What’s happened to Harriet Harman?

Watching Harriet Harman being interviewed by Laura Kuenssberg on Newsnight earlier this week was a strange experience. I felt as if I’d entered a political twilight zone where nothing was quite as it seemed. Was the deputy leader of the Labour party really saying these things? I knew she was, but it seemed so miscalculated — so unwise — it was as if Harman’s body had been taken over by someone else. A mischievous political demon, perhaps. Or Lynton Crosby. The entire interview was like a nine-minute party political broadcast for the Conservative party.

By my count, Kuenssberg gave Harman five chances to admit that it had been a mistake for the National Council of Civil Liberties to grant ‘affiliate’ status to the Paedophile Information Exchange, a notorious lobby group that campaigned for the age of consent to be lowered to the age of four, and five times she refused. Why?

Harman’s argument was that, as a matter of policy, the NCCL didn’t bother to vet any group or individual that applied to join. Indeed, there doesn’t appear to have been a formal application process. Any group willing to pay the membership fee could ‘affiliate’ with the NCCL. As the legal officer, she had no say in the matter.

But as Kuenssberg pointed out, the NCCL could have expelled the PIE once it had come to light that a group actively campaigning to legalise sex between adults and children had joined the organisation. And yet it chose not to. Wasn’t that a mistake?

Even if that wasn’t possible — Harman muttered something about policy being dictated by the ‘annual general meeting’ — couldn’t she have resigned? I like to think that if I discovered an organisation I was helping to run had been infiltrated by paedophiles, and there was no mechanism for getting rid of them, I’d resign.