THERESA May warned against a “sliding back” of trans rights last night. Speaking at a PinkNews event in Parliament, May told the magazine: “I think much has been achieved over the last 50 years... but there is more to do.”
The ex-PM was speaking as the Tory leadership race became something of a points-scoring exercise over defining a woman. Yesterday, contender Penny Mordaunt made the flippant joke that “it was Margaret Thatcher who said every Prime Minister needs a willy [referring to Thatcher’s deputy PM Willie Whitelaw]. A woman like me doesn’t have one”.
Last week, Suella Braverman said “we need to get rid of all of this woke rubbish” on defining a woman. May has urged the Government to extend a recent ban on ‘conversion therapy’ to trans people.
‘Truss’s boast is farcical’
TORY leadership hopeful and Foreign Secretary Liz Truss boasts that the release of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe from Iran shows she “gets stuff done”. But the family of Morad Tahbaz, the London-born prisoner left in Iran despite Truss’s pledge that he would be released too, are not impressed. His daughter Roxanne told us Truss “continues to mislead” on the “farce” of a deal.
Master potter loses it in lockdown
AUTHOR and ceramicist Edmund de Waal seems to have gone slightly feral while working on his latest book during the isolation of lockdown. “I found myself talking aloud,” he told an audience at Hatchards Piccadilly last night. De Waal, right, then explained that instead of using a “fountain pen in a leatherbound book”, he scrawled all over the walls of his studio. The writing’s on the Waal...
Cat cafe owner faces licence squabble
THE OWNER of a cat café sanctioned by Westminster Council has said she will close “within weeks” without help. Florence Heath, who owns La Maison du Chat, had to evict her cats after the council told her she needed a special kind of door. It then relented but demanded that she get an animal licence, which has taken months to come. Heath told us her loss of income was a “nightmare” and she is close to giving up.
CHRISTOPHER Lloyd, the original Doc Brown, posed with cast member Roger Bart at the Back to the Future musical last night. Model Portia Freeman brought the blues to the Quatre Vin launch party in White City with reality stars Oliver Proudlock and Emma Louise Connolly. Poet Benjamin Zephaniah was at the Peaky Blinders stage show, while DJ Princess Julia was at a Nike x Martine Rose launch in Soho. Actor Zoë Wanamaker and Alexander Armstrong went to Anything Goes at the Barbican.
