ONE VERY PUSHY LADY
Kate Maltby’s daddy is a banker who dated Ann Widdecombe, and a family friend of the minister she accuses of touching her knee. ANDREW PIERCE profiles a woman determined to make it in politics — whatever the cost Oh please, Kate, spare us the poor little
ON HER own website, Kate Maltby boasts about her impeccable credentials as an ‘intellectual historian and scholar’. She says her main interest is Elizabethan literature, using her ‘background in Greek and Latin to trace the history of ideas and stories from Homer to Shakespeare’.
How strange, therefore, that when she wrote an article for The Times newspaper last year, she began with the sentence: ‘I am standing in the lobby of the Library of Congress in Washington DC, stripped down to my underwear.’
Its subject was the corset, and how modern women were using them as ‘waist trainers’ to improve posture in the way women did a century ago. Miss Maltby was photographed in such a corset to accompany the feature, having worn one for a month.
The piece was met with incredulity by some. ‘ Not so much an intellectual historian as a media butterfly desperate to be noticed,’ one historian noted waspishly.
This, then, is the 31-year- old woman who is now being accused of betraying her family friend Damian Green.
Yet some wonder why she didn’t accuse the minister of having had a wandering hand when, three weeks ago, she wrote for the American news network CNN about the serial sexual predator Harvey Weinstein. Of the Hollywood mogul, she wrote: ‘Wherever we come from, all women know a Harvey Weinstein. He’s the guy a few tiers up from us at work — usually a few decades older — who offers to help talk up our promotion prospects in-house as he puts a hand on our knee.’
Note Maltby’s mention of the word ‘knee’. Surely this was the perfect opportunity for her to reveal how she had once been victim of a wandering hand on her own knee.
What makes this story doubly troubling is that Damian Green was an Oxford University contemporary and friend of Kate Maltby’s mother, Victoria.
Maltby’s multi- millionaire banker father, Colin, was also the first and only love of Ann Widdecombe, the former Tory MP, whom he met at Oxford.
In his only interview about his three- year relationship with Widdecombe, he said: ‘She swept into a fancy-dress party wearing saucy shorts — before being carried out by a reveller dressed as a gorilla. She was different — she was distinctive. She was always her own person and still is.’
To this day, Mr Maltby and his wife remain friends with Widdecombe, attending her 50th and 60th birthday parties. Widdecombe knows their daughter Kate, too.
The young journalist was at the launch of her autobiography, Strictly Ann, in 2013, and went with her parents to the Royal Opera House to see Widdecombe perform in La Fille Du Regiment, a comic opera, the same year.
Widdecombe, asked about Kate Maltby’s attack on Damian Green, flatly refused to comment and hung up the telephone.
But a friend said: ‘Colin and Victoria will be absolutely aghast by what Kate has done. They are good and decent people who eschew publicity.
‘ They are still friends with Damian and his wife. I’m tempted to say what was she thinking about. But we know that. She was thinking about Kate Maltby.’
Kate was brought up in Geneva, Switzerland, before the family moved back to Britain and into their £5 million home in Holland Park, West London. Kate, a highlystrung teenager, dropped out of Cheltenham Ladies’ College and moved to the £ 25,000- a- year St Paul’s Girls’ School.
Once asked about her childhood political hero, she named Michael Portillo. She explained that as an 11-year-old Tory in 1997, she was devastated by New Labour’s landslide General Election victory — telling schoolfriends it ‘would lead to the end of Western civilisation’.
She added: ‘Then I went home to my bedroom and pinned up a newspaper photo of the new last hope of the liberal Tory Party: Michael Portillo, who had just lost his seat.’ When she was 16, she edited the school newspaper and one of first interviewees was the then shadow education minister, Damian Green. Family strings were pulled to secure the interview.
After school she went to Oxford to study Classical Languages and Literature, but dropped out to go to Yale University in the U.S.
She later secured a doctorate in English Language and Literature at University College, London.
She was engaged, but the relationship didn’t work out. (In 2014, she said ‘I’m mad enough to have chosen not to have sex outside marriage. As a feminist, I value marriage because it protects the rights of women.’)
Keen to make her mark in politics, in 2010 she helped set up a new centrist Conservative thinktank, Bright Blue. Green was an enthusiastic supporter, so their paths crossed once more. One prominent former champion of Bright Blue is Theresa May. In 2012, Maltby moved into a £1.3 million flat in Notting Hill, the spiritual home of the young modernising Tories who propelled David Cameron to the leadership in 2005. She bought the flat, now worth around £2 million, with no mortgage.
While she was in Notting Hill, the ambitious Maltby targeted Samantha Cameron, the then Prime Minister’s wife, who still regularly socialised in the area.
There were emails and invitations from Maltby for coffee and drinks. One member of the now defunct Notting Hill set recalled: ‘She was relentless and persistent in courting Mrs Cameron and others. We all got bombarded with emails and calls from her after she just sort of appeared in our midst. But I’m afraid there was something not quite right. I wasn’t sure we could ever fully trust her.
‘Sam was certainly not interested in having her as a friend. We came to see her as a bit of a political groupie. We were nice but distant, and in the end she gave up.’
Two years ago Maltby, who is trying to carve out a career as a TV historian and critic, demonstrated her flair for self-promotion when she broke the strict protocol that governs theatre critics by reviewing Benedict Cumberbatch’s Hamlet for The Times almost three weeks ahead of the agreed embargoed date.
The anger was led by the actor Samuel West, who tweeted: ‘Really shoddy journalism for The Times to review the first preview of Hamlet. Breaks all boundaries of protocol, taste and art. Bad form.’
Apparently relishing the row, she defended her actions on Radio 4’s Today programme.
A regular columnist in the Guardian, she has used its pages to attack the Brexit Secretary David Davis. She also launched a lacerating attack on the CNN website against Prince William and the Duchess of Cambridge for flying to Poland to ‘suck up to the country’s government’ to try to help the Brexit process.
She went on to criticise the notion of ‘hereditary rank, hereditary political power and privilege; before concluding grandly: ‘The United States abolished these in 1776. Many in Britain would like to do the same.’
Last night, a Tory source said: ‘I feel sorry for her because she is desperate to be well known. At parties, she is the one who always presses too close to the person she’s decided can be the most use to her.
‘But she’s really messed up now, burnt her bridges with the Tory Party with that flimsy article, and in the process caused huge upset, and ruptured some long-standing family friendships.
‘She might be more careful the next time she’s asked to write a piece trashing a decent man.’
‘I wasn’t sure we could ever fully trust her’ She pursued social contact with SamCam
Kate Maltby believes that, in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein scandal, Westminster has become a far more unpleasant place. She is not wrong there, only she fails to realise that she is part of the poison, and not the fearless and glorious solution to the problem, as she so fondly imagines. For the journalist, political activist and self-styled ‘outspoken feminist’ is the latest young woman to step forward and accuse a senior politician of making sexual advances towards her. a man who is, incidentally, a close family friend of hers, and who tried to help the ambitious Maltby with her nascent career as a political writer. In an article published in the times, Miss Maltby claims that in 2015, current Deputy Prime Minister Damian Green almost put his hand on her leg. almost! ‘I felt a fleeting hand against my knee — so brief it was almost deniable,’ writes Miss Maltby, in rampant pearl- clutching mode. ‘ Damian,’ she wails in retrospect, ‘ you probably have no idea of how awkward, embarrassed and professionally compromised you made me feel.’ She goes on to describe how Green passed on some Westminster gossip and explained that his ‘wife was very understanding’. From this, she deduced he was attempting to misuse his position and authority for sexual purposes. Well, maybe he was. and maybe he wasn’t. Yet if this was the case, Green was remarkably nonchalant about his desire. Maltby did not hear from him for over a year. He was, it seems, spurred into action by seeing a newspaper photograph of her in a corset — to illustrate a scholarly article on Victorian underwear. When Green sent a cheery text suggesting a drink — her assumptions about his actions were clear. Clearly driven mad with lust by the sight of the 31-year-old in a lace-up bodice and lumpy leggings, Green had only one thing on his mind. the brute! So she ‘actively ignored him’ until this June, when he was suddenly promoted to Deputy PM in theresa May’s new government. the fact that Green was suddenly hugely important did not escape the single-minded Miss Maltby, who put the trauma of what had happened behind her and began texting him again. ‘I look forward to seeing what you achieve in government,’ she chirped, which seems to make a mockery of her previous angst. She explains away her hypocrisy by writing that ‘it’s crucial to understand that most of us have to maintain relationships with such men in order to thrive professionally’. Is that so? and all this, more or less, is the absolute crux of Maltby’s allegations against the 61-year-old married father of two. Yet in the febrile atmosphere now engulfing Westminster, this is all it takes to potentially bring down a career. this very public humiliation has left Green fighting for his political life, but when one analyses Maltby’s disingenuous article, exactly what is it that Damian Green stands accused of? Nothing that would hold water in court. Maltby’s timid allegations are little barbs couched in screeds of the velvety self-justification of someone who appears to be just as guilty of assiduously using Green for her own ends. She casts herself as the victim, bravely asking bold new questions about the abuse of power for sexual gratification, but all she provides to back up her case are nudges and winks.
In her article, she writes that on the Night of the Knee, Green, a university contemporary of her mother, ‘offered me career advice and in the same breath made it clear he was sexually interested’.
Really?
Do go on. Yet she doesn’t tell us what he said or did that was so desperately, explicitly suggestive — and in the circumstances, don’t you think she should? Neither does she provide any evidence that he pestered or pursued her over the years, because he so clearly did not.
Yet the way she enthusiastically smears the minister without really making the case against him is contemptible. She even asks herself at one point, did I imagine this? Well, Kate — did you?
In describing their past relationship, she calls Green ‘ avuncular’. Certainly, he seems to have been nothing but kind and helpful over the years; agreeing to be interviewed for her school magazine, helping with her career, giving her advice when called upon. She felt angry that his so- called assault ruined their developing ‘ meaningful political relationship’ — which seems to be a rather deluded estimation of her own value to a government minister.
Perhaps Green is not entirely innocent. Perhaps he did have a clumsy, misplaced interest in this young woman, but does he deserve such a fate, splashed across the front page of a newspaper, blared on television bulletins?
Maltby serves up death by innuendo, the repeated stiletto insinuations of an accuser who is protected by the kryptonite shield of feminism. In this brave new world, every man is a predator, every woman is a victim and every clumsy pass or wandering hand is conflated with serious sexual assault and even rape.
Is it really that simple? Maltby is an intelligent young woman who is not afraid to use all her charms to get herself noticed. She once wrote that she loved wrap dresses because they were ‘the right armour to take on the world’, and also that she uses her ‘good curves to distract from the bad ones’.
No sin in that, but it suggests the kind of sophisticated woman who has an acute understanding of sexual politics and appearances.
two years ago, she went to Jordan to interview oppressed Syrian women who live in fear in refugee camps there; women — she reported — who are called sluts, forced to marry and scared to go to the loo for fear of being raped.
One might have hoped meeting these survivors of major trauma could have given her some perspective and context on real female suffering. Yet for young women like Maltby, it appears the inviolability and sanctity of self overrides everything, even common sense.
Was it that same self-entitlement that enabled her to text the man she claims once molested her, embarrassed her, made her feel awful about herself?
How else to explain all this?
ALL
Sensible people feel strongly that sex abusers should be called to account, in Westminster or elsewhere. Yet I don’t believe that the current ferment is helping matters.
Yes, the alleged rape of a young activist at a Labour event — she said her attacker was a senior party official — is deeply disturbing.
But elsewhere, many young women, just like Maltby, are making a big fuss about nothing very much. the drive to shame men at all costs makes them sound a little too excited, more pleased with the exhilarating sound of their own daring ‘me, too’ contribution to this furore than serious consideration of the issues at stake.
It conflates real abuse with gropers, real victims with modish, selfseeking opportunists, it condemns clammy opportunism and demicreeps with the kind of fervour that should be reserved for rapists and serial sex offenders.