In April 2021, Pink News – the radical, pro-trans, pro-LGBTQ+ magazine – published a good news story for its readers. For years it had been campaigning about the use of non-gay actors to play gay roles. And it had just learnt a new stage production of The Danish Girl was about to be produced, in which all the main parts would be handed to transgender performers.
The show’s writer claimed that ‘inspired by discussions with our consultants and casts, we are committed to telling a joyful trans story’.
The production’s lead actress, L. Morgan Lee, described how ‘this creative team has taken the time to truly see the artists they work with. They are committed to telling this story using not only a trans woman to play Lili but a variety of trans people in many of the other roles throughout the show with a cast that reflects the world we live in.’
According to Pink News ‘The Danish Girl rights Eddie Redmayne‘s wrongs’ – a reference to the controversy that accompanied the heterosexual actor’s portrayal of the character on film.
All of which seems like just another bog-standard showbiz story. Except it comes with a twist. Because the writer who had been inspired to pen her inspiring pro-trans story was Katie Lam, the shadow Home Office minister, and putative darling of the Tory New Right.
The very same Katie Lam who created a storm last week by declaring people who had legally been settled in the UK for decades could face deportation, something she claimed would have the benefit of leaving ‘a mostly, but not entirely, culturally coherent group of people’.
Even more bizarrely, the announcement of her embrace – from the pro-trans, pro-DEI side – of one of the British culture war’s most toxic debates came just weeks after she had left government, where she had been working alongside Dom Cummings as Boris Johnson’s deputy chief of staff.
What’s more, Pink News reported a significant proportion of the cost of the production was being underwritten by the taxpayer, as part of a £1.5billion ‘Cultural Recovery Fund’ unveiled in the wake of the pandemic.
The timing of this revelation the Tories’ rising star was happy to see working-class tax receipts funneled into bringing the story of a closeted, trans, Danish landscape gardener to the stage is interesting. And from Lam’s perspective, unfortunate. Because, according to a number of senior Tory MPs I spoke to last week, she has another major production in mind.
‘She’s working with Dom Cummings to bring down Kemi, and replace her as leader after the local elections next year,’ one shadow minister told me. ‘They’ve been plotting together for months.’
Another senior Tory told me: ‘He’s grooming her to be his candidate. It’s a pretty open secret.’
The two alleged conspirators certainly seem to be operating in plain sight. On Thursday Lam and Cummings appeared together at a conference organised by an group called Looking For Growth, at London’s O2. As one journalist observed, Cummings appeared to be ‘the de facto warm-up act for Katie Lam’. For her part, Lam opened her address to the assembled politics nerds and policy wonks with the loyalist message: ‘The Tory Party might not exist in a year’s time. It is beyond the event horizon of death.’
She then diverged from her parliamentary brief by launching into a detailed analysis of the nation’s economic woes, noting ‘we spend more on debt interest than we do on our schools’.
Katie Lam, the shadow Home Office minister, is plotting to replace Kemi Badenoch as leader of the Tories, MPs tell DAN HODGES
To which an objective observer might respond that debt might be lower if the Government wasn’t having to fund performances of obscure, gender-identity Scandi art.
Keen Westminster Kremlinologists have also pointed out that in an interview in The Times last Saturday, Cummings claimed the Tories had to skip a generation and ‘start with young people, you have to start with people who weren’t in the Cabinet last time’.
Then the following day, an ‘anonymous’ source was quoted in The Sunday Times. ‘There’s a feeling that the next leader should be from the next generation,’ says one senior figure from the last Conservative government. ‘We have to decouple from the last 14 years. Whereas Kemi [Badenoch] and [Robert] Jenrick and all these people have been right in it, Katie – or anyone new – offers a glimmer of hope.’
Whoever the mysterious ‘senior figure’ was, Lam’s allies are adamant there is no skulduggery afoot between her and Barnard Castle’s famously myopic tourist. ‘It’s crazy. It’s completely ridiculous,’ one told me.
A spokesman for Lam was equally dismissive. ‘She’s just getting on with her job,’ he told me. ‘She fully supports Kemi and thinks she had a great conference. To say she’s plotting is mad.’
It’s certainly true Lam is suffering from the jealousy of some longer-standing, but lower profile, colleagues. Several have reportedly begun referring to her dismissively as ‘The Showgirl’.
And yet the widespread, and spontaneous, anger that greeted her ‘cultural coherence’ comments is instructive.
Before the Tory’s Manchester conference, Lam’s clumsy intervention would have been dismissed with a shrug, and an acceptance it all formed part of the jockeying preceding Kemi Badenoch’s inevitable removal after next year’s local elections.
Dominic Cummings, former adviser to ex-Prime Minister Boris Johnson, is said to be playing a role in Ms Lam’s mission
But now many Tories think that while the odds remain stacked against them, they are at least back in the fight. And they have little patience for what they see as immature grandstanding.
Especially when it’s coming from a Member of Parliament who has only been in the House 16 months. As one veteran former Cabinet minister observed: ‘Everyone thinks it’s ridiculous that after little more than a year in parliament, in her early 30s with a fairly thin CV before coming here, and after one speech that was noticed, she thinks she is equipped to lead the party, and in such difficult times.’
They have a point. Badenoch’s conference bounce may prove to be of the dead cat variety. But her gutsy performance earned her the right to some breathing space from her more ambitious – and seemingly unself-aware – colleagues.
And even if Badenoch does falter next year, her fall will come too soon for Katie Lam. I recently met her. She’s interesting and engaging. But her political thinking is – understandably – embryonic. And like a number of young politicians, her head has clearly been turned by her first taste of positive publicity.
Which is a shame. Because at some point in the future she may have something to offer to her party and her country.
In the meantime, if she wants to progress there are three things she needs to do. Stick to her brief. Avoid the limelight. Then ditch Dom Cummings and find herself a proper warm-up man. Perhaps Eddie Redmayne is available?
