Keir Starmer doesn’t have a ‘women problem’ – he has a ‘man problem’

Keir Starmer has had a terrible week, but the clear-out of his key backroom boys, Morgan McSweeney and comms chief Tim Allan, might be the thing that saves him in the end.

Far from being the “geniuses” they would have us believe, these men may have been hampering the meaningful change that Sir Keir Starmer promised when he was elected. To many of us on the outside, they looked very much like yesterday’s men. Same old, same old – in every way.

Harriet Harman, one of Labour’s most respected and senior figures, spoke for many on Wednesday when she begged Starmer to start thinking differently. “We need a complete culture change, and I think everybody recognises that,” she said in a meeting with the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP).

The most powerful change Starmer could make, she said, would be to install a woman into the reinstated position of first secretary of state (a kind of de facto deputy prime minister). Harman said this would be a “really powerful” way to “turbocharge” and “transform the political culture around women and girls”.

Harman has hit the bullseye. Among the general fury about Peter Mandelson and the way he lied and betrayed his country, there is another simmering rage at the blind spot shown by Starmer. He and his “boys club” failed to understand – or even consider – that a man who had a known friendship with a then-convicted sex trafficker did not make him the right man for the job. For all the talk from Starmer saying he didn’t know the full facts and how “victims” of course should come first, the catastrophic decision of giving Mandelson the job at the slightest whiff of an association with Jeffrey Epstein shows how far the victims were from the thoughts of those at the top of government.

I just don’t believe that this blind spot would have been quite so big if more women had been in the room.

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As each revolting detail came out of the Epstein files, including the news that a nine-year-old Brazilian girl had arrived on his island, presumably as a plaything for one of the many powerful men whose names have been handily redacted, turned our collective stomachs. More missteps from No 10 are revealed.

Starmer’s former comms chief Matthew Doyle (another Labour peer and Mandelson protégé) was found to have campaigned on behalf of a friend who had been charged with possessing indecent images of children. Starmer had to apologise for a second time to the Commons, admitting that, like Mandelson, Doyle “did not give a full account of his actions”. Could it be that Nor 10’s backroom blokes didn’t ask the right questions during his vetting? After all, he was one of the boys. What was there to worry about?

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It is against this backdrop that a flotilla of female Labour MPs at the PLP have made their voices heard this week. They are calling for a truer representation of women in the corridors of power, to ensure the epidemic of violence against women and girls is properly tackled. There is no point saying you care about this as an issue if you don’t care enough to look at the details when it matters.

One of the most powerful voices in the debate was that of Natalie Fleet, MP for Bolsover, who became pregnant after being groomed and raped as a teenager. Asking the PM to launch a national inquiry into the crimes of Mohamed al-Fayed, the Harrods owner, she said: “These are our victims, this is our Epstein,” reminding him that British police officers had taken bribes to cover up his behaviour and doctors had checked over his victims.

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Despite the words about victim-centred policies, the government still has not made any commitment to establish such an inquiry at this time. It also took months of pressure and debate from victim groups and expert reviews before Starmer finally announced he would launch a national statutory inquiry into grooming gangs, marking a U-turn from his earlier position.

What explains such hesitation? In a powerful blog post, government minister Alison McGovern called it out: “Our political culture doesn’t properly hear women,” she thundered, pointing out this was one of the main reasons why Mandelson was hired in the first place.

As a veteran commentator on women’s issues, I’ve been talking about the lack of women at the top and the lack of female input into decision-making at the top for about 30 years now. I hope that we have finally reached a tipping point. There is certainly a level of female fury about the glacial pace of change and the abuse of women that is unprecedented in my experience.

In the PLP, Labour MPs are saying enough and, in doing so, they are reflecting the anger of women more widely. How can it be that 100 years after we got the vote, female voices are still not being heard in politics in the way that they should be?

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Harman is right that “turbocharging” change at the top as a necessity. But I am not convinced that just putting a lone woman in as first secretary of state will do it. After all, we did have Angela Rayner as deputy PM for over a year, and she was effectively kept in her lane, her light deliberately dimmed.

I don’t know whether it was the boys’ club who found her energy and charisma too intimidating, but Rayner wasn’t allowed to shine in the way, say, John Prescott was in Blair’s government. Remember when John Prescott punched someone in the face on the campaign trail and it was shrugged off by the then-prime minister Tony Blair as “John just being John”? Different times? Or different rules for the boys?

I’m a fan of Emily Thornberry, a first-class debater, and Jess Phillips who, like Ange, talks “human”. But under Starmer, too many of these kinds of women’s voices have either been sidelined, stifled, or simply locked out of the conversations going on in the rooms that really have Starmer’s ear.

The women Starmer does seem to feel comfortable around couldn’t be more different from Ange. They are women like Rachel Reeves, policy bluestocking types, who aren’t going to frighten the horses. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time in history that boys were intimidated by strong women with forthright opinions and bags of messy charm.

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The time has come for a change. It’s International Women’s Day in a fortnight, and that has never felt more ironic or more useless. As Helen Coffey wrote in The Independent this week, could it be time for women to say enough and down tools for the day, like they did in Iceland in the Seventies? As a protest against gender inequality and lack of representation, 90 per cent of Icelandic women took the day off and refused to work in both paid jobs and unpaid domestic labour. It sent a powerful message and led to stronger equality laws, including gender equality legislation passed in 1976.

What else can we do to turbocharge progress? We are sick of the dial not moving – and not just in politics either. Women entrepreneurs still receive only 2 per cent of VC funding; we still have only six women running FTSE companies. The corporate world likes young, “pleasing” women. Older ones with opinions? Not so much. It’s why there is such a huge female brain drain from companies at 50. The metrics are not changing. Power is not being shared equally.

More diverse teams make better decisions, but it’s still a boys’ club where those decisions are made. From politics to business to the police, law and tech, the world in 2026 is still designed for, set up for, and governed by men. And if the concerns of women fall on deaf ears, it leads to blind spots in key decisions that are being made. We saw this during Covid, when amusement parks were opened before schools, and we’re seeing it in our politics today when we hire the wrong man for big jobs in Washington. It was the same in the financial crisis, remember when the IMF chief Christine Lagarde said then that if “it had been Lehman Sisters, this wouldn’t have happened”.

We need more female voices at the top, and we need them to be listened to. Starmer promised change. This would be a good place to start. As the suffragettes said, deeds not words, prime minister, deeds not words.

Eleanor Mills is the Founder of Noon.org.uk – the UK’s premier network for women in midlife