A Lavatory Tsar? Another gimmick that would be utterly self-defeating

When you play the game of thrones you win or die, in this case of embarrassment. His Majesty’s Government has been mocked over the notion of appointing its own dedicated Lavatory Tsar.

Yes, that’s right. A Lavatory Tsar. Comparisons have been drawn with John Major’s “cones hotline”, long considered the gold-standard idea for a government out of ideas, but more than a quarter of a century later it has finally been superseded.

The government has distanced itself from the reports. But you can see why it got such a reaction, given equalities minister Kemi Badenoch has breathtaking form in this area. The most embarrassing thing I personally have ever witnessed, and from among a true embarrassment of riches, was at the launch of Ms Badenoch’s attempt to become the Conservative Party leader. In the atrium outside a hired room, a member of her staff had been told to scrawl the words MEN and WOMEN on two sheets of A4 paper and stick them with Sellotape to the doors of the toilets. This was her actual pitch to become the actual prime minister.

The notion was floated alongside a Badenoch pledge to require that all new buildings are fitted with single-sex toilets. For this and so many other reasons, the policy seems more than a little bit misguided. There are memorials all over Eastern Europe to testify that tsars, historically speaking, have not always respected the boundaries of their office. Appointing a tsar to uphold the system of single-sex toilets seems fraught with peril.

One does, of course, mock the Lavatory Tsar with a real sense of foreboding. The most recent poll indicates that 56 per cent of women do not like the idea of unisex toilets. And so, if you have the temerity to take the mickey out of the LavatoryTsar, you do run the risk of being told that you don’t care about the safety of women.

But is it at all possible, perhaps, to think that the safety of women is a serious issue and that the appointment of a Lavatory Tsar is not a serious answer? That perhaps, in a country weighed down by as many terrifying problems as ours currently has, the prime minister should not be going out of his way to let people think he is spending his time coming up with ideas like the creation of a Lavatory Tsar? That ideally, a serious answer to a serious problem should not be one that seems custom-made to invite ridicule?

A serious proposal would not, for example, have people asking: “Who is going to be the Lavatory Tsar? Sir Peter Bottomley?” Or congratulating the prime minister for finally putting the Tory into lavatory. Or, as has happened several times, pointing out that the answer to the question is probably not to create the kind of job that feels like it has been lifted straight from the noble pantheon of ritualised humiliation in the workplace. Just like apprentices on building sites are customarily sent to the warehouse for a “long weight”, the fortunate holder of the title would be free to walk around Whitehall telling people, “I’m the loo-tsar. I’m the loo-tsar. Look at me, I’m the loo-tsar.”

More to the point, do we not already have a Lavatory Tsar? What is Rishi Sunak if not the Lavatory Tsar? Our rivers and seas are awash with sewage, and millions upon millions of people can feel their hopes and dreams being flushed down the toilet. We are hoping – if not, by this point, praying – that our little Lavatory Tsar (an unelected one, too) might have some big ideas about how to turn it all around. To get us, for want of a better term, back on dry land. News that the big idea at the moment is a Lavatory Tsar is more than a little bit terrifying.

At the heart of this particular bit of the culture war on which Badenoch seeks to capitalise is the concern that men pretending to be trans women will use women’s toilets and put women in danger. Of course, the outlawing of single-sex toilets does absolutely nothing to address that alleged problem, but in any event, you would have to hope that Badenoch will eventually realise that if you’re going to appoint an all-powerful tsar to police the nation’s toilets, and particularly the gender of people using them, you are surely going to need a tsarina as well.

More generally, the problem with this full-throated embrace of the culture war is that it’s all been done too late. In the late Obama and then the early Trump period, clowns on the internet made politics out of identity because the longest economic bull run in history provided the cover to do so.

But it’s not so easy to make politics out of toilets when no one can pay their rent or their mortgage or get a doctor’s appointment, and they’re homeschooling their kids – again – while the teachers go on strike. It’s even more ridiculous than making politics out of frogmarching asylum seekers on and off a barge that’s self-evidently not fit for human habitation. Who knows, perhaps the Lavatory Tsar would have found the legionnaires’ disease on board Bibby Stockholm before it became yet another international embarrassment.

Even the notion of such an appointment is, quite clearly, only the latest advertisement that the government doesn’t have any serious answers to any of the very serious problems – only a short list of stunts that have all become entirely self-defeating.