Tory leadership contender Kemi Badenoch may not have won but she's kickstarted backlash against woke nonsense – Kenny MacAskill MP

The ‘woke debate’ has exploded onto the Tory election contest. Until now the issue has largely been confined to a small number of people with the vast majority of the general public having no clue and less interest.

Former Conservative leadership candidate Kemi Badenoch, a former equalities minister, stood on an 'anti-woke' platform (Picture: Jonathan Hordle/ITV via Getty Images)

But that’s going to change, and the direction of travel’s only going to be in one direction – to roll back much of the woke nonsense.

The self-ID debate’s now public and the consequences whether in sport or single-sex spaces are becoming clear. Anger will grow as the consequences are realised and it’s the public who’ll be demanding that sanity prevails and that protections are provided for women, as well as dignity and respect.

None of that is transphobic as the rights of all must be protected but that includes women as much as transgender people.

The absurdity of mothers being described as “pregnant persons” was exposed by defeated Tory leadership contender Kemi Badenoch. Her testimony was much more credible than that of Penny Mordaunt who appears to have either tacitly supported or failed to object to such arrant nonsense. The nomenclature, the invented language, is a mixture of the laughable and the Orwellian. But it’s the physical and practical manifestations that are much more worrying.

However, Badenoch has let the genie out the bottle and the rollback will begin. Recently my wife and I made a day trip to the Isle of Wight. As Tory a place as they come, you’d think. I was therefore gobsmacked to find that the public toilets on Shanklin promenade had been converted to unisex ones. Entering them, a lady a few years older than me was departing and clearly was not happy. Other ladies outside were also expressing anger, if not disgust.

I can fully understand their views as I found them off-putting and it must be worse for females. This was a lovely summer’s day with crowds, but what would it be like on a dark winter’s night with the place deserted? I very much doubt the old lady, or indeed the other women, were transphobes. Frankly, I doubt the former would even have known what the word was.

But the rollback has started and I would wager the toilets in Shanklin will be changed, and rightly so.

Kenny MacAskill is Alba Party MP for East Lothian