Nigel Farage with Sarah Pochin and Laila Cunningham. Carl Court/Getty Images
Two decades after the start of the sexual revolution, feminist writer Andrea Dworkin wanted to understand why many women had chosen a political home — the Right — which seemed at first glance hostile to their interests. She reasoned: “The Right offers them the best deal: the highest reproductive value; the best protection against sexual aggression … the most reliable protection against battery; the most respect.” The relaxed values of the Left had made women vulnerable, without recourse to the traditional institutions which had shielded them from exploitation and abandonment: marriage, sexual conservatism and accountable fathers.
It’s a logic also championed by the women in Donald Trump’s administration, who deliver home truths from the Oval Office through the fog of hairspray. In a crusade against liberal values, these women have positioned themselves as defenders of the sex, speakers of common sense and protectors of children: they are the successors of the Right-wing women Dworkin observed in 1983.
The Maga line-up is fierce. There’s South Carolina congresswoman Nancy Mace, who has carved out a reputation as a thorn in the side of the “lunatic Left’s” gender politics. Then there’s Karoline Leavitt, a blonde sharpshooter who, at just 28, holds ruthless court during the White House’s press briefings. Leavitt has made her name puncturing liberals with all the deference of a Twitter troll: when a New York Times reporter sent her an email, she replied: “As a matter of policy, we do not respond to reporters with pronouns in their bios.” And, of course, there’s Kristi Noem, secretary for homeland security, nicknamed “ICE Barbie” for her beauty-queen brown balayage and tough talk on immigration. Her greatest hits include the catchphrases “Leave now or pay up” and “It’s a warzone down there”.
Uncouth though it may be to point out, these women all epitomise the Magababe look. The “uniform” of the top women in the Trump administration — barrel curls, lacquered lashes, pageant-queen contouring — is not coincidental. Barbara Res, who worked closely with the President for two decades and built Trump Tower, recalled in her admittedly vengeful memoir that he tended to hire “Barbies” and would “criticise his female employees for their looks”, for being too fat or too thin or otherwise unappealing. Gritty glamour is a winning look on the new Right: owning the libs turns voters’ heads when delivered through glossed lips.
Many of the Maga maneaters’ British counterparts appear to have noticed this, and have begun emulating both their look and their language. Take Michelle Dewberry, one of the most astringent voices on the contemporary Right, who won the second series of The Apprentice in 2006 and now presents the GB News show Dewbs & Co. Dewberry echoes Noem, Leavitt et al’s argumentative mode: in her brusque Hull brogue and bright red lipstick, she interviews sacrificial Left-wingers with the air of a stern mother dressing down a tipsy teenager after they’ve stumbled in from a party. Reform councillor Laila Cunningham, another straight-talking footsoldier of the glamorous new Right, is equally happy to devour Blairites on primetime TV like a gleeful lioness.
Like Noem, Dewberry often plays the no-nonsense mum card. Last week Noem, decked out in false eyelashes and a Border Patrol baseball cap, said it was her status as “a wife, a mother and a grandmother” that guided her in going after immigration crime “for American families”. Dewberry made a similar case: “I’m not a Reform representative, I’m just a mum”, she said, while discussing potential school shootings in Britain should Nigel Farage adopt the American approach to gun laws. With the air of an exasperated woman in a playground, she said the Lib Dem leader Ed Davey should be “ashamed of himself” for conjuring the image of British children cowering under desks to hide from marauding gunmen.
Of course, being “just a mum” is surprisingly versatile political dynamite. Fuming mums have advocated for almost every pressure group under the sun, from banning vaccines to boosting gun control. “Mum politics” — duty, protectiveness and common sense — has always had a place in British conservatism, from Thatcher’s economics of the thrifty housewife to the shock troops of Mumsnet who have, more than most women in Westminster, set the agenda on sex-based rights. If Reform’s top women — who call themselves, emetically, Farage’s Fillies — are determined to emulate Maga’s success among middle-aged American women, it will also be by appealing to them as mothers. Cunningham, a likely future star of the party, knows this, and has already used a Mail thinkpiece about her own children being mugged to make a Jenrickian case for tough justice. At a press conference on women’s safety last month, she called herself a “vigilante mum”, a title Andrea Jenkyns, the Reform mayor of Greater Lincolnshire, has also embraced. In this, they are canny: after all, who better to wrangle a chaotic toddler party than a vanguard of mums?
Their leader, Farage, has himself made a bold grab for the female electorate. He has (correctly) acknowledged that protecting women and girls will be the “next big issue in British politics”, and the question has lingered over this year’s two biggest culture-war flashpoints so far: the anti-migrant protests and the preservation of single-sex spaces. As the migrant hotel ruckus rumbles into the autumn, Reform’s candour on these twin concerns will be a tonic to those sick of progressive deflection. Last month, Jenkyns used a Reform for Women press conference, alongside the MP Sarah Pochin, to declare the vulnerability of women and girls a “national emergency … enabled” by the government’s asylum policy. While Labour has been squeamishly evasive on whether unchecked illegal immigration does in fact endanger British women and girls (duh), they have shamelessly handed the argument to the hard Right. Kemi Badenoch has been characteristically forthright, saying “As a mum, nothing matters more than protecting children”, but it may seem too little too late from a party which, after all, oversaw vast numbers of illegal migrants arriving in Britain.
At present the weakest link in Reform’s case for common sense on women’s issues is Vanessa Frake, whose defenestration as justice adviser must be in the post after an off-party-line refusal to say she’d remove trans-identified men from women’s prisons in August. Farage distanced himself from her remarks shortly after, keen to hold the line: in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling on the definition of “woman” in the spring, he described the move as an “outbreak of common sense”.
But Farage’s Fillies do have an Achilles’ high heel. Aping transatlantic politics is not straightforward, and following Maga’s tactical roadmap on female voters may have unanticipated consequences for the daughters of the very mums Reform is targeting. If mishandled, the supposed “common sense” approach which worked for Maga could unravel politicians’ credibility on issues which call for more complex consideration. One such issue is our country’s 60-year-old abortion law: Pochin, Reform’s only woman MP, has held the UK’s 24-week limit responsible for “murdering babies”, evangelical language which until recently would have been laughed off stage in Britain. Farage has called the limit “utterly ludicrous”. To be clear, just 0.1% of abortions in the UK happen at or beyond the 24-week mark; 88% of abortions are performed at less than 10 weeks. Of the 260 abortions carried out at or beyond 24 weeks in 2022, all but four were for fetal abnormalities. But such data points do not matter for those inherently opposed to the procedure at all, and it is this wilful misdirection which resulted in the repealing of abortion access in the US.
In other areas, too, Reform’s offering to British women looks like it will be thin gruel: the focus on foreign sex offenders and trans toilet invaders belies relative silence on women’s safety in general. Can this party really be trusted, for example, to secure higher conviction rates for rape? Or to improve the provision of childcare to keep women in the workforce? On domestic violence or maternal health? When an employment bill proposed giving workers protection from customer harassment, Farage decried the death of “pub banter” (banter which presumably involves estimating a barmaid’s bra size). For all that Reform’s movers and shakers claim to champion women, they have very little to say on any of these problems.
Until Labour can point out these policy flaws, the Reform woman will only rise and rise. It would be both stupid and unproductive to chastise ordinary British women for joining their ranks when Dworkin’s prophecy has so far come true: on the biggest, shoutiest issues, Reform seems to have a better offer for women. It is Labour’s job to show that Farage’s Fillies cannot be trusted to protect women’s interests beyond the easy wins on gender ideology and migrant crime: if they fail, they will have their own daughters to answer to.
