Bridget Phillipson has said she has been the victim of sexist briefings from inside No 10 Downing Street. In an interview with the BBC’s Matt Chorley, the Education Secretary was asked: “Do you feel like you’ve been on the receiving end of sexist briefings?”
She responded: “Yeah completely, but you know that’s life. I’ve been underestimated most of my life, I’ll just continue getting on and doing what I’m doing, not worrying too much about some of the nonsense that gets written in the papers, but I do slightly have to laugh because there’s this idea swirling around somehow that I’m No 10’s preferred candidate for all of this. I’m not quite sure that’s what you and many colleagues in the media have been saying in recent months with all of this negativity and nonsense that I’ve faced.”
During the government’s first year in office, Phillipson was traduced by “No 10 sources” as the papers reported she was due to be sacked in a reshuffle. It reached such a fever pitch that Keir Starmer had to personally assure Phillipson that he had not authorised any of the briefing and that her job was safe. When the reshuffle came, she stayed in place (alongside Lisa Nandy, who faced similar treatment). As I recently wrote, Phillipson had to fight unpleasant internal battles over her education agenda. She appears to have won.
Other prominent women in the government experienced similar hostility from their own side – Nandy, ex-chief of staff Sue Gray and former transport secretary Louise Haigh among them. Talk of a “boy’s club” and “toxic” culture swirled. Last week a key aide to the PM, Paul Ovenden, resigned after a leak of WhatsApp messages in which he repeated vulgar jokes about Diane Abbott. “That place is full of juvenile misogynistic men,” a particularly incensed female Labour MP recently said to me of No 10.
I don’t want to assume too much secondary motivation to Phillipson’s candid remarks, as the claim is important in its own right. But why has she chosen this moment to issue such a damaging claim about the PM’s team?
Since the start of the deputy leadership contest Phillipson has been written up as No 10’s candidate. She has struggled to break out of this mould, which is a liability with the electorate she is facing: a Labour membership which, as one Phillipson-supporting MP recently told me, “just doesn’t like us being in government”. Phillipson followed up with some careful remarks about the mood in the Parliamentary Labour Party. When pressed by Chorley about there being a “lads club” in Downing Street, she said: “We had lots of new colleagues who were elected last year, lots of brilliant people who haven’t felt that they’ve been part of the team in the way that they should.”
When a handful of Labour MPs had the whip suspended recently after dissenting from the government line on a number of issues, including welfare cuts, a No 10 source told the Times they had been punished for “persistent knobheadery”. The phrase has been bitterly remembered by backbenchers. On the eve of conference Phillipson is determined to show that, despite being a serving cabinet minister, she would be an independent voice as deputy leader.
[Further reading: Where is Zarah Sultana?]
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