SARAH VINE: In a modern world filled with wimps, Dame Jenni Murray was an inspiration, an icon, a brave and towering intellect. How sad the BBC chose to hang her out to dry for standing up for women

Courage is a valuable quality in the modern world. The Iranian people are brave and dare to stand against a despicable regime whose brutality knows no bounds. Victims of grooming gangs bravely fight against their tormentors, many of whom still live among them.

Brave are the men and women who have been standing guard 24 hours a day outside the Chinese embassy in London for the past 20 years to protest the mistreatment of Falun Gong and Uyghur Muslims. Volodymyr Zelensky is brave, no need to explain. Alexei Navalny was brave until the moment Putin poisoned him. Extraordinary, all of it.

Most people are not brave. They don’t take a stand, they choose not to rock the boat, they look the other way. They protect their own and their loved ones’ interests and leave the rest to their own devices.

When challenged, they take the path of least resistance, mirroring the views of those who shout the loudest or those who are most powerful for fear of attracting their ire.

On one level this is understandable; On the other hand, this is one of the main reasons why politics is so corrupt and the world is in such a terrible state. Moral cowardice is a contagious disease and spreads easily through social media. This is why 20 percent of college students say they would not share a home with a Jewish student; This is why Parliament voted to allow the killing of full-term babies in the womb. This nonsense is very hard to resist and not everyone has the stomach to handle it.

That’s why I have great admiration for Ayaan Hirsi Ali, JK Rowling, Salman Rushdie, Douglas Murray, Nimco Ali and many more. like that He prepared to swim against the current. They are the ones risking their sanity and safety against pitchforks.

Dame Jenni Murray was brave in this regard. I was very sad when I learned that he died on Friday evening, at the age of 75. Her health had not been good since she quit or was fired from her job as the iconic presenter of the once-great Woman’s Hour (now better known as ‘Waking Hour’); It’s a sloppy, dreary mess of self-congratulatory, self-spun nonsense that no sane person would probably listen to unless someone shoved an electric tampon up their vagina.

Dame Jenni’s health hasn’t been the best since she either quit or was sacked from her job as the iconic presenter of the once-great Woman’s Hour.

For 30-odd years he presided over a highly professional show with his own unique style. He had one of the best voices on radio, a soothing and calming voice and an interview style that often produced surprising results. He had a natural authority that made him more than a touch intimidating; but being quite vulnerable himself (he was very candid about his personal and emotional struggles) he was never cruel.

He knew how to get the best out of people, and that was because he was something rare in publishing: not a raging narcissist. He was speaking to people on the basis that it was them, not him, that the listener wanted to hear. She was just the presenter, the channel, not the star, not in his mind anyway – again, anyone who reads her memoirs suspects that this is the legacy of a mother who always belittled her and for whom she never quite got the love she craved.

But Murray still didn’t leave himself behind. He could be extremely harsh when the situation called for it, mostly when speaking to formidable women like Margaret Thatcher and Hillary Clinton; but her interview with Joan Baez in the late 1980s was pure emotion, with Dame Jenni describing herself as ‘crying on the inside’.

She was brave because she was a trailblazing woman in a male-dominated industry (she joined BBC Radio Bristol as a copy boy in 1973 and was presenting Newsnight in 1983), whose hard work and professionalism paved the way for future generations of women in broadcasting and journalism.

Jenni Murray was made Commander of Women by the Queen at Buckingham Palace in 2011.

Dame Jenni’s bravest point was probably her defense of women, especially the vulnerable, and her stance on the immutability of biological sex, writes Sarah Vine.

He was bold in his presentation style; He was asking questions that no one else dared to ask, such as why Monica Lewinsky never asked them. HE the dry-cleaned dress and what Thatcher thought of Mitterrand’s famous (possibly apocryphal) comment about the Iron Lady having ‘the eyes of Caligula and the lips of Marilyn Monroe’.

She was brave when she announced on-air that she had been diagnosed with breast cancer in 2006, and continued to share details of her treatment with her viewers as part of her mission to ‘explain’ the disease.

But her bravest point was probably her defense of women, especially the vulnerable, and her stance on the immutability of biological sex.

There are many who now boldly embrace this so-called “gender critical” view, but when she entered the fray in 2017 with an article in The Sunday Times under the headline “Be trans, be proud but don’t call yourself a real woman”, even acknowledging such a notion was seen as blasphemous by trans activists fueled by a quasi-religious belief in their cause.

Like all ideologues and fanatics, radical trans people had, and in many cases still have, no logic. If you disagree with their belief that a woman can have a penis, then you’re not only wrong, you’re evil. This is their version of sharia law and non-believers should be punished. That’s why most people are giving up, including Prime Minister Keir Starmer, the leader of the Green Party and many others. It’s easier to argue the truth.

Murray’s article was beautifully written and measured, but he forgot one thing: You can’t reason with bigots. Their minds are so full of anger that they don’t have the capacity to handle any intellectual challenge, so they resort to the only thing they understand: intimidation. It’s like arguing with a hurricane: you’re bound to get flattened.

Murray could have avoided this if he had gone back to his box. But she was not an unconventional woman. She not only objected to the idea that gender is fluid, but also to the manipulation of the semantics of femininity, and particularly to the outrageous use of the word ‘cis’ and silly expressions such as ‘pregnant people’.

She advocated for single-sex spaces for biological women, arguing that although trans women were within their rights to live and appear as women, it was impossible for them to truly understand what this meant because they had no experience of growing up as women in a fundamentally patriarchal society.

Her refusal to give in to the trans mafia ultimately led to the end of her long and distinguished BBC career. Having given her entire life to the Company, it hung her out to dry, banned her from discussing transgender rights, and claimed that her views violated the company’s neutrality rules. Neutrality rules that strangely do not apply so strictly to other (male) presenters such as Gary Lineker.

Was he injured? Actually yes, deep down I think it was. When I spoke to him after all this he was still shocked not only by the lack of loyalty shown by the BBC but also by the level of harsh criticism he had received. I think she understood, as did many of the women who fell afoul of this gang, that at the root of it all was a deep-rooted misogyny, a visceral hatred of women, and especially of strong, brave and intelligent women like Murray.

It was a great privilege for me to know him. He was an inspiration, an icon, and a great mind. I hope he punishes them all well in heaven. ‘So Mary, tell me: How did your husband Joseph react when you first told him that you were pregnant by the Holy Spirit…?’

Read Dame Jenni’s latest Daily Mail column here