Tom Harris at the Telegraph on Duffield v Starmer:

Starmer only became an MP in 2015, but was already talked about as a future leader, despite his lack of campaigning or political experience. It is the complaint most often heard from Labour politicians and ex-politicians: he’s just not that political.

This lack of political skills nearly condemned him to political oblivion just one year after being elected leader of his party, with the loss of the Hartlepool by-election. Sitting governments winning a seat from the official opposition half-way through a parliament is a strange and rare event. Fortunately for Starmer, the Conservative Party came to his aid with a series of fratricidal misjudgments, dispensing of two prime ministers and gifting the next election to the Labour Party without its needing to make much effort to win.

But Duffield has exposed Labour’s victory for what it really was: a vote of no confidence in all the political parties, but one from which Labour happened to be in a position to benefit.

It would be a huge mistake for the party to now ignore Duffield, but it is also likely. Keir Starmer is thin-skinned – another weakness – and has refused on a number of occasions even to acknowledge Duffield’s existence. The woman who in 2017 won Labour’s only seat in Kent was condemned to the political wilderness by a man peeved to be called out on his previous naïve and ill-informed acceptance of trans ideology. 

Some men – grown-ass adult men at that – are astonishingly thin-skinned about women who disagree with them.

Yet when Starmer himself slowly and painfully reneged on the catechism that “trans women are women”, he could not bring himself to acknowledge that Duffield had been right all along. During the general election campaign, he attributed his conversion to the realities of biological science (“Men have penises and women have vaginas”, apparently) to Tony Blair. 

First rule of Boys’ Club: find a man to credit.