Inside parliament’s ‘summer of sex’ | Cindy Gallop & Cleo Watson
Coffee House Shots
The Spectator
4.4 • 2.2K Ratings
🗓️ 16 April 2026
⏱️ 23 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
It is a hard time to be a Labour MP. The polls are flagging, the economy is stagnating and the Middle East remains in crisis. But facing electoral armageddon in three weeks’ time, one brave backbencher has taken it up on herself to raise her party’s spirits. Samantha Niblett, the Honourable Member for South Derbyshire, is launching a campaign to make 2026 the ‘summer of sex’.
On today's podcast, Tim Shipman and James Heale make sense of the story with Cindy Gallop, the sextech entrepreneur who's working with Niblett on the campaign, and Cleo Watson, former special adviser and author of novels Whips and Cleavage.
Produced by Megan McElroy.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to Coffee House. I'm Tim Shipman, the political edge of The Spectator. Now, people, I have been a journalist for 29 years. I have been writing about British politics for 25. I have covered eight general elections. Four US presidential elections. I've interviewed five, six prime ministers. |
| 0:24.4 | I've interviewed a US president. I have covered more leadership elections than you can shake a stick at. |
| 0:29.5 | But today, ladies and gentlemen, we are talking about sex toys in politics. |
| 0:35.0 | And I'm delighted to be joined by a saucy gang of co-conspirators. My deputy, Mr. James |
| 0:43.3 | Hill, is here, a man who loves a big poll. I'm joined also by Cleo Watson, author of Wips and Cleavage, |
| 0:53.4 | two very entertaining and slightly lubricious novels about British |
| 0:57.6 | politics, former deputy chief of staff in Number 10 Downing Street during the Boris Johnson |
| 1:02.6 | years, where it's fair to say, sex and politics did merge from time to time. And the star guest |
| 1:08.6 | is Cindy Gallup, sex influencer and advisor to Samantha Niblett, |
| 1:13.7 | the Labour MP who has said we must have a summer of sex. So we're going to get to the bottom |
| 1:20.9 | of this very important issue. Cindy, welcome. Just explain to our viewers and listeners what a sex influencer is and how you got roped into this campaign. What's it all about? |
| 1:32.2 | Sure. So I'm actually a sex tech entrepreneur. I'm the founder and CEO of Make Love Not Porn, which I've been running for 17 years, came about because I date younger men and realised all those years |
| 1:45.7 | ago when we don't talk openly honest about sex, porn becomes sex education by default in not a good |
| 1:51.6 | way. So Make Love Not Porn is the documentary to Porn's Hollywood movie, a window onto the wonderful |
| 1:57.6 | sex we all really have in the real world. And I recently launched Make Love Not Porn.Dot Academy due to parent-teacher demand, which is the |
| 2:06.8 | zero to 18 and beyond sex education extension of what we do. |
| 2:11.5 | So I've been encouraging people to talk openly, healthy and educationally about sex for a very long time. I came into contact with |
| 2:20.8 | Samantha Niblett, actually on a completely different front, because for the past year, I've been |
| 2:26.6 | very involved in the LinkedIn resistance, challenging a LinkedIn algorithm change that was actually |
| 2:32.9 | suppressing the work of women and female founders. |
| 2:37.0 | Samantha is spearheading Labour's Women in Tech Initiative. She reached out because of that. |
| 2:42.4 | And when we talked about the work that I do, I found she was completely like-minded about the |
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