Sir Tony and Sir Keir in agreement - John McLellan

Former Labour leader Tony Blair

Who’d have thought? “I’m definitely of the school that says, biologically, a woman is with a vagina and a man is with a penis. I think we can say that quite clearly,” Sir Tony told Holyrood Magazine. It’s a mark of how far politics can leave most people behind that this is newsworthy, and when Sir Tony wondered how “politics got itself into this muddle,” he need look no further than Sir Keir.

He told the Daily Telegraph, “Yes, Tony’s right about that. He put it very well,” but only three years ago insisted it “was not right” to say that only women have a cervix, as his Canterbury MP Rosie Duffield had stated. Despite subsequently revising his view, Ms Duffield was still excluded from Labour’s election campaign launch, even though it was held in her county.

At last week’s Scottish Parliament petitions committee, Labour MSP Monica Lennon stuck to Sir Keir’s previous view by repeatedly referring to “women, and people with a cervix” when speaking in support of a call to provide home testing kits for the human papillomavirus, which can cause cervical cancer.

So what is Labour’s position? I’ll defer to former Edinburgh Labour councillor and senior advisor, and now publishing phenomenon Susan Dalgety who said, “sex is a material reality, only women have a cervix.” Not according to Monica Lennon they don’t.