The joke nobody wanted, least of all as told by you, Prime Minister
Another bleak chapter in the narrative of contemporary British politics unfolded this week at Prime Minister’s Questions as Rishi Sunak made a crass and callous joke at the expense of the transgender community.
Adding to Sunak's problem, however, was the presence of Esther Ghey in the gallery in the same session. Esther is the mother of Brianna Ghey, a teenager whose tragic murder was partly attributed to her transgender identity.
Sunak’s ‘joke’ was controversial.
However -
It was no more or less controversial than any of the previous number of times the Conservatives have weaponised the so-called ‘Trans debate’ to further their own contemptible culture war agenda.
The disparity lay in the timing of Sunak’s delivery and the context and audience to whom the joke was presented, with many [rightly] perceiving it as inappropriate. One would argue that there may never be an appropriate time to make it, and that the joke should serve as a timely reminder to any Conservative that the punchline of their jokes and culture war rhetoric can sometimes involve real human beings.
A much broader problem with this modern incarnation of the Conservatives, however, is that they have been continuing on this path and picking on the LGBTQ+ community for some considerable time now.
You may remember the time, for example, when Boris Johnson - as part of his ‘Operation Save Big Dog’ campaign to revitalise the Conservatives’ standing in the polls - tried to weaponise the issue over gender identification in 2022 when he told an audience:
“Good evening ladies and gentlemen, or as Keir Starmer would put it, people who are assigned female or male at birth.”
This came shortly before Conservative MP for Bridgend Jamie Wallis - who was in the audience for Johnson’s speech - came out as Britain's first openly transgender MP.
You may remember also when Liz Truss made the issue a primary focus during her leadership campaign, laying down the gauntlet for other would-be contenders and turning the various hustings events into transphobic spectacles featuring quotes such as:
“I'm a plain-talking Yorkshire woman, and I know that a woman is a woman.”
The Gender Recognition Act 2004, Section 9 (i) states, meanwhile:
“Where a full gender recognition certificate is issued to a person, the person’s gender becomes for all purposes the acquired gender (so that, if the acquired gender is the male gender, the person’s sex becomes that of a man and, if it is the female gender, the person’s sex becomes that of a woman).”
Truss was either ignorant to laws over gender identification, or performatively so for the purposes of “pandering to bigots” - according to her own fellow Conservative MPs. Truss’ snidey asides directed at the Trans community would continue throughout her leadership campaign.
In the same timeframe, Sunak was also keen to weigh into the debate; focus was placed on his intention to ‘protect women's rights from gender-neutral language' which, according to Sunak, 'erases women' or his intention to ‘protect the words man, woman and mother.’
When Sunak eventually went on to become Prime Minister, his rhetoric continued - not least with the appointment of former Deputy Chair Lee Anderson who himself said that the next election should be fought on culture wars and ‘the Trans debate’.
Sunak himself has made numerous comments about gender recognition previously.
A leaked recording from a meeting with the 1922 Committee in 2023, when Sunak was mocking Liberal Democrats leader Ed Davey, revealed Sunak as saying:
“Like me, you can probably see that [Davey] was trying to convince everybody that women clearly had penises. You’ll all know that I’m a big fan of everybody studying maths to 18, but it turns out that we need to focus on biology.”
During his speech to the Conservative Party conference in October, Sunak weighed into the gender debate again and elicited a large cheer from the audience by suggesting people “shouldn’t get bullied into believing that people can be any sex they want to be… They can’t – a man is a man and a woman is a woman, that’s common sense.”
Sunak posted an entirely unprompted message later in December by reiterating the same point on his own Facebook account:
All of the above is by no means an exhaustive compendium on when the Conservatives have weighed in on the so-called ‘Trans debate’. In the case of Sunak, Truss and Johnson, it’s merely indicative that the fish always rots from the top
The point is, however, that Sunak, Truss and Johnson feel so comfortable making them because they are normalised within the ecosystem of the Conservative Party language and rhetoric.
The whole purpose of this is that by targeting the LGBTQ+ community and venturing into the ‘Trans debate’ is a) an extension of their own underlying bigotry and punching down on minorities, yes, but also b) for the purposes of finding dividing lines on policy that differ from Labour, and to also distract from government failure on any number of more salient issues - from the cost-of-living, the NHS, immigration, the environment. To name a few.
In that sense, the distraction [with this crass joke] has worked; this article is focussed on it presently.
However -
The attempts at misdirection in this case appear to have back-fired tremendously; to the extent that there are serious calls for Sunak to resign over the matter and the impact it may have on his already beleagured chances of future election.
Conservative MPs themselves have rightly spoken out against Sunak - including outgoing MP Dehenna Davison, who, alongside others, has condemned Sunak’s joke. And rightly so.
Other MPs have been caught in a bind, however.
Chancellor Jeremy Hunt denied that Sunak made the joke and that his comments had been: “taken out of context.”
Crime, Policing and Fire Minister Chris Philp actually referred to Brianna Ghey as male, and was asked across several different interviews if he felt that Sunak’s joke at the despatch box was "respectful" or "appropriate" - before deflecting to the opposition and refusing to give an answer.
Chief Secretary to the Treasury Laura Trott did one worse by completely misrepresenting the words of Esther Ghey and suggesting that the tragic murder of her daughter had nothing to do with transgender issues, even if Esther Ghey said to the contrary [a “contributing factor”], as did Mrs. Justice Yip who delivered the verdict in the trial of Brianna Ghey’s murderers and said, quite specifically, that:
“...a secondary motive was hostility towards Brianna because of her transgender identity.”
Then, among this increasingly emotive debate, Kemi Badenoch characteristically weighed in by accusing the opposition of ‘trivialising’ and “point-scoring” over the tragedy, and then proclaiming to have “done all I can to ensure we have take the heat out of the debate on LGBT issues.”
And yet -
No minister perhaps more culpable for weaponsing the debate is leadership hopeful Kemi Badenoch, whose attempts to bait and goad liberals and the ‘Left’ into entering the debate have been extensive.
This is due primarily to the fact that her views on matters relating to race and gender are mostly in-tune with the views of what the more vociferous and fundamentally right-wing members of the Conservatives think.
And -
She is unafraid - perhaps detrimentally so, in often as abrasive a manner as possible - to state them, to the delight of Conservative members, and with absolute relish; be it over matters relating to a ban on conversion therapy [delays in implementation that Badenoch blames on the transgender community], dropping trans-inclusive workplace policies, or restricting gender recognition.
This, ultimately, provides the reason behind why Sunak himself is in a bind, and it revolves around the political question over who Sunak would be trying to appeal to with jokes like this.
If Sunak issued an apology - as he rightly should - at the request of Brianna Ghey’s father no less, it would, in context of his own previous attacks on the Trans community, seem trite and hollow. Questions would be asked over his sincerity at this stage when he appeared to mean it all those many times before.
Furthermore, however, if Sunak issued an apology, it would directly contradict the same language and approach that has been used by the Conservatives over the last several years who have decided to weaponise the issue.
Why this is important to remember for Sunak is that the same people who have invested significant political capital in the culture wars issues [such as the ‘the Trans debate’] are the same people who have been at Sunak’s throat over the last 17 months over immigration, tax, growth [etc].
Deviating too far from the script at this point and apologising would undermine the narrative for why he told the joke in the first place.
To do this would be politically inexpedient when the debate over Trans issues in the Conservatives - almost exclusively so - is so ‘heated’, so emotive, but also, in some ways, seemingly a determining factor in who the party's members support.
It’s no coincidence, for example, that fellow ardent culture warrior Kemi Badenoch remains top of Conservative Home’s monthly ‘Cabinet League Table’.
The other reason that Sunak will find it hard to emerge from this controversy unscathed is because when he told the joke, it was ill-conceived as part of some pre-written script.
There was ample opportunity Sunak had to edit this script, write annotations, decide what would be both appropriate and inappropriate, good or bad, and so for a man who apparently prides himself on his fastidious grasp of [“spreadsheet”] detail, the suggestion that he was bamboozled by his own comms and was unaware of how controversial the comments may be, somehow seems ridiculous.
It is, on the contrary, exemplary, in a very small, though nonetheless significantly damaging way, of his own managerial incompetence.
In any case -
The challenge for Sunak and the Conservatives broadly on matters such as these, and as sensitive as they are, is that when you have a party that has become so self-indulged and entrenched in the scent of its own guttural, culture war bile, sometimes the focus on real people, and real human beings, who have suffered so much, gets lost; the notion of apology and contrition, and of basic human empathy and decency, seemingly absent and a sign of weakness or an alien concept.
Indeed, as of today [Friday], Sunak has yet to apologise. This page expects that he will never apologise for all of the reasons laid out above.
Beyond this, it’s questionable, sadly, how much difference any of this will make or if it’ll have any material effect on the language of discourse in politics.
Many disengaged by the state of modern politics, in part due to comments like those made by Sunak, will likely just add it to their rap sheet of things they already dislike about this current, modern and obscene variant of the Conservative Party. One hopes against hope, however, that the majority of decent-minded people will be as disgusted by his so-called ‘joke’ as I was.