“As interesting as it sounds, I have no idea what a Manosphere is,” said Oliver Ryan, the Labour MP for Burnley. He wasn’t the only slightly baffled person in the House of Commons on Tuesday afternoon. You could see some of them wondering if it was a new leisure complex. A couple of the chaps on the green benches who tend towards the spherical looked a touch defensive. Was this about Ozempic again?
In fact it was an urgent question on security matters. An internal Home Office report had been leaked to the Policy Exchange think tank, which said that it revealed all manner of wicked wokery. Chris Philp, the shadow Home Secretary, had demanded Yvette Cooper come to Parliament to explain herself. He’d heard that the government definition of “extremism” could be extended to include “the so-called manosphere”.
Cooper had better things to do, and sent along Dan Jarvis, the Security Minister. If Keir Starmer is a headteacher, Jarvis would make a good head of sixth form: he approached the session with a patient air that nonetheless hinted at steel underneath. The report, he explained, was one of many internal documents floating around, and didn’t represent government policy. It hadn’t recommended expanding the definition of extremism, and the government had no plans to do so.
The manosphere, for those who don’t follow online trends, is the part of the internet devoted to encouraging the male of the species to be their worst selves: a heady mix of misogyny, self-pity, and body-building. Like the Reform Party, but buff.
Richard Tice did a better job than Philp, in that his question at least had internal logic to it
If politics doesn’t work out for him, Philp might make a good manosphere influencer: sculpted hair, strong jawline, and a permanent sense of fury. But for the moment he prefers to audition for a job as the kind of journalist who gets worked up about things that might happen, often based on misunderstanding what they’ve read. Look, everybody’s got to eat, and I hear it can be lucrative work.
So he ignored Jarvis’s assurances. The government might not be planning to extend the extremism definition, he said, but what if it did? “Does the minister agree that combating Islamist terrorism is more important than policing the manosphere?”
Philp’s rhetorical style is a breathless urgency, every word delivered like a punch: He. Is. Furious. At. The Bloody. State. Of. Everything. He began complaining about people sending “the thought police to stop anyone telling uncomfortable truths that left-wing lawyers do not like.” It was like listening to someone read the Daily Mail comments section through a megaphone.
Jarvis, having fought in Afghanistan with the Parachute Regiment, has some experience of the hard end of Islamic extremism. It seems unlikely that he believes Andrew Tate represents a greater threat to human life than Osama bin Laden did.
“Let me gently remind the shadow home secretary,” he began. The impression of a teacher trying to keep their patience was only heightened by his apparent decision to let a teenager on work experience sit next to him on the front bench. It was in fact Keir Mather, a young Labour MP so loyal to his leader that he shares his name. Mather is 27 tomorrow, and getting to sit next to Jarvis may have been a birthday treat.
Jarvis was thoroughly polite, but a clue to his views about Philp came when he thanked Lib Dem spokeswoman Lisa Smart for questions that were “entirely sensible and reasonable.”
Reform’s Richard Tice did a better job than Philp, in that his question at least had internal logic to it: if the internal report had been completely rejected by the Home Secretary, didn’t this show that “people in her department are completely out of touch with the wishes of the Home Secretary?”
Andrew Murrison, a Conservative, asked why whoever leaked the report had done so, implying that the government had only been so forthright in its rejection because the paper had become public. Labour backbenchers had already made clear, several times, their view that the document had been leaked by a Tory sympathiser to make trouble. “Ultimately, of course, that is a matter for the leaker,” Jarvis replied, his eyes narrowing in a way that suggested he had a few ideas of how he’d like to conduct any interrogations. “If I were the leaker, I wouldn’t be too comfortable at the moment.”
Speaking of online radicalisation channels, Suella Braverman would later offer a stark warning of the dangers of spending too much time listening to the kind of people who willingly hang out with Donald Trump. “Is it an impossibility,” she asked the Heritage Foundation, “that 20 years from now, it will be the UK, not China or Russia, that will emerge as the greatest strategic threat to the USA?” I suppose if the president does attempt to seize Greenland, we might well help to stop him. But this turned out not to be what she meant.
“What happens if the UK falls into the hands of Muslim fundamentalism, our legal system gets substituted by Sharia Law and our nuclear capabilities vest in a regime not too dissimilar to that or Iran today?” she went on. “Regardless of whether one thinks this is a realistic outcome, which I do not, should we not have the courage to ask these questions?”
Another question we should have the courage to ask is why, of all the mad hypotheticals that Braverman doesn’t believe will happen, from duck-sized horses to frogs growing wings, she opted to talk about the one that will go down well on Fox News. Well, everybody’s got to eat.
