Now even Sir Alan Duncan turns on Stonewall

Covid has meant it’s been a tough old year for the charity sector – but few have had it worse than Stonewall. Accused of misrepresenting the law, pilloried by its co-founder Matthew Parris and facing an exodus of Whitehall departments from its diversity scheme, the LGBT rights organisation has few allies left.

Now even Sir Alan Duncan, the second-rate politician turned third-rate diarist, has turned his guns on the charity – despite being heralded on Stonewall’s website as the first openly gay Conservative MP. The ex-Rutland and Melton Tory, whose memoirs fired more shots at his colleagues than a Maxim gun, mounted a rare defence of the government’s decision to withdraw funding from Stonewall’s diversity programme. He told Bright Blue’s magazine Centre Write:

I think some of the Stonewall agenda has become so apart from what one might call mainstream thinking; they’ve become a bit odd. I don’t see the decisions on Stonewall as anti-LGBT at all.