The trouble with Keir Mather

Every time I cross paths – or swords – with a cranky student activist, I have the same thought: ‘Oh God, these people are going to be running the country one day.’ I have tormenting visions of these blue-haired censors, these giddy blacklisters of the un-PC, in parliament, drawing up laws, wagging a collective finger at the wrong-thinking throng.

Those privileged fuming youths who once blocked my path to the Oxford Union; that offence-seeking mob that tried to prevent me from giving an after-dinner speech at Queen’s College, Oxford – they’re going to be in charge soon, I always fret, and then we’re screwed. We’ll all be under the thumb of that eccentric intolerance that has stalked so many campuses of late.

Well, bad news – it’s happening. Labour’s newest MP, Keir Mather, had a previous life as precisely one of those illiberal youths. While at Oxford – where else? – he wrung his manicured hands over the Union’s penchant for hosting ‘controversial’ speakers and appeared to think that students’ feelings should be put ahead of difficult debates. And this wasn’t long ago. He’s only 25.

Keir the Younger, who looks and sounds like an identikit Starmer, won the Selby and Ainsty by-election last night. He overturned the Tories’ 20,000 majority. He’s the first MP to have been born after Tony Blair became PM (he was born in 1998). He’s being called ‘the Baby of the House’. But don’t be fooled into thinking he’s a sweet, fresh politician: this is a bloke with some pretty questionable views.

He once branded Germaine Greer ‘an abhorrent transphobe’. It was 2018 and the Oxford Union had invited her to speak. Crusading Keir, who’s gay, was not happy. This is a woman who has made ‘dehumanising and downright dangerous comments about transgender women’, he thundered.

She hasn’t, of course. All Greer says is that men are not women. If she’s an ‘abhorrent transphobe’, then so are the vast majority of Brits, who will fully concur with Greer’s insistence that biology is real and it matters. Another Labour MP massively out of touch with public sentiment? Great.

Mather also slammed the Union for hosting the Russian ambassador to the UK. In Pride week of all weeks. It’s ‘hugely insensitive’, he cried, before describing himself as ‘fucking shook’. I’m sorry but if other people’s views shake you to your core, maybe you shouldn’t have been at university in the first place?

Mather’s comments implicitly lumped Greer in with Putin’s Russia. He slammed the Union for hosting both a ‘stooge of the homophobic Putin regime’ and ‘an abhorrent transphobe’. As if these people are moral equivalents. As if a funny, principled feminist and public intellectual is no different to a Kremlin lackey. As if defending the social and scientific truth of womanhood – as Greer does – is akin to running an authoritarian state that denies certain people their basic rights. This is how unhinged the demonisation of gender-critical women has become.

Does anyone else find it worrying that Labour’s new generation includes a young man who has maligned such an important thinker as Greer? She devotes her life to analysing and improving the condition of women and then along come some leftist bros suggesting she is a vile old bigot. I wonder how the gender-critical Labour MP Rosie Duffield feels about sharing the opposition benches with a man who, just a few years ago, was branding people like her ‘abhorrent’.

Maybe Mather has changed. He should say. I’m sure his constituents will be keen to know if he still thinks Germaine Greer is unfit for public life because she says people with penises are men, not women.

The rise of this new breed of Labour politician suggests that while Labour might have done well in yesterday’s by-elections, it won’t be reconnecting with its working-class roots anytime soon. Mather’s an Oxford grad who cut his teeth in public relations, worked as a parliamentary researcher for Wes Streeting, and fumes against free expression he doesn’t like. His other namesake – Hardie – will be spinning in his grave.