Can Gay Rights Help Save the Tories?

The debate over sex-based rights may allow Conservatives like Kemi Badenoch to refresh their traditional concern for the family by championing feminism and gay rights. It might be a winning formula.

This is a longer version of an article that appeared in edited form in Spiked Online.

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Fortune favours the bold.

I reminded myself of this as Kemi Badenoch passed the LGB Alliance stand at the Conservative Party conference earlier this month. She was surrounded by journalists, TV crews, handlers, and fans and so could barely see the stand. Which is why I shouted rather plaintively at first…. ‘Kemi!’ No response.

I raised the volume until I sounded as if I was dangling by my fingerstips from a ledge and needed rescue. She turned and the rest is…an opportunity for my shameless self-promotion. Cue a succession of jealous messages from leftie lesbians and gay men old enough to have stopped being fanboys and fangirls long ago. This intense identification with Badenoch by many who do not think of themselves as natural Conservatives represents more than a passing outburst of niche popularity.

If you’re looking for a way to judge the ideological coherence of the candidates to be the next Conservative leader then forget their stance on Ukraine, boats full of suspiciously mature looking Afghan “boys” or the soaring national debt.

It’s gay rights or its mongrel offspring LGBT+ rights that provide a litmus test of how hard the candidates have thought about the challenges facing the Conservatives and how much their party needs to learn from the way it exercised power in the recent past. Or failed to.

It might seem absurd to suggest LGBT+ “rights” can be a window into the candidates’ wider world view. There are, after all, only 748,000 lesbians and gay men in England and Wales, while there are an estimated 4.8 million golfers and 2.2 million anglers and no one keeps banging on about them the whole time. On the other hand organisations that represent golfers or anglers don’t tend to get people fired for refusing to use neo-pronouns or faint in mock-horror when someone refers to pregnant mothers instead of uterus-havers. Nor are they trying to subvert some of the most fundamental values of our society such as the rights of parents. That’ll be the LGBT+ lot.

Only one candidate has a track record of standing up to this most entitled of lobby groups. And it’s taken guts on her part. Even meeting LGB Alliance caused her grief.

Search for Kemi Badenoch on the website of the favourite news service of spiky-haired non-binary they/thems and drag queens, Pink News and it offers no less than 264 stories, each one more negative than the last. She has been relentlessly pilloried and defamed by all manner of LGBT+ activists and even told to shut up by David Tennant who appears to think he really is a Time Lord as opposed to just another idiot actor.

Yet here’s the thing. Badenoch didn’t back down. Instead she had the intellectual confidence to treat with contempt the claim from one of Parliament’s most pretentious poltroons, the gay MP Chris Bryant (now Sir Chris Bryant don’t you know) when he claimed she made him feel unsafe. Her crime? Speaking up against the medicalisation of vulnerable, often gay, teens with puberty blocking drugs.

There was something of Margaret Thatcher’s chutzpah in Badenoch’s refusal to be lectured by Bryant. Just as Thatcher believed she was a better defender of working people’s interests than Far Left activists who claimed to speak on their behalf, so Badenoch believed, rightly in my opinion, she was a better defender of young lesbians or gay boys than were lazy blowhards like Bryant.

This confidence may have come from her refusal to accept unquestioningly the conventional wisdom of her Party establishment or a civil service captured by the LGBT+ lobby.

I witnessed this critical thinking for myself when, out of the blue, I received an email from Badenoch in 2021. I’d never spoken to her before. At the time she was the Equalities Minister and in her email she said she wanted to thank me for posting a thread on Twitter that dissected research funded by her own Department.

To say this research was garbage is to be unnecessarily polite. Academics at Coventry University had been paid a considerable sum of taxpayer’s money to study the prevalence and impact of so-called conversion therapy. In their press release the team waxed lyrical on how damaging and widespread were attempts to convert people’s sexual orientation or gender identity. You’d hardly have guessed, as I pointed out in my thread, that the team had managed to interview only 30 people, a third of whom reported that the attempts to “convert” them had been a relatively positive experience. Whoops.

Badenoch’s department said it intended to use this research to shape policy on the alleged conversion therapy of trans people. Guess how many trans people the researchers had interviewed though? A grand total of six, of whom only three said they had actually experienced so-called conversion therapy. How on earth could national policy be shaped by such pathetically inadequate research? The Coventry study has disappeared from view and is now generally treated with the contempt it deserved.

This small example is revealing because any party in government that wants to get things done on behalf of the British people cannot afford to be pushed about by lobbies that have more loose screws than a B&Q. And no lobby is more unhinged than the LGBT+ one which actively undermines women’s sex-based rights and children’s mental health by insisting they can be born in the wrong body.

Yet its tentacles stretch deep into our institutions from schools and hospitals to the civil service which appears to operate a revolving door that circulates activists from LGBT+ groups across departments where they advance demands they were making as lobbyists the day before. This should matter to Conservatives; not least because it all happened on their watch.

It began when David Cameron announced in 2011 he was supporting gay marriage. It wasn’t that there was anything wrong with the idea of gay marriage in itself. The problem was he was so very obviously desperate to use the policy to signal the rebranding of the Conservatives as progressive. And ever so metropolitan modern. To do that he actively sought the public approval of groups like Stonewall. This unwittingly handed them something close to a veto over future Tory policy.

From now on if ever the Conservatives failed to read from the Stonewall script they could be denounced. This arrangement became more perilous when Stonewall did some rebranding of its own and from 2015 prioritised trans rights rather than gay rights.

It was this that would lead directly to the scandal of an ostensibly Conservative Prime Minister, Theresa May, championing the LGBT+ lobby’s signature policy of Gender Self-ID, which allows rapists to bed down in women’s prison cells and predatory men to perform their own interpretation of the dance of the seven veils in girls’ changing rooms.

The Conservatives can at least take comfort they eventually came to their senses and rejected Gender Self-ID. They also recognised, despite the howls of the LGBT+ lobby, there was a mounting medical scandal at the Tavistock clinic and commissioned the Cass Review to investigate it. In both cases Badenoch was at the forefront of defending these moves. Jenrick was nowhere to be seen.

From the dangerous influence of Stonewall to the medicalisation of vulnerable children with puberty blockers Kemi Badenoch has been unafraid to lead. Against the endless platitudes of Keir Starmer and the growing sense he is in hock to lobbyists her courage and independence of mind offers the Conservative Party and the public a bold alternative. As a gay man I hope they choose her.