, originating in Africa where it is still carried out in many countries. And while it is bad enough to hear people defending any species of unnecessary surgical procedure on girls’ bodies, doctors who examined the child victims found plenty of evidence of harm; they discovered scar tissue and lacerations to the girls’ genitalia, while one victim said she was in so much pain she could hardly walk.

Some of the girls cried and screamed during the procedure and one was given Valium ground into liquid Tylenol to keep her calm, according to court records. Two of the victims were just seven years old when Dr Nagarwala performed these procedures on them, using a private clinic in Detroit owned by another doctor who also faced charges.

FGM is controversial even among members of this sect, which originated in western India, and some actively oppose it. They are worried by the outcome of the Detroit trial, believing that it sends a dangerous message to countries where huge numbers of girls are still being mutilated. “Unfortunately this is going to embolden those who believe that this must be continued… they’ll feel that this is permission, that it’s OK to do this,” said Mariya Taher, who was herself a child victim of the same type of FGM.

In western and developing countries alike, some of the most effective campaigners against FGM come from communities where it is still practised, often women who were forced to undergo the procedure themselves when they were children. Many of them are justifiably angry about something that was done to them without their consent, with potentially catastrophic consequences for their sex lives and ability to give birth safely. In some good news, the British government has committed to spend £50 million on grassroots programmes to stop FGM across Africa by 2030.

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Yet if the failed prosecution has achieved nothing else, it has at least focused public attention on a practice that happens in conditions of great secrecy in western countries and is notoriously difficult to prosecute. In the UK, where an estimated 137,000 women and girls have been subjected to FGM, there has not yet been a single successful prosecution.

The police say it is carried out behind closed doors, with parents and practitioners taking care to leave no evidential trail, and children are often too frightened to testify at trials that might send their mother or father to prison for up to seven years. But mandatory reporting by health professionals is gradually uncovering the extent of the practice in the UK, with more than 6,000 cases being recorded by midwives and obstetricians between April 2017 and March 2018. These are adult women who may have been cut abroad, when they were children, although it may be an indicator that their own female children are at risk of FGM in this country.

More than 200 million girls and women have been cut in 30 countries in Africa, Asia and the Middle East, according to the World Health Organisation. In countries such as Sierra Leone, where FGM is still legal, almost 90% of the female population aged between 15 and 49 has been cut, causing a huge range of health problems and high rates of maternal mortality.

Cultural pressure is relentless and hard to resist, according to a recent report by the Thomson Reuters Foundation, which noted that girls in Sierra Leone who try to avoid FGM are accused of being unclean, promiscuous or carrying disease. Even in countries such as Egypt, where FGM was outlawed in 2008, the practice continues and is often carried out in insanitary conditions by older women with no medical knowledge. There have been horrific cases of girls and even babies bleeding to death after being cut with knives or razor blades.

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Changing the law is an essential step in protecting women and girls but changing ideas is just as important. It is a shocking fact that some western liberals used to defend FGM as ‘part of their culture’ without looking too closely at who ‘they’ were – namely the cutters who made money from it, and the men who wanted ‘pure’ wives who found sex too painful to have extra-marital relationships.

It is only two decades since the feminist writer Germaine Greer argued in one of her books, the whole woman, that banning FGM was “an attack on cultural identity”, rightly drawing a rebuke from MPs on the international development select committee. In an unintentional illustration of how important language is in these matters, Greer also made the wildly insensitive observation that “one man’s beautification is another man’s mutilation”. She has long been regarded as a maverick but it is worth remembering that cultural relativism, while widely and rightly discredited, has never completely gone away.

That is why the outcome of the American court case has the potential to be so damaging. The judge was clear that his decision didn’t amount to an endorsement of FGM but that won’t be the headline in parts of Africa and Asia where generations of cutters are determined to keep the practice going. Hearing it sanitised as just a ‘nick’ in an American courtroom is deeply alarming, and needs to be challenged in every available forum.

FGM is misogyny in its bleakest form, denying girls control of their own bodies and threatening their lives in the most extreme cases. It is a gross abuse of human rights, wherever it happens, and western countries have a duty to make sure that both their laws and language lead by example.