Laura Perrins Double Hypocrisy

[Update at end of post]

The right-leaning part of the punditerati has recently been applauding a new recruit to its ranks: step forward Laura Perrins, co-editor of Conservative Woman, and inexplicably invited on to both BBC Question Time and the paper review panel on The Andy Marr Show (tm). Ms Perrins is much admired for her forthright, if monotonously delivered, views, although her cold and humourless nature is all too obvious.

Laura Perrins (née McGowan)

What all those talking up Ms Perrins are not telling, though, is that she is guilty of rank hypocrisy twice over. Her first foray into the arena of double standards came back in 2013, when she called into then Deputy PM Nick Clegg’s phone-in on LBC. The Mail was ecstatic at the result: “A stay-at-home mother who ambushed Nick Clegg on live radio tore into Coalition family policy last night … Laura Perrins, who gave up work as a barrister to look after her two children, said ministers viewed her role as ‘worthless’”.

That’s a fascinating one, because Ms Perrins had not, it seemed, “given up work”. Indeed, she was, under her maiden name of Laura McGowan, working on The Journal Of Criminal Law, for which she was the legislation editor. Her name is on the Journal’s Criminal Law Legislation Update, which was published in December 2014 - more than a year and a half after she phoned LBC to berate Clegg (and get in the Mail).

It gets worse: a regular Zelo Street source tells that Ms Perrins was also lecturing at UCL Laws during the 2013-14 academic year, where I am told she also called herself Laura McGowan. That Laura McGowan and Laura Perrins are one and the same can be seen from a photo in the Law Society of Ireland Gazette for December 2007.

So far, so hypocritical, but Ms Perrins managed to top that in an article for the Mail bearing her by-line and published earlier this month, with the online headline “There's no shame in being a Mrs! As Miriam kicks up a fuss over being called Mrs Clegg, LAURA PERRINS says the successful 48-year-old lawyer's aggressive feminism does her no favours”. The by-line sneeringly says “By (MRS) Laura Perrins For The Daily Mail”.

After starting with “Well, I hate to say this, but Miriam Clegg might be a bit sensitive. The wife of our former Deputy Prime Minister has gone off the deep end on social media after being invited to an event to mark International Women’s Day - in her married name”, readers are told “I do wonder why it is such an unforgivable crime to take your husband’s surname? I did, though I never think of Perrins as my husband’s name. For me it is now our name - as a family unit that includes our three children”.

So why did Ms Perrins not take her husband’s name when she was still contributing to The Journal Of Criminal Law? And why did she still call herself Laura McGowan when lecturing at UCL Laws? Remember, both of these have come after she made great play out of coincidentally and totally by accident phoning LBC and trowelling on her being a married woman called Laura Perrins. Whoops, another slice of hypocrisy!

What you will not read in all the right-wing cheerleading and spin. Hello Laura Perrins.

[UPDATE 1725 hours: Ms Perrins has responded via Twitter to acknowledge that the person at left in the photo from 2007 is indeed her.

So that's an admission, then. Good to see she is happy with this post]