Jamie Wallis; Politics East; Jeopardy! - Nutmeg's week

You’ll never guess what happened next (part one)

A few weeks ago Claire Maugham posted on Bluesky about the possibility of being told she’s not a woman by ‘gender criticals’ due to the loss of her breasts from breast cancer. Claire is the wife of Jolyon and alleged mother of two ‘trans children’.

You’ll never guess what happened next.

She deleted the posts and then Jolyon claimed she’d been mistaken for a man and challenged by ‘vigilantes’ in a public changing room because she had a double mastectomy. According to him, Claire is one of thousands of women being mistaken for men in similar situations every day.

Meanwhile, Jolyon, founder of the consistently failing Good Law Project, continues to crowdfund for a ludicrous attempt to force the EHRC to withdraw its interim guidelines following the Supreme Court ruling.

You’ll never guess what happened next (part two)

The story of former MP Jamie Wallis is a great example of the decline of multiple institutions, but particularly the media and the Conservative Party while it was in government.

First - a recap, which you’ll probably need as almost none of the mainstream media covered his story fully.

Wallis was surprisingly elected as the Conservative MP for the relatively safe Labour seat of Bridgend at the 2019 general election. It wasn’t just a shock that he won the seat - it was bizarre that he even became the Conservative candidate given that he’d been kicked off his town council the year before for failing to attend a single meeting after he was elected in 2017.

Little was known about the new MP bar that he had a wife and two very young daughters, and with some media interest in him, he immediately became embroiled in scandals. Less than one month after he was elected, a fellow MP said he needed to issue an apology for misleading the press. This was for his answer to a question about his links to Sugar-Daddy.net, a website which offered to introduce financially struggling ‘boys and girls’ to older wealthy men, to fund their lifestyles seemingly in exchange for sex. He said he never had “a financial interest” in the company that ran the website but it turned out he had been director of a company acting as Sugar-Daddy.net’s parent company’s sole shareholder.

At the same time, Bridgend Council revealed more than 800 complaints to trading standards about businesses he ran, which led to another MP calling for the whip to be removed from him (less than four weeks after he was elected). In addition, details emerged about three of his other companies. Action Direct UK was banned from taking on new clients by the Ministry of Justice, Fields Associates allegedly exploited legal loopholes to ensure people accused of paedophilia avoided jail and Fields Analytics allegedly imported ‘Thai brides’ to the UK.

In 2020 it also emerged that the campaign chief he used during the general election was a convicted criminal.

Wallis also uses the title ‘Dr’ but Private Eye investigated his PhD, from Cardiff University, and found it was in ‘astrobiology’, a debunked theory that organisms regularly arrive on this planet from outer space. Its main proponent is a friend of Wallis’ father - who was the sole credited supervisor of Wallis’ thesis, which itself mostly quoted his father’s work. Private Eye discovered that his family friend supervisor didn’t even work at Cardiff University - having left there three years before Wallis was allegedly awarded his PhD.

But all of this was, or should have been, secondary to the scandal that broke in 2022.

Out of the blue, he tweeted: ‘I’m trans. Or to be more accurate, I want to be,’ and, with that, he became ‘Britain’s first transgender MP’. Almost all the media scrutiny was immediately replaced with an outpouring of support from people like Ash Sarkar and even Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who thanked him for his ‘bravery’ and said “The Conservative Party I lead will give you the love and support you need to be yourself.”

It simply didn’t matter that in the same ‘coming out’ post, Wallis revealed three other vague details that should have raised some eyebrows: 1. He said that someone had been jailed for trying to blackmail him over ‘photographs’, 2. He met an unnamed man online on a gay dating site in 2021, and when they met in real life, this man raped him (after the ‘rapist’ refused to wear a condom), and 3. He’d recently been arrested for crashing his car.

Wallis gave just one interview to the press about this statement, on Sky News with Sophy Ridge. She failed to press properly about these three revelations. She also failed to ask him anything about, for example, what his wife and children were going through or his history with dodgy companies, but instead spent 20 minutes telling him how inspirational he is.

A few months later he was fined £2,500 and disqualified from driving for six months. It turned out that he, in the middle of the night, drove so fast into a telegraph pole that he broke it at its base, ensuring local villagers were without electricity for several days. He then fled the scene - while dressed as a woman - which meant he was not immediately breathalysed. The judge said he was “not credible”.

Despite every possible red flag, Wallis was then, just a few weeks later, appointed to join the Women and Equalities Select Committee.

The only other thing of note he did as an MP was announce in 2023 that he wouldn’t stand again in Bridgend, but would try to secure a seat somewhere else. He tried to be the Conservative candidate for the safe seat of South Norfolk for the 2024 general election, but this time, finally, the party rejected him, and Labour won the seat anyway.

You’ll never guess what happened next.

This week he appeared in court accused of harassing his ex-wife, and revealed that he is now a woman called ‘Katie’.

He turned up to court late, with bruises on his arms, and stumbled when he was asked to stand. A screen had to be erected to block him from seeing his ex-wife. His barrister, who at one point ‘misgendered’ him, seemingly blamed his ex-wife for not accepting his transgender identity. The court was also told that he has ‘significant mental health issues’ and hasn’t been able to understand court documents. The trial was adjourned. This was him just before the hearing started.

The BBC initially ‘deadnamed’ him in the headline of its coverage of the case, but then removed the name. Note that no pronouns are used for him anywhere in the article - and it did not make BBC News’ section on ‘transgender people’.

That wasn’t the only time that happened this week. The BBC ran this story about another man called ‘Katie’, who’d been jailed for paedophilia offences. Again, no pronouns were used and the story failed to make its trans section. For those who think that this might mean the BBC has stopped using incorrect pronouns, unfortunately it still very much is (see below), just, it seems, not on stories in which the person has done something bad.

The BBC, racing itself to the bottom

Earlier this month we reported on what might have been the worst case of journalism ever, in which BBC OS covered the Supreme Court ruling. This involved a male Pride activist interviewing a cross-dressing man about his feelings. For balance, a second man was also interviewed - who was a trans activist who made various untrue claims that were not challenged. BBC OS returned to the story the next day and interviewed another cross-dressing man about his feelings and then replayed some of the interview with the cross-dressing man from the day before. Then the Pride activist had two women on, in which he asked them questions about men’s feelings and challenged the facts they had stated.

However, this has already been replaced as the BBC has now broadcast something unfathomably worse.

Politics East is a Sunday morning news programme broadcast on BBC One in the east of England.

Last Sunday it devoted half the show to belatedly covering the Supreme Court ruling with a video followed by a panel discussion.

The video started with a poll of five people on the Supreme Court ruling and found they all disagreed with it. The five were two men who say they are women, one man who says he’s non-binary, one woman who says she’s non-binary and one woman who says she’s a man. The BBC helpfully added that the survey should not be treated as ‘scientific’.

This part of the show was also converted into a BBC News story, featuring ‘preferred pronouns’. As Helen Joyce said of it: “Let’s ask people who want to force everyone else to pretend they aren’t the sex they actually are, even to the detriment of everyone's human rights, how they feel about a ruling that makes it harder for them to do this”. The article also states that the 2021 Census found that 262,000 people in the UK identify as transgender. It doesn’t state that the Office for National Statistics has since revealed that that figure is wrong and should not be used (a story the BBC failed to report on).

The video then cut to a trans activist involved in amateur cricket, who wrongly said that women are physically stronger than men who have taken hormones. This was not challenged. We then saw a woman, Kate Barker from the LGB Alliance, speak briefly before we were introduced to three more ‘trans people’ who talked about how terrified they are, before someone from an LGBT charity talked about transphobia.

If you’re keeping count, 11 people were featured in this four minute video, and 10 of them were trans activists.

We were then treated to a discussion in the studio. This involved the host, Amelia Reynolds, and three guests. The guests were a trans activist independent councillor who talked about the trans people in her family and a Labour MP who talked about ‘trans people being the most persecuted people within the crime statistics’. This isn’t true but, fortunately for him, Reynolds was not going to challenge him - instead she proceeded to agree with them both and said that the Supreme Court ruling has not made anything clearer. There was also a Conservative MP, who was on via video link, and who was only allowed to answer questions about ‘transphobia’ and the feelings of cross-dressing men.

This monstrosity of a broadcast ended with the presenter thanking her guests “just for talking about this in an open way”.

A few days later the BBC broadcast an episode of make up competition Glow Up, in which everyone who’s featured had their pronouns displayed, a drag queen talked about a ‘trans icon in the queer community’ and the aim was to impress a giant cross-dressing man.

This party is in power

In true Labour style, the party decided to postpone, and probably cancel, its national women’s conference rather than attempt to keep out the men pretending to be women. No doubt the party was worried about the very male acts of violent protest that might ensue if it tried to hold it. As the Telegraph reports, Labour’s National Executive Committee was advised that the ‘only legally defensible’ way forward for the event was for it to be single sex. Labour went for the nuclear option instead.

This conference has form for being timid and siding with men, for instance by failing to invite Rosie Duffield in 2022 in case her presence provoked tran-trums. Perhaps its cancellation wouldn’t be a huge loss for women but, as Venice Allan predicts, it could be a sign of things to come.

Rosie also drew our attention to some embarrassing and outdated contributions to a debate on gender, self-ID and sex that took place between MPs in Westminster Hall this week.

Kirsty Blackman (SNP) provided the entertainment by suggesting we would need magical powers to ascertain someone’s sex, while Christine Jardine (Liberal Democrats) claimed the government has no reason to record the sex of its citizens.

When will this Pride have a fall?

Pride Hub Egham opened a few weeks ago. It was meant to have been opened by its founder, Stephen Ireland, but he was on trial for child rape at the time. (He has since been found guilty. Another Pride volunteer was also found guilty of paedophilia offences at the same trial. Pride in Surrey is now run by Ireland’s ex-partner). Last week it ran a ‘Baby Shower’, featuring ‘Sorry Daddy’ t-shirts, and had attempted murderer Sarah Jane Baker perform.

And finally

ITV had a terrible week. Its Genius Game with David Tennant continues to be a huge flop while shows like Lorraine and Loose Women have been partially axed. In the same week, its show Jeopardy! with Stephen Fry aired three episodes featuring two cross-dressing men. This is in addition to an episode last month that also had a man who pretends he’s a woman as a contestant.

See you next week!