Epstein: Starmer must end Labour’s “boys’ club” culture — Rosa Prince

Key topics:Epstein fallout exposes political bias against sexual abuse victims.UK Labour accused of “boys’ club” culture undermining women’s voices.Women’s representation vital for fair decisions and justice reform..Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa’s bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here..By Rosa Prince.Anyone who still questions why sexual abuse victims can take years to report their ordeal or ultimately decide not to pursue justice at all need only look at recent political developments on both sides of the Atlantic. In the US, the Congress-mandated release of 3 million documents relating to the late pedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein retraumatized those he trafficked for sex with his powerful friends, by redacting his buddies’ personal details while exposing those of young women and girls they violated. In response, one victims’ group suggested the botched release, which included nude images, was in fact deliberate; a warning sign to others of the consequences of complaining.Here in the UK, 10 Downing Street is in turmoil after not one but two senior Labour Party politicians were promoted to important roles despite fraternizing with sexual criminals who preyed on children. First came the fall of Peter Mandelson as US ambassador over his relationship with Epstein. Not long after, Matthew Doyle, former aide to Prime Minister Keir Starmer, was elevated to the House of Lords — even after it emerged he had campaigned for a friend charged with possessing child pornography, including images of girls as young as 10. In both cases the men passed government vetting by “explaining” they believed their friends’ claims of innocence: In other words, their decision to doubt the word of those alleging abuse was considered acceptable mitigation..Read more:.Epstein Scandal: The case against Bondi - she’s been failing paedophile’s victims for years.Why would any victim now come forward, knowing that the instinct of the government that is supposed to protect them is to undermine and betray them? The message that the concerns of women and children are low on the priority list compared to those of rich and powerful men is hardly shocking, but the overt affirmation feels deeply depressing.In the UK (although not, jarringly, yet in the US), the latest developments have at least led to some soul searching in political circles, resulting in fresh accusations that Starmer is operating a “boys’ club” in No. 10 Downing Street.At the weekly session of Prime Minister’s Questions, opposition leader Kemi Badenoch accused Starmer of "stuffing government with hypocrites and pedophile apologists," adding that he "always puts the Downing Street boys’ club first." That criticism is not confined to his opponents. Cabinet minister Lisa Nandy, one of a group of female ministers repeatedly badmouthed to the press by (male) No. 10 aides, said this week: “Politics does often operate as a boys’ club and I don’t think that the Labour Party is immune to that. Some of the briefings have absolutely been dripping with misogyny … we’re lazy, we spend too much time with our kids, we don’t spend enough time with all kids, you really can’t win. In the end it’s designed to try to keep us down and to try and stop us from being heard.”Writing on her Substack of her “rage” at recent events, the local government minister Alison McGovern said, “Mandelson succeeded because the culture supported and rewarded him. So let's be honest about the toxic culture. … It's our culture that doesn't properly hear women which meant Peter Mandelson's power lasted for so long.”The South Shields MP Emma Lewell told Starmer directly as he attended a meeting of the women’s parliamentary Labour grouping: “I can’t even begin to explain how much it hurts when people are screaming at me in the street that I am a member of the ‘pedo protectors party’ … You have said so many times now ‘things will be different.’ Each time it isn’t.” It’s a sign of how rattled Starmer is by the criticism that he felt it necessary to meet with the group, as is his promise to them that he would take action to “eradicate structural misogyny.”Are the accusations fair? Complaints that No. 10 is a boys’ club are not new, as I’ve written before. Women now make up nearly half of Labour members of Parliament and cabinet members. But many still find politics an unwelcoming place, and it never feels like the issues specific to their sex — women’s health, violence against women and girls, equal pay and representation — are high up the priority list. Too often it seems as if men in politics who in every other way consider themselves progressives, who have wives and daughters they love and respect as their equals, have a mental block when it comes to the women they work alongside, and the issues they prioritize as a result.When the time comes for the big calls to be made, they seem to unconsciously turn to those who look, sound and think like themselves, rather than considering the views of those who might see the world differently. The result is that they too often prioritize the extremely complex issues they are grappling with in a way that elevates matters important to men, and pushes those key to women down the agenda.So it was that when confronted with the question of who best to send to Washington to treat with a president who values a high-roller lifestyle and macho talk, the answer was a man — Mandelson — with those qualities, no matter his association with a pedophile. Indeed, almost because of that association, and regardless of the fact that a highly able woman known to get on with Donald Trump, Karen Pierce, was already in situ. Men are seen as the default — the grown ups; women as fine to have around so long as they view the world in the same way.It could be argued that, in the British context at least, this is a peculiarly left-wing problem. It remains a running sore that Labour has never had a female leader, while the Tories are now on their fourth, including three prime ministers. It is inescapably the case that Starmer has benefited from the innate sexism of UK socialism: When he ran for the leadership in 2020 against two women (including cabinet minister Nandy) it was hard to escape the impression that the members picked the candidate who most resembled their mental image of what a prime minister should look like — despite what would turn out to be his overwhelming shortcomings as a leader.Meanwhile, in a similar vein, when I was in the US last week, several female Democrats told me the party could never risk running another woman candidate against Trump’s successors. Given Republicans seem in no hurry to elevate a woman to the Oval Office either, America’s little girls must continue to wait for a presidential role model.Health Secretary Wes Streeting, who originally backed the women’s rights campaigner Jess Phillips over Starmer, and who is seen as the PM’s main rival for the job, has suggested that, “… if women such as Jess Phillips had been in that room when the decision was taken, Mandelson would never have been sent to Washington.” As Aaron Burr croons in Hamilton, exclusion from “the room where it happens” is both unfair and corrosive. It also makes for bad decisions. Mandelson almost certainly wouldn’t have been allowed anywhere near DC, nor Doyle the House of Lords, had a woman been listened to. (Mandelson’s appointment was in fact opposed by Starmer’s original chief of staff Sue Gray, who he sacked after only three months after she clashed with his close ally Morgan McSweeney; McSweeney has now quit over the Epstein affair.)The former Labour Deputy Leader Harriet Harman, who is now a peer (and one of many able women who should have led the party), has urged Starmer to appoint a female “first secretary of state” to ensure there is effectively always a woman in the room when the important decisions are taken. I’m not sure tokenism is the answer. It seems to me it should just be a no brainer that women are always in the room, because it should seem unnatural and arbitrary not to have sufficient numbers of women at the top tiers of politics to ensure this happens by default. But just as importantly, when we are in the room, our voice must be listened to.For now, there are a number of things Starmer and his new team of girls as well as boys must do to prove they get it. As former Prime Minister Gordon Brown has urged, the police must investigate the dozens of occasions on which Epstein’s private planes were allowed to pass through London Stansted airport apparently for the purposes of trafficking young girls (so poor and dehumanizing were the checks that some individuals on the flight manifest were logged only as “females,” rather than by name). The king’s brother Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor (formerly known as Prince Andrew) should face a formal police investigation and give evidence to Congress. .Read more:.UK PM Starmer may be engineering an economic recovery he won’t be around to enjoy.The government target to halve violence against women and girls should be pursued with far greater vigor. Victims of wealthy abusers, including the late Harrods boss Mohamed al Fayed as well as Epstein, must be given far greater support to receive justice and redress. And the people who enabled their abuse — friends, colleagues, staff, medical workers — should face prosecution. Women make up 51% of the UK population, and as they have greater longevity — and older people are more likely to vote — an even greater proportion of the electorate. At the last election, they were slightly more likely than men to vote Labour; today they are slightly less likely than men to back the party, according to recent polls. If he wants to turn his fortunes around, Starmer should start listening to them..© 2026 Bloomberg L.P.

Epstein: Starmer must end Labour’s “boys’ club” culture — Rosa Prince

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