Harriet Harman joins Electoral Dysfunction podcast – and shares her views on the PM
Labour heavyweight Harriet Harman is joining Sky News’ Electoral Dysfunction podcast as a permanent member of the team.
The former acting leader of the party and mother of the House will now sit alongside Sky News’ political editor Beth Rigby and Conservative peer Ruth Davidson as the three women bringing the news – and their views – to the public every week.
In her first appearance as a host, Ms Harman told today’s podcast she was “absolutely thrilled” and “really excited” to become a regular fixture, adding: “I was so excited when Electoral Dysfunction started up, and I’ve been so pleased to see it go from strength to strength.
“So to find myself actually joining it, I feel I’m on the threshold of something absolutely amazing.”
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Ms Harman became a Labour MP in 1982, having long campaigned for increasing the representation of women in the party – and the Commons.
She became a shadow minister two years later, and when Labour came to power in 1997, she held a raft of roles – including becoming the first-ever minister for women.
She stood down at this summer’s election, but will be joining the Lords as a Labour peer when parliament returns next week.
Harriet Harman served in Tony Blair’s first government in 1997 as the first minister for women. Pic: PA
Sharing her insight into a tough week for Sir Keir Starmer – who warned of a “painful” budget to come in October due to the £22bn “black hole” in public finances – Ms Harman said she was going to “cut him some slack”.
She compared the current prime minister to one of his predecessors, telling the podcast: “I remember when Gordon Brown… was chancellor, he used to talk about prudence with a purpose – basically you’d be terribly prudent with the public finances, but here’s the purpose.
“And what Keir Starmer is doing is more of the prudence at the moment, rather than the purpose, because I think he’s trying to make sure that people don’t become over-optimistic about the speed of change that they’ll see in their actual lives.”
Ms Harman said she thought her party leader was “paranoid” about failing to deliver as a government, as that would “build resentment” among voters, and any “overpromising” from his side would just make things worse.
“So [in his speech this week] he was talking about the foundations of society being undermined, as well as the foundations of our economy. And I think he is very averse to the idea of overpromising.”
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However, she was surprised at how “sanguine” newly elected MPs were about his position.
“I was wondering whether or not our new team of MPs, many of whom were elected for the first time in July, whether or not they were getting overanxious,” said Ms Harman.
“[But] they are like, ‘well, this is what we said on the doorstep – we said things were going to be hard and it would take a while, and we’re going to take just tough decisions to bring about stability’.
“So, they seem to think this is what they were expecting, and [what] their constituents were expecting.”
“Certainly it’s… on the other end of the spectrum from ‘razzmatazz’. But, you know, perhaps he’s got it right. Let’s see.”
Don’t forget, you can see Electoral Dysfunction live when it goes out on tour in September.
You can get your tickets by clicking here and the dates for the shows are below:
• London – Thursday 12th, Bloomsbury Theatre
• Salford – Monday 16th, Lowry Quays
• Liverpool – Sunday 22nd, St George’s Hall
• Glasgow – Thursday 26th, The Glee Club
Here’s a rule I tend to apply across the board in Westminster: If a politician is talking, politics is probably taking place.
Add into that, if the topic of debate is especially grave or serious, be more prepared to apply the rule, not less.
Which brings us to the grooming scandal.
There is no doubt Tory leader Kemi Badenoch was politicising the issue when she ripped into the government in the Commons on Monday.
In fact, she admitted as much.
Asked about it during her news conference, she said: “When I’m in the Commons, I will do politics. If every time we are pointing things out and doing our job we are accused of politicising something, it makes it a lot harder.”
So the question here is less about whether politics is at play (it almost always is and that’s not necessarily a bad thing), and more about whose interests the politics is working towards.
In other words, does Ms Badenoch care about the grooming scandal because she cares about victims or because she cares about herself?
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To answer that, it’s useful to try and pinpoint exactly when the Tory leader started showing such a keen desire for a public inquiry.
Was she always harbouring it? Or did it only arrive after Elon Musk and others pushed the scandal back up the news agenda?
On this, she’s not helped by the record of the governments she served in.
Yes, the broader child abuse inquiry was announced under David Cameron, but there was no specific statutory grooming inquiry.
As late as 2022, the then Tory safeguarding minister was batting away demands for a public inquiry on the basis that locally-led probes were preferable.
That is – as it happens – the same explanation the current Labour safeguarding minister Jess Phillips offered to Oldham Council in the rejection letter that sparked outrage and set us on a path to this eventual outcome.
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“If we’d got this right years ago then I doubt we’d be in this place now,” wrote Baroness Casey in her audit.
If Labour can be attacked for acting too slowly, the Tories – and by extension Ms Badenoch – can be too.
In response, her aides insist she was bound by collective responsibility while she was a minister, and that the issue was outside her brief.
Ms Badenoch also points to her work with patients of the now closed Tavistock Gender Identity Clinic as evidence of her track record campaigning for change in thorny policy areas.
In this context, the presence in the grooming scandal of questions around the role of gender and ethnicity mark this as an issue that you’d expect the Tory leader to not only be interested in, but to genuinely care about too.
But as previously discussed, just because a politician is somewhat sincere in what they are saying, doesn’t mean there isn’t a dollop of politics mixed in too.
And having dug out a recording of a post-PMQs briefing with Ms Badenoch’s media adviser from January, that certainly seems to be the case here.
Asked what had changed to trigger the calls for an inquiry, the spokesperson said: “We can all go back and look at the reasons why this entered the popular discourse. This is something that is of high public salience.”
Or to put it another way, the politics changed.
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