Brianna Ghey: Sunak plunges new depths

There is simply no floor to his behaviour.

Just another day with a black pit in your stomach, watching the prime minister do things of such callousness and cruelty that you find yourself shocked despite your better judgement. There is simply no moral floor to his behaviour. There is no depth he will not plunge. 

My partner isn't on Twitter. After PMQs I found that I was quite unable to tell her what had happened. I didn't want to. I didn't want to burden her with the ugliness of it, with the stench of it. I was ashamed to describe the behaviour of the prime minister. I didn't want to hear myself say it out loud.

The basics are simple. You probably know them already. Across the Commons Chamber, Rishi Sunak called Keir Starmer "someone who's broken every single promise he was elected on", and then went on to reel off a little list, including the following line: "Defining a woman, although in fairness that was only 99% of a U-turn". I don't even know what the joke was supposed to be there. All I know is that Esther Ghey, mother of the murdered trans teenager Brianna Ghey, was in the public gallery to hear it. 

But they all laughed behind him. It's such a lot of fun, these trans jokes. 'Don't you know what a woman is?' 'Can a woman have a penis?' That attempt to make something complicated and delicate into something brutal. To turn the fate of humans into an electoral dividing line. To carry a bit of stands-to-reason ignorance into an area that should be approached with the greatest possible caution and consideration. 

Starmer, to his considerable credit, seemed genuinely outraged. The Tory benches shouted a mocking panto "oooohhhhhh" at him when they sensed a trace of offence. They were still lost in their heady up-yours-political-correctness gusto. "Of all the weeks to say that," Starmer murmured. "When Brianna's mother is in this Chamber. Shame." The Speaker tried to intervene. For a moment Starmer looked lost for words, as if he was grasping for something to encapsulate how it had made him feel. "Absolutely…" he started, then faded away. "Of all…" Then he faded away again. And I felt more warmth towards him at that moment than I have for some time. I felt a genuine sense that he was shocked into speechlessness by the cruelty of it all.

The prime minister refused to apologise when asked to do so in the Chamber. His spokesperson refused to apologise in the media scrum afterwards. Women's minister Kemi Badenoch then tried to reverse the emotional momentum, and indeed the entire factual basis of what had just taken place, by accusing Starmer of politicising the issue. "It was shameful of Starmer to link his own inability to be clear on the matter of sex and gender directly to her grief," she said. And so by that point, we were where we were. In the pit of the fucking world. Conservative politicians taking what had happened to that woman and mangling it into whatever weapon they needed to hurt their opponents.  

Over the weekend, Esther Ghey said something which I hope I’ll not forget. Asked about the mother of one of the teenagers who killed her daughter, she said: "If she did want to contact me then I'm open to that… I want her to know that I don't blame her for what her child’s done." I found myself utterly taken aback by the depth of her kindness, of her empathy, and by how plainly she had expressed it. I imagined for a moment that it was someone I loved who this had happened to and knew instantly that I would not be capable of it. I was overawed by her potential for compassion. To see that type of person forced to witness this abuse of her grief was… Yeah, I don't have the words for it. I suppose only the word that Starmer used, that has rattled in my head since I heard it. Shame.

I couldn't care less about people's opinion on the trans issue. It really is completely immaterial to the question under discussion here, which is about how it is discussed. Senior Crown Prosecutor Nicola Wyn William said the "killing was a hate crime, motivated in part by hostility towards Brianna because she was transgender". That should be a reminder, and I am putting this at its very mildest, to conduct this debate in civil, respectful terms. But Sunak failed to do so. And not only that, he failed to do so in the presence of a mother who had lost her child.

It's an unforgivable thing he has done. And having done it, it is unforgivable that he did not instantly apologise for it. 

The political take on all this is that Sunak evidently has no presence of mind. During the recent interview with Piers Morgan, he was seemingly roped into a £1,000 bet against his will. He was asked whether Starmer was a "terrorist sympathiser", to which he replied: "The facts speak for themselves". Then there was today's moment today in the Commons Chamber and his inability to see that the right and indeed most personally useful thing to do was to instantly apologise. The man is simply not present. He is pushed into behaviour he does not intend to do. He is unable to calculate the ramifications of what he is saying. He does not demonstrate even a smidgen of self-awareness in the moment. He is a cardboard cut-out of a thing.

But honestly I couldn't care less about all that. The question of his judgement was settled a long time ago. All he's demonstrated recently is that it is even worse than we previously thought possible. 

What mattered today was about morality. It was about the basic standards by which you hold yourself, the manner in which you discuss people, and the rudimentary civil requirement of speaking carefully around people who have experienced terrible loss. It was about crassness and brutality and coarseness. It was about a lack of dignity. A lack of integrity. In the name of God he demonstrated a total inability to grasp the behaviour expected of him today.

We've spent a bit of time the last few days talking about Labour and the £28 billion pledge. Progressives feel disappointed by the party's lack of ambition. I share that disappointment. But at moments like this you realise that the election is about something larger than all that. It is about more than policies and public services and parties. It is at this stage, in a really rather unexpected way, about the moral character of the nation. Sunak seemed a fairly run-of-the-mill conservative when he came to power. It transpires that he is a moral vacuum. It is of the utmost importance that he be removed from power. His presence there stains us all.