Prime Minister Boris Johnson is up against the ropes. “Partygate” has been the last straw for many Conservative MPs, and the PM has realised it is time for him to take measures in the hope of avoiding a confidence vote as the 1922 Committee letters mount up towards the critical trigger of 54 submissions.
The PM seems to have realised – though let’s watch this space – that, if he is to have any chance of winning back the confidence of the Parliamentary Party, the Party membership, and the Conservative-voting electorate, then the dysfunctional and chaotic behaviour has to stop, and the woke agenda must be replaced with a more traditionally conservative one.
This would be the best time imaginable for the PM to cancel the “Safe To Be Me” (STBM) international LGBT conference scheduled to begin at the end of June this year.
This event, organised in collaboration with the UK’s notorious gender lobby outfit, Stonewall UK, and overseen by the PM’s Special Envoy on LGBT Rights, Lord Herbert, is precisely the kind of unhelpful spectacle that is alienating not only Conservative MPs who oppose the woke agenda, but also swathes of the voting public who are sick and tired of the increasingly totalitarian influence of gender ideology and identity politics in British society.
No self-respecting gay or lesbian person who has any idea of what is going on with gender ideology colonisation can any longer support Stonewall UK or any conference where they and the UK Government promote gender identity politics.
The key supporters of Stonewall UK in the PM’s entourage were, reportedly, his wife, Carrie Johnson, and her good friend, Henry Newman.
Mr Newman was a senior special adviser to the PM, apparently with privileged access, until he was recently transferred back to Michael Gove’s office in the Downing Street shake-up. Mr Newman is a key figure in the preparations for the “Safe To Be Me” conference.
The Spad exodus includes advisers who have left of their own volition, and those who have apparently not. Unfortunately, two of those who decided to leave – Munira Mirza and Elena Narozanski – were powerful critics of gender ideology in the PM’s Office, and their loss is a matter of concern and regret.
The departure of Stonewall supporter Henry Newman, however, could potentially result in a change of culture at Number 10 with regard to gender ideology promotion and appeasement. According to the Telegraph, Mr Newman was described by Mrs Johnson as one of her “favourite people”. His promotion had come in the wake of a power struggle at Number 10 that had resulted in the departure of senior aides Dominic Cummings and Lee Cain.
Last November, the Telegraph ran a headline of “Boris Johnson warned of ‘ludicrous contradiction’ in his approach to Stonewall ahead of conference” and reported that Mr Johnson had “faced calls to drop the charity Stonewall UK as a partner to the ‘Safe To Be Me’ conference”, given that a number of Whitehall departments had cut their links with Stonewall “amid concerns over its stance on transgender issues and value for money”.
The article went on to suggest, from a Government source, that the Government’s accommodating attitude towards Stonewall was being driven by “a small group of advisers in Number 10”. The Telegraph reported specifically an allegation of “mounting tensions between senior aide Henry Newman and Munira Mirza, the director of the Number 10 Policy Unit, over Stonewall and the Government’s wider policy stance.”
Lord Herbert, who is heading the “Safe To Be Me” conference, is, according to the Telegraph, “said to have Mr Newman’s backing”. Lord Herbert has expressed his opposition to Government departments pulling out of Stonewall and has described ministerial opposition to Stonewall as stoking a “culture war”.
A second Government source was reported by the Telegraph as saying: “(We) are hosting something with people who are going against Government policy, which would not happen anywhere else. Number 10 needs to fix this.”
The Telegraph source had spoken disparagingly about the Government partnering with Stonewall in hosting this major international LGBT conference “at the same time as every major institution with an ounce of credibility is disaffiliating from Stonewall”.
But the PM is now hanging on to his job by his fingertips. It is just possible that he may no longer be willing to play the role of the weak, inadequate, and clueless adult who always caves in when his spoilt, self-indulgent kids throw their LGBT+ tantrums.
As Jo Bartosch recently reported in LGN, some gender lobby organisations have declared that they will boycott the conference in protest against the position taken by the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) in its recent statements on self-identification and conversion therapy.
Jo wrote: “It is the EHRC’s job to look at facts; their intervention has been like the return of adults to the room.” Children who resent the constraints of adult supervision may throw a tantrum and refuse to eat their greens when they don’t get their way. But the PM is now hanging on to his job by his fingertips. It is just possible that he may no longer be willing to play the role of the weak, inadequate, and clueless adult who always caves in when his spoilt, self-indulgent kids throw their LGBT+ tantrums.
If the PM goes ahead with this conference, it will simply make his position even more vulnerable and will further damage confidence in his leadership among the Conservative Party grassroots and potential voters. Cancelling the conference would send a powerful and positive signal that “woke business as usual” is no longer happening.
There is a small minority of people who describe themselves as Conservatives and who buy into – or claim to buy into – the absurd doctrines of LGBT+ gender ideology. This all started with some gay Conservative Party members whose craving to be liked and accepted by the rabidly anti-Conservative “LGBT+ community” led to the uncritical adoption and promotion of an ideology that is hugely antagonistic to conservative values. This is the Trojan horse via which anti-conservative gender ideology has been able to smuggle itself into senior ranks of the Conservative Party.
The unspoken motto of the Gay Conservatives Who Want To Be Loved By The Conservative-Hating LGBT+ Community: “Please don’t hate me for being a Conservative. I will promote at the top of my voice your sacred LGBT+ ideology. Please accept me into your club. Please don’t marginalise or cancel me.”
In my experience, as a gay man and a Conservative Party member, the vast majority of people who identify with LGBT+ ideology hate the Conservative Party. Mr Johnson, they are not a section of your electorate or potential electorate. They are neither your friends nor the Conservative Party’s friends, and they never will be.
Why is the Prime Minister appeasing the LGBT+ lobby and its allies – a group of people of whom the vast majority will never vote Conservative, and who actually hate him and hate the Party he represents? Does he seriously believe he will win these people over with a conference that a section of the gender activists are actively boycotting?
No matter what the PM does to appease the gender lobby constituency, his efforts will always be portrayed in their media and their organisations through a prism of negativity and misrepresentation.
Even if he caved in to every one of their crazy demands, they would still keep carping on about past times when the evil Conservative Party didn’t give them what they wanted. Continuing to appease the LGBT+ gender lobby extremists is a no-win scenario for the Prime Minister, for the Conservative Party, and for the country.
At the same time, by going to such lengths to appease the viciously anti-conservative LGBT+ lobby, the PM is alienating and angering loyal Conservative voters and members who have had enough of the harm being caused by Stonewall and its aggressive promotion of gender ideology.
Scrapping the conference would have the added benefit of taking pressure off the Conversion Therapy Bill, which is currently a rush-job aiming to provide results to announce in time for the June “Safe To Be Me” conference…
Furthermore, appeasing and promoting the LGBT+ lobby means actively harming the lesbian and gay community, who are now once again fighting for our right to be same-sex oriented, to only date partners of the same sex, and to organise and meet separately, according to our minority characteristic, without persecution and vilification.
The Conservatives’ Section 28 seriously harmed the lesbian and gay community to which I belong, and the Prime Minister’s appeasement of gender ideology is now doing us serious harm once again. In my view, the harm being caused to us this time is far, far worse than Section 28 – which I lived through.
Scrapping the conference would have the added benefit of taking pressure off the Conversion Therapy Bill, which is currently a rush-job aiming to provide results to announce in time for the June STBM conference, and which could then be accorded the time for thorough pre-legislative scrutiny that this potentially catastrophic bill – yet another Stonewall gender lobby project – urgently needs.
It is unlikely that the two men recently executed by the Islamic Republic of Iran for the crime of homosexuality were ever aware that the UK was planning to host a “global equality conference for LGBT rights” this year.
According to reports by the Jerusalem Post and the Human Rights Network in Iran, Mehrdad Karimpour and Farid Mohammadi were hanged for the crime of homosexuality on Sunday 30 January: an appalling development, which was reported by LGN.
The killing of these two men for gay sex is surely exactly what any international LGBT “Safe To Be Me” campaign should be all about. Despite this, there has not been a peep of protest from the Government in response to these reported executions. Not even the PM’s special envoy on LGBT rights – Lord Herbert – seems to have voiced any public protest, or expressed any public opinion on it, and my invitation to him via social media to do so was fruitless.
For me, the current Government’s silence in response to developments like the Iranian judicial state murders of men for homosexuality is a signal of just how shallow its commitment to the global rights of lesbian and gay people really is these days. The Parliamentary Conservative leadership got much better on the topic of gay rights over the years since Section 28; but then the Government became increasingly captured by homophobic gender ideology, where the rights of lesbian and gay people, of women, and of children, were not just consigned to the bottom of the heap: they were thrown under the bus. And let us not kid ourselves that any of the other mainstream Parliamentary parties are any better. They are even worse. Far worse.
It is an index of the extent to which the LGBT+ lobby is now obsessed with the promotion of transgender ideology that protecting the lives of lesbian and gay people in repressive countries from the worst kind of judicial persecution, seems to have become an irrelevance, or an unwelcome distraction to the obsessive promotion of compulsory pronouns and transgender self-identification.
Where is the LGBT+ lobby’s outrage at men being hanged in Iran for homosexuality? Stonewall, do you have nothing to say about this amidst your obsessive posts about the fake conversion therapy bill? And where is the Government’s outrage over these killings?
This is the right time for Conservative backbench MPs to tell Boris Johnson that the “Safe To Be Me” conference must be cancelled. If he wants to signal a departure from woke ideology and from the influence of people who have caused him, his office, and the Conservative Party, so much harm, the cancellation of this conference, and of the reckless partnership with Stonewall, must be put at the top of his agenda.
It is time for Conservative MPs to insist that the PM stop the harm he is causing when he encourages the appeasement of a gender lobby that is overwhelmingly anti-Conservative and that is causing very serious harm to the country … and to the Conservative vote.
And when the Prime Minister and Lord Herbert have a moment, perhaps they might like to condemn the recent executions by Iran of two men for homosexuality. Gay people living under regimes that judicially murder them for homosexuality will never be “Safe To Be Me” so long as their homophobic leaders know that Western politicians will turn a blind eye when the noose is put over our brothers’ and sisters’ heads.
There is nothing to be gained by a conservative PM pandering to gender nonsense. They should articulate conservative policies and argue for sex before gender.