Rosie Duffield: ‘Starmer is how he appears on TV – astonished that anyone dares question him’! B
She resigned from Labour with a stinging attack on the PM, but the now-independent MP says Sir Keir’s boy’s club rules through fear
It’s only been a week since Rosie Duffield resigned the Labour whip and wrote THAT letter to Keir Starmer. In it, she criticised his “managerial and technocratic approach” as well as his “lack of basic politics and political instincts”.
She pulled no punches. “The sleaze, nepotism and apparent avarice are off the scale,” she wrote.
The last few days have been spent steadying her team and dealing with the reaction. There have been thousands of emails, “about 4,000 and about 95 per cent have been supportive”. This Canterbury MP – the first Labour MP in that constituency since its formation in 1918 and until recently Kent’s only Labour MP – will now sit as an independent MP.
It is no secret that Duffield has been unhappy in the party for some time and has become increasingly isolated within it, yet the resignation and the real fury of her letter is a blow to Labour. However, it was spun.
The resignation of Starmer’s chief of staff Sue Gray on top of Duffield’s resignation cannot help add to the impression of a dysfunctional “boy’s club” at the top of the Labour Party. Duffield is clearly exasperated, saying: “This is not a huge surprise. It appears ‘the lads’ have won this battle and pushed her out.”
Indeed, I had heard much talk about “the lads” at the Labour conference. Some said senior male advisors felt threatened by Gray so leaked her salary and seeing how she was treated had put other women off applying for jobs.
Her ousting and the consolidation of power by Morgan McSweeney, Gray’s replacement, vindicates much of what Duffield has been complaining about, which she describes as “the cliques and jobs for the boys’ culture around Keir”. It’s also troubling to hear how intertwined all these people are – Gray’s son Liam Conlon is a Labour MP who has taken money and tickets from Lord Alli.
McSweeny’s wife Imogen Walker is a Labour MP who has been given money from Labour Together, an organisation that he used to run.
But Duffield has long been outside such a circle and has now removed herself completely. She is warm and relaxed when we meet in central London, though has obviously been under huge pressure.
Her butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-my-mouth exterior makes her look younger than her 53 years, and it belies a core of steel, a passionate commitment to her beliefs and a wealth of experience that many underestimate.
The more we talk, the more I realise just how difficult it has been for her. In one way it’s a mystery that she stayed as long as she did. Every single other party has made overtures to her over the years. “Jo Swinson asked me to jump over. The Tories always joke about it, but they know I’m not Tory at all. I couldn’t possibly be in a party that instigated or wanted to instigate the Rwandan policy. How could I? They were the architects of the two-child benefit cap. No chance.”
Those on the left who believe any woman who questions trans activism must be a far-Right loony will also be disappointed. Duffield is in fact soft Left and about as far from Reform as you can imagine, and regularly speaks up about the plight of refugees.
Her values, one would have thought, aligned with Labour. She is a former teaching assistant, a single parent who has lived on tax credits and a stalwart advocate of women’s rights. In 2019 she made a widely praised speech during a debate on the Domestic Abuse Bill, where she revealed her own experience of “coercive control”.
She spoke movingly of her own experience. “Abuse isn’t only about those noticeable physical signs. Abuse is very often all about control and power,” she said, describing a relationship that she had reignited in 2017. She talked about being scared to go home.
She has also made speeches about birth trauma, the mental health crisis in children, the homeless, those with disabilities, and some of the most vulnerable groups in society. Inside Labour however she became persona non grata for her gender-critical views – including biology is real, women must have single-sex spaces and that medicalising children is dangerous. And many of us in the real world were glad that someone had the guts to stand up to the “grow your own cervix” crowd.
The result of her speaking up however has been several death threats, to a point where Duffield could not attend her own hustings, and had to spend £2000 on security while campaigning. Labour peer Michael Cashman, in a now-deleted tweet, was hardly sympathetic: “She should do the decent thing and stand down if she won’t face constituents.” He then called her “Frit. Or lazy”. In June a man was sentenced to prison for threatening to kill her “with a big gun”.
Where you might expect she would find support from within the party, she says there was none. Instead, she had to contend with not-so-subtle hints that she could not stand again, in a seat she won in 2019 with an increased majority.
“Dirty tricks were going on because certain boys wanted seats. A particular favoured son was circling mine for a long time. Certain women were being offered places in the Lords. Overtures were made. I didn’t want that. The person hovering around was offered a seat in the North, where they had no connection, so then one of “the Matthews” (that’s what I call these lads who brief against me) said I owed hundreds of pounds for the Party Levy and if I didn’t pay I could not be a Labour candidate.”
This accusation turned out to be false. It’s hard not to empathise with Duffield’s anger at having survived the 2019 election only to watch relatives and friends of MPs and spin doctors get seats and promotions. “Some are fresh out of uni and senior backbenchers are now deemed irrelevant despite our experience. You are being told you are worthless.”
She clung on despite this war with the party machinery. “I needed to see things get better immediately. We needed to see that we were going to reverse all of the austerity we’d been shouting about for 10 years. And very quickly it was obvious the direction things were going on day one. I was getting to the stage where I was going in feeling sick. I didn’t know what Rachel Reeves was going to say.”
The freebies – the free clothes, spectacles and tickets arranged for the Prime Minister, his wife, Angela Rayner and Rachel Reeves from Waheed Alli – pushed her over the edge.
“Nothing can justify it. I can’t pretend to myself that it is ok. Some MPs are obviously having to pretend this to themselves. So when people say I only gave it a 100 days, it was 100 days plus seven years. And for the last four years I have been shunned, cancelled, ghosted and gaslit.”
Her refusal to pretend and her lack of interest in fitting in with the party establishment are a telling insight into Duffield’s character. It comes as no surprise to learn that she left school at 16. Her father worked hard to send her to a small private school, but quickly it all went wrong. Her mother didn’t work due to illness.
“I was put up a year at school because I could read and write very early, and my little peers mostly couldn’t. But when I was moved I was terrified of those older children. I just stopped working.” Things did not improve for her at secondary school, where she felt overwhelmed and disorganised. “I tell everyone I left at 16 but really it was 15 I just stopped going.”
Following a recent diagnosis of ADD in her family she decided to get tested too, and found she fitted this pattern. She tells me this only in passing: “I know every other bugger has got it. I don’t want to be self-indulgent.”
You can’t help but feel that her earlier life would have been different if such things had been understood. She is whip smart but isn’t always going to straightforwardly conform. She would clearly much rather be doing constituency work with people than sitting in the Westminster chamber for six hours to make a three minute speech.
When she speaks passionately about her constituency it makes you realise just how isolated she was from the party. One of “the lads” was shocked that her constituency “has a beach and villages and is rural”. Starmer never once visited her, even though she was the only Labour MP in Kent.
When she talks about the injustice of the winter fuel payments she does so with real insight, outlining how it will affect those with cancer or just on the cusp of getting extra help. Maybe, she says, richer pensioners will spend their money on meals which will benefit the local economy.
This understanding of how ordinary people actually live is her political gift, but it is no wonder that she is at loggerheads with those playing power games all around her. She decides what she thinks and does something about it.
Having watched the gender debate for some time from the side, she chose to go to the front. “How many flak jackets do I put on? How much armour do I need?” she says. Often, she sounds very disappointed at the lack of others to back her up. “There was just silence”.
She had survived the rows about anti-Semitism having witnessed Starmer say nothing. And she had survived apologising for breaking Covid rules. At the time, she was about to move in with her partner James Routh, a TV director.
“About three days before he moved in with me, we went for a walk together. I hadn’t seen a single soul in person for three months. I was isolating from my own family during big family occasions and birthdays and my own children’s birthdays. We had access to tests as he was working on a documentary. When the story came out I apologised.”
And today she feels that despite having won three elections in Canterbury, nothing positive was ever attributed to her, and that she would never be offered a job in any of her areas of expertise. Instead she was held up as an example of what might happen if any other female MPs raise their heads above the parapet.
Doubtless she feels a huge sense of betrayal from the number of MPs whom she knows agree with her but are hankering after front bench jobs. “I was told there are around 30 gender critical women on the Labour benches. They haven’t as much as said hello”. No one has got in touch with her since the resignation. It is as if she is contaminated.
“Everyone is frightened. There is a huge atmosphere of fear. And control. I’ve never known such control. There is deep-seated misogyny.
“The lads in control used to have clipboards, now they are just on their phones all the time.” Surely though, on the gender issue for which she was ostracised, the Cass report and the fact that Wes Streeting is following its recommendations is a game changer? “Wes is wise. He has very strong political instincts”.
But she feels that a gesture – perhaps being offered a role in women’s health or a committee – would have signalled it was OK to hold her views within the Labour Party. “Being left on the back bench was a very clear message to me and many of the women I represent that the boys had won the argument.”
Although over the years, Starmer often claimed to be having conversations with her, this was simply not the case. She finally begged for a meeting just before the election. In the end she got 20 minutes with him. “It was utterly pointless. He just looks like he does on television, utterly bewildered by being challenged, and affronted as well. He is astonished that anyone dares to question him. Friends in the legal profession will say to me, that’s his barrister head, because if you question a barrister, they believe you’re questioning their knowledge of the law and their absolute expertise on their subject. I was questioning him about the two-child benefit cap, and how it looked, and he just seemed baffled.
“He is a politician who has no political talent. I did mention the gender stuff and that I had never had an apology, I said he never talked to the backbench which is the direct line to constituents.
“The thing he said that really got to me was when he said: ‘I’ve wasted the last nine years. Rosie, you’ve wasted the last seven.’ And I took a minute, what do you mean? And then I said, Keir, I’ve helped over 60,000 constituents. It’s all recorded. I’ve done so much casework. How can you call that a waste of time? He said: ‘Well, I haven’t been in power.’”
Duffield ends by telling me that she likens her time in the Labour Party to an abusive relationship. “It was my party, and they have been consistently unpleasant as a group. They’ve been as unpleasant to be around as my abusive partner and that’s not something I’d say lightly. I will feel that sense of relief and freedom that I did when I left that relationship, but it hasn’t sunk in. So I can’t just go ‘I’m free’ just yet.”
Hopefully this strong, independent woman will be able to do exactly that in time.
