‘Mumsnetters are deranged when it comes to Meghan’

The Mumsnet founder talks to Julia Llewellyn Smith about extortionate childcare costs, political ambitions and falling in love with someone new after 30 years of marriage

A‘The reaction to the Sussexes reminds me of the Madeleine Mccann story’

‘It gets my goat that women – trans women included – live with this spectre of male violence’

s ever, on Mumsnet, thousands of women are simultaneously discussing every subject imaginable from “Breaking up, how can I sell the house?” to “Am I Being Unreasonable (AIBU)… to think we can’t afford to support Ukraine any more?”

But right now, all these debates are dwarfed by the “Royal family” thread, where dozens of people are analysing the fallout from Prince Harry’s leaked book, Spare. “He has gone after Camilla …” one user has posted – gaining 427 replies in three hours. In 60 minutes, more than 60 people are discussing “how Harry lost his virginity”. Just shy of 500 people are debating whether “Harry and Meghan realise hardly anyone supports them”.

“Ah, Meghan and Harry,” says Mumsnet founder Justine Roberts, 55, wearily. “The reaction to them actually reminds me of the Madeleine Mccann story. People have extraordinarily strong and vitriolic views, way more powerful than I would expect. They are so strongly anti-meghan we’ve had to do what we did with Madeleine Mccann and cobble it into one topic because it seems slightly deranged. Ninety per cent of our content is incredibly supportive, but attention is drawn to the controversial topics, which are very active because people have very strong feelings.”

Mumsnetters, as the site’s eight million unique monthly visitors call themselves, have strong feelings on virtually everything from whether newborns should be helped into a routine (majority verdict: no!), turning on the heating (wear a jumper!) to the nurses’ strikes (generally supportive).

A Mumsnet Q&A has long been mandatory for politicians trying to win “women’s votes”, even if many appear bemused by the sharp questions they have to tackle. “We know 20 per cent of users are undecided [about how to vote], and we know that half of those take a political steer from Mumsnet, so that’s 10 per cent of votes up for grabs, but politicians still tend to slightly underestimate us,” says Roberts. “There is this perennial view that mums are kind of dull and boring and stupid. But I think in some ways Mumsnet has slightly moved the dial on.”

As Mumsnet’s spokesman, Roberts has become the de-facto voice of all women. Tall, in an on-brand Mumsnet blue jumper and jeans, she radiates energy and has her finger on the pulse of what the country thinks.

Earlier this week, she appeared on the Today programme to discuss a super-hot potato: the Prime Minister’s plans to drop his predecessor Liz Truss’s proposals to introduce 20 more free hours of childcare per week.

“We have the highest childcare costs in the developed world; parents are paying on average 29 per cent of their income on childcare, which is just insane,” says Roberts, a mother of four children now aged between 23 and 16, who in their childhood muddled through with a series of au pairs – “some wonderful, some totally incompetent”.

She adds: “Four out of 10 of our users say they couldn’t afford their childcare without either using their savings, going into debt or using family members.

“We haven’t invested enough in what is really vital infrastructure, because without decent childcare loads of women in particular are saying: ‘This just isn’t worth the candle.’ Our latest survey showed one fifth of our users have said they’d be better off giving up work and many are considering giving it up.”

“This is all about the economy,” continues Roberts. She knows what she’s talking about – she used to work in the City. “We’re lamenting the missing millions from our workforce when you’ve got all these women who are trained up to do a role, to be productive, saying, ‘I can’t cope with this anymore. I’m dropping out.’ If they want to be full-time with their family that’s fine, but lots don’t and they don’t want to give up their careers, which have been hard won.”

also During promised Truss’s to relax 44-day rules tenure so one she adult could look after five children, rather than four, as currently allowed, with the goal of eventually abolishing all such regulations completely. “That was not such a good part of her reforms,” says Roberts, with a faint smile. “[Truss] actually floated that idea on Mumsnet in 2013, when she was education minister, and it met with a negative response. There was a very one-sided exchange with her fighting her corner and 360 responses saying ‘This is bats---’, but – in true Liz fashion – she never gave up and carried on thinking it was a great idea. But at least she put childcare on the agenda. Now it has gone off the agenda again and that is very bad news. There might be a feeling among the Conservatives that it’s a domestic matter, and not for them to meddle.”

Johnson’s Roberts responses was unimpressed to her childcare by Boris questions when, earlier this year, she interviewed him for Mumsnet. The then prime minister mused that “maybe you should be able to” use childcare Tumbletots. vouchers “There for was activities no real like understanding of how dire the situation is,” she says. “Even though he knew some of the areas we were going to talk about, he hadn’t really thought about the issues coherently. I think he thought the interview was all going to be a big joke.”

Some were surprised by Roberts’s assertive handling of the interview, kicking off with: “One user would like to know why should we believe anything you say when it’s been proven you’re a habitual liar?

“People were shocked at how direct I was, but I was just reflecting the mood on the site. We asked users for questions and at least half of them were around the issue of trust. It was right in the middle of partygate so I’m not surprised, because people were absolutely furious. They’d followed the rules, sometimes at a great cost, and he’d broken them.”

The exchange was given further edge by the fact Johnson and his then-wife Marina Wheeler were former next-door neighbours of Roberts and her then-husband Ian Katz, former editor of Newsnight and now chief content officer at Channel 4, in Islington, North London. Were they friends? “We weren’t enemies. It was amicable. Boris claimed he used to throw snails over our garden wall. I remember his car was covered in parking tickets and the paps were always outside because he’d committed some new dastardly misdemeanour. It was chaotic.”

Did she consider him prime minister material? “No, because of the chaos! But Boris was always fun and that’s why the public liked him, although by the time of that interview our users were really fed up with him.”

Since those days, Roberts has separated from Katz. They were married for 30 years, until 2019. This is the first time Roberts has spoken about what happened. “I just fell in love – although I don’t want to go in with who,” she says, flushing. “Obviously what happened was not planned or ideal. I wasn’t sitting there thinking ‘I’ve got to get out of [this marriage]’, but,” she says, laughing, “[Love] literally hit me like a tornado. I’m sure menopause has something to do with that – you put your head up a bit from nurturing your children, you’re a little less tired and you think, ‘Actually, I may have half a life left.’ It was subliminal in my case, but I was open to another way of living and another relationship.”

The separation, she says matter-offactly, “was traumatic and disruptive. Because we’re not as a society set up to believe that separation and divorce is anything other than failure.

“[Ian and I] had a fantastic time. I felt I’d had the best of marriages and I wish in a way our society would accept and celebrate that, rather than make people feel they’re failures because their relationship ended after 30-odd years. But I also think there have been some upsides – if you can be civil and put the family first, which we did, it’s possible for both parties to come out and have the rest of their lives and this new exciting experience.”

How have their children taken it? “Great. In many ways they’re seeing the benefits of having two Christmases, things like that,” Roberts says, laughing again. They all have bedrooms in Roberts’ new home.

We’re at Mumsnet’s North London HQ, which is full of long white desks with computer monitors, but is almost entirely deserted. Most of her 70 staff work from home four days a week, with compulsory attendance on Wednesdays. She is in two minds on this. “I can see why a lot of companies have become quite draconian in insisting people come back to the office. It’s especially important for young people – it’s partly about friendships, but also role models, seeing how other people do things.”

On the other hand, Mumsnet has – naturally – always prided itself on its family-friendliness. Roberts, educated at a girls’ private school in Guildford and Oxford, before working first in the City and then as a sports journalist, founded the company in 2000 after a disastrous holiday with her baby twins gave her an idea for a website offering advice for parents on what to buy for their babies – and where to go on family-friendly holidays.

Almost a quarter of a century on, the site is packed with women swapping similar information, but also engaging in wide-ranging debate, usually with wit and erudition. Seventy per cent of users have degrees or equivalents. “It’s a written site so it has a bias towards people who can write,” Roberts says. Yet all income brackets are represented. “There are a lot of people talking about getting universal benefits.”

Despite predating social media, the site has survived the arrival of far mightier behemoths such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. But as Roberts points out, what makes Mumsnet unique is that while users can use nicknames, the site has a rigorous moderation policy. She’s employed more moderators as traffic has risen. “Our average response time, in daytime hours, is under an hour.” Compare that with the social-media giants who are unwilling to publish statistics but anecdotally can take days, or often weeks, to intervene.

Some have argued that one section of the site that should be more vigorously moderated is the “Feminism: Sex and Gender” topic, where a dedicated group discuss transgender politics, with the vast majority taking a “gender-critical” stance – in other words, believing someone’s sex is “biological and immutable”. Their uncompromising posts led to The New York Times describing Mumsnet as “transphobic”, with one transgender rights campaigner describing the site as “Terf [Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist – an insult] Island”. In the fallout, some firms pulled advertising from the site.

Yet Roberts – who points out the site also has a support thread for parents of transgender children – refuses to shut the discussion topic down. “Obviously it’s controversial we allow that discussion, because lots of people would rather we didn’t and I’m sure commercially it’s not been very wise,” she says. “But we’re not owned by private equity, we don’t have to chase profits and our values are that the site is unfiltered – we don’t do that Facebook algorithm thing where you see what you’re interested in. Anything you see is a true and fair discussion. If an opinion is legal we will host it, because that’s the only way of understanding the other side’s point of view.

“Cancelling an opinion that you can’t change sex, which five years ago pretty much everyone would have felt, won’t lead us to compromise. For the majority of our users it’s not the biggest issue on the agenda, it’s a minority who feel very, very, very strongly about it.”

On a personal level, Roberts sighs, “I wish it wasn’t an issue that created so much anger. For me, if you want to choose to be a woman, with all the disadvantages that entails, I’m going to embrace you. But biologically is a trans woman the same as a woman? I would say no.”

Yet, she adds, all this squabbling is missing the bigger point. “There’s this tension because both sides are rightly worried about safety. Trans women feel they are not safe in male spaces because of male violence [if they’re forced, for example, to use male lavatories] and cis [heterosexual] women are nervous about that because they think this might be exploited by violent males. It gets my goat that women – and trans women are included – live with this spectre of male violence and no one politically or otherwise seems to be saying: ‘this is the real issue.’”

As Roberts’s children have grown up, her concerns have become more outward-looking. Fifteen years ago, she says, she’d have posted on the site’s ultra-popular “Am I Being Unreasonable” topic about gender disparity in the home (she once revealed a spreadsheet of domestictask allocation showing she had 65, while Katz had five, including lightbulbs – of which “not many” worked) along the lines of: “AIBU to think that it’s just not good enough for dh [darling husband] to say ‘tell me what to do and I’ll do it’?”

Today, Roberts would ask about the World Cup (she’s a Liverpool fan). “I’d ask ‘AIBU to wonder why this World Cup was held in Qatar when women still need approval from their male guardians to get married there?’”

Mumsnet will keep campaigning on such issues, just as it has previously on such topics as Let Girls Be Girls (to get retailers to stop selling sexualised clothing to children) or We Believe You (a precursor of #Metoo). Other key areas now include the NHS – with Mumsnet’s latest survey showing 13 per cent of users say they can no longer get access to a GP – and inflation. “We have a monthly cost-of-living tracker and it’s grim. People are really struggling to pay their bills, they’re going into their savings and taking on debt to cover everyday items.” Roberts won’t say how she votes, stressing the site is for everyone, but says she’s always been of “a progressive persuasion”. Would she consider a political career?

“I’ve always thought of myself as more of an outside lobbying person,” she says. “But things are getting so bad that I almost feel it’s irresponsible not to use whatever small bit of influence we might have to try and make things better. So I wouldn’t rule [politics] out in the way I used to rule it out. I’m not saying I have any particular skills or talents, but I guess I have a voice.”

Then she wobbles. “Though there is all this awful trolling and nastiness.” AIBU to want Justine Roberts as Prime Minister? I know what the Mumsnetters would say.