‘If I Had Raped Her, I Would have At Least Remembered It’: Inside the Westminster Sexual Misconduct Scandal

An environment of hyper-masculinity, a culture of staying silent to advance and protect careers and a backlash against the ‘Me Too’ movement – Adam Bienkov, Sian Norris and Sascha Lavin lift the lid on an endemic crisis at the heart of British politics 

“I genuinely think Westminster is beyond saving now,” Tara O’Reilly, a former Labour Party staffer who left Parliament after speaking out about the abusive and predatory behaviour so many young women still suffer there, told this newspaper. “It’s literally diseased and I don’t think there is the political will on any side of the political spectrum to change it.”

O’Reilly entered Westminster as an idealistic, young working-class woman who was determined to make a real difference. After starting as a parliamentary researcher for a Labour MP, she quickly became a rising star in the party. Hoping to change the political culture that had excluded so many people from backgrounds like hers, she set up a cross-party organisation designed to help young women from all backgrounds get their foot inside the Palace.

But after years of witnessing and experiencing abusive and harassing behaviour from male colleagues and MPs, O’Reilly said she became completely “burned out”.

“It’s so sad,” she told Byline Times. “I set up Women in Westminster to try and help women get into positions like the one I was in… but I absolutely wouldn’t advise women to work in Parliament now.”

She describes life in Westminster as “lawless” with the sort of sexually abusive behaviour practiced by some men within the Palace dismissed by senior figures as “just politics”.

“If you really wanted to, you could get away with pretty much anything,” she said. “I remember a few years ago, when I was working in Westminster, an MP who had been accused of rape at the time came over to speak to the journalist who I was having a coffee with. And he immediately, when he was introduced to me, made these jokes about what he was accused of having done. He was saying things like ‘if I’d done it, if I had raped her, I would have at least remembered it’. And that was the moment where I was just like, ‘yeah Westminster is done for me’.”

For sexual predators who work in Parliament, young ambitious staffers can seem like the perfect target. Unlike some workplaces, where staff are actively encouraged to speak out, young women in Parliament are often pressured into keeping quiet.

“You are inadvertently, and also often quite directly, told to keep your mouth shut”, O’Reilly said. “You are told that it will affect your career, and that it will ruin the reputation of the party that you’re trying to get elected. I was repeatedly told that ‘you’re going to make the Labour Party look bad and you’re going make Parliament look bad’ and ‘you really care about democracy, don’t you Tara?’.”

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