Good riddance to Rosie Duffield – she was never a good fit for Labour

There's a popular meme taken from an old headline on the satirical news website Clickhole : " Heartbreaking : the worst person you know just made a great point".

People tend to post the headline, or just the picture of the poor stock model they used to illustrate the piece, whenever somebody known for being generally at odds with their values accidentally aligns with them on some issue or other. Trump accidentally said something sort-of progressive? Jeremy Clarkson believes in climate change ? Piers Morgan came out as a Swiftie ? Heartbreaking.

I saw a lot of people using that meme on social media this Saturday evening, when MP for Canterbury Rosie Duffield resigned the Labour whip . In a letter announcing her departure and accompanying profile in the Times , Duffield chastised the government over the pitiful start to its first ten weeks in office, highlighting the acceptance of gifts from donors, as well as the party's stance on winter fuel payments and the two-child benefit cap. She even rebuked them for the treatment of Diane Abbott under the post-Corbyn version of the party.

To be clear, I'm not saying that Labour's first ten weeks have been all that bad . In terms of scandals, a lot of the charges against them have been relatively weak sauce, particularly when compared to the laundry list of ignobilities foisted upon this nation by their predecessors. As far as I'm concerned, there isn't a pair of glasses or football box expensive enough to put Keir Starmer anywhere near the likes of Boris Johnson.

But perception is reality, and the fact is that if enough people are swayed by a "scandal" , then eventually it loses the air quotes. Labour's optics have been a mess these past few weeks, and they're going to need to get their house in order sharpish if they don't want to be set upon by a general public that has become used to prime ministers who only stick around for a month and half.

Duffield, though, is perhaps the worst person affiliated with the party who could have made this point (other than perhaps the ghost of John Stonehouse, a minister under Harold Wilson whose Wikipedia page contains a section titled " Faking own death ").

I lived in Canterbury for several years. It's a strange city – part Tory stronghold and heart of British Protestantism, and part student town where I invented a drink called "Joseph Conrad's Revenge" (it was basically just tequila and Capri Sun). I have a lot of real affection for it – it's where I did my BA and my Masters, it's where I had my first teaching job, and it's where I met a lot of friends I still have today.

So you can probably imagine my glee in 2017, when the city finally elected its first ever non-Conservative MP. I wasn't living there at the time – by that point I'd been barred from all the student pubs and had to abscond to Liverpool – but I'd heard a lot about her. People were really excited for a Labour MP – a woman, no less – to shake things up.

And boy oh boy did she shake things up. Within a few short years Duffield made a name for herself as a major provocateur, mostly due to her stance on transgender issues. While Duffield has described herself as " not anti-trans ", she has refused to recognise the identity of transgender people , has self-identified as " gender critical ", called transwomen "male-bodied biological men", and spoken at conferences by the trans-exclusionary LGB Alliance .

Back in the days when you could see likes on Twitter/X, she was investigated by her former party for liking a tweet which said that trans people are "mostly heterosexuals cosplaying as the opposite sex and as gay". She was also investigated for liking a tweet by Graham Linehan which some viewed as downplaying the persecution of trans people during the Holocaust (the investigation was later dropped ). She caused Labour a lot of headaches, and I wouldn't be surprised if many in the party were happy to see the back of her.

It's also worth pointing out that Duffield has previously abstained on votes to cut the winter fuel payment and ending the two-child benefit cap – both issues which her letter cites as contributing to her departure. Apparently they're issues that she believes in so vehemently that they're worth resigning over, but not actually voting on.

During her time with the party, Duffield made a lot of noise and ruffled a lot of feathers, but didn't really seem to do much else. Like Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema in the US – who were elected on Democratic tickets but ultimately switched to Independent after it became apparent their views did not actually align with the party at all – there's a real question of what Duffield was doing in Labour in the first place.

She calls the party her "natural political home" in her letter, and praises the party ethos of speaking "for those of us without a voice", but if she really does believe in that core tenet she hasn't done much to demonstrate it during her tenure. In my view, she chose instead to belittle and undermine the voiceless by making heinous statements about trans people. I suppose there's nothing stopping her from identifying with whichever party she wishes – we can unpack the irony of that later – but it's still a bit of a headscratcher.