Opinion: Women in high places have closed ranks around Laurence Westgaph for too long

Today’s weekend read is a personal reflection on the investigation we published a week ago about the historian Laurence Westgaph and the decision by National Museums Liverpool to hire – and later retain – him as a historian in residence. It is written by Chantelle Lunt, a civil rights campaigner and the founder of Merseyside Alliance for Racial Equality. If you have more information about this story, please get in touch.

I first met Laurence Westgaph in the summer of 2020, not too long after George Floyd’s murder. I was new to the activist scene at the time, and I’d been told Westgaph was someone I must work with if I wanted to advocate for Black lives in Merseyside. He wasn’t just a historian, but a key figure in the L8 community, well-respected and well-connected.

Often regarded as the heart of Black life in Liverpool, L8 was where the oldest Black community in Europe settled following the abolition of slavery. For more than ten generations, the people who lived there faced marginalisation, oppression, and police brutality. That small, tight-knit community – which led the 1981 uprisings known as the Toxteth Riots – was understandably wary of outsiders. Although I was born in L8 and had lived there briefly, I wasn’t considered to be truly from L8, because I had grown up in Knowsley. So, despite being Black, I was treated with suspicion by some in the community.

That summer, I attended one of Westgaph’s popular walking tours devoted to the history of Liverpool’s role in the slave trade, and interviewed him for a social media post for one of the activist groups I was working with at the time. While it was clear he knew his Black history, two things struck me about him that I hadn’t expected. The first was the surprising fact that his tours were attended primarily by older white people. The second was just how guarded he was. I couldn’t quite put my finger on why, but he regarded me with the same cautious air I had encountered when I was a police officer, off duty, and told people what I did for a living. I don’t think I’m merely projecting backwards when I say that Westgaph felt to me like he was a man with something to hide.

This was the same summer that Westgaph was hired for the prestigious position as National Museums Liverpool’s (NML) historian in residence. Janet Dugdale, then a senior executive at the organisation, said in a press release that his hiring was “an important action to help us achieve our promise to be anti-racist”. When the museums shared the news on social media, their comments sections were flooded with criticisms: Westgaph had convictions for the statutory rape of a 15-year-old girl in 2000, as well as for assault causing grievous bodily harm in 2009. NML is now under fresh scrutiny after The Post revealed that they worked with him from 2020 to 2024 despite knowing about those past convictions, and in the face of fresh warnings and allegations of sexual misconduct from museum staff. The Post’s investigation has sent shockwaves across the city, with many questioning how one of the biggest cultural institutions in the country had hired an alleged serial abuser and looked the other way when its own staff raised concerns.

But back in 2020, the online critics of Westgaph’s hiring were harshly rebuked by some local Black leaders, particularly regarding the statutory rape charge. Some believed that revisiting a nearly 20-year-old case was nothing more than an attempt by the far-right to derail one of the biggest civil rights movements the country had ever seen. Sonia Bassey MBE – a decorated community leader and then-chair of the museums’ RESPECT group, of which Westgaph was also a member – engaged with critics of NML’s tweet, dismissing the accusations as defamation against a Black man.

It felt like a message was being sent to Liverpool’s Black community: that this wasn’t a moment to break ranks. Surely a woman as high profile as Bassey would not risk her career and her many accolades to defend this man if he wasn’t innocent? Surely the most high-profile arts, media and cultural organisations in the city would not risk their reputations on this man if he were dangerous? I knew there must have been something beyond the shocking quotes and headlines that I was missing.

The judge’s acknowledgement that a 15-year-old whom Westgaph met in a nightclub “gave every impression” of being older – combined with his lenient community sentence – fuelled the narrative that he had been treated unfairly. A ‘reasonable belief’ defence for statutory rape, where a defendant can avoid conviction if they can prove that they reasonably believed the child was 16 or older, was only introduced under Section 9 of the 2003 Sexual Offences Act, years after Westgaph’s conviction. This legislative shift created a window for Westgaph and his supporters to argue that, had he been tried under later laws, he might never have been convicted.

It was difficult for me at the time to consider things objectively. I am someone who has been groomed, abused, stalked and raped, all before the age of 17, by men considerably older than me, while I was in local authority care. I have historically held a rigid black-and-white view of offences such as statutory rape. But it was my time as a police officer that revealed many of the grey areas. I’d come across plenty of young men who had turned 16 a few months before their girlfriend, facing a conviction because their girlfriend’s father had found out they had sex, as well as those post-nightclub one-night stands with someone who had lied about their age. I knew that cases such as these were not always the same as the grown men who knowingly groomed vulnerable teenagers into sexual relationships, like those I had encountered in my youth.

Nevertheless, Laurence Westgaph being in the museums – spaces that are usually half full of children – was something that did not sit right with me, and I phoned NML to raise my concerns. While the exasperated customer service agent at the end of the line was not able to answer my queries about Westgaph’s background check clearance, he did log my concerns.

I quickly realised that my actions were out of step with the wider activist scene, where many were standing firmly behind Westgaph. It became clear to me that as an activist with a far smaller profile, I would have to put my feelings and personal traumas aside and campaign in a space dominated by a man who was not only linked to some of the most prominent organisations in the city but also most of its Black leaders.

It had been over a year since I first raised concerns about Westgaph to the museums when a woman from L8 told me about the whispers that he was violent towards women. This prompted me to revisit old reports about his convictions. While he conceivably might not have known the girl in his statutory rape conviction was under 16, reports on his 2009 GBH conviction told a very different story. These reports captured the voices of his ex-partner, Natalie Inge, and Ben Blance – the man Westgaph had kicked down a door to attack. Their accounts contradicted the narrative that Westgaph had merely stumbled upon his best friend in bed with his partner. Instead, they described a jealous ex who had twice been reported to the police by Inge, in the second instance forcing his way into her home before punching Blance several times and fracturing his eye socket.

By this time, I was campaigning with a recently incorporated group. One of the first decisions I put forward to fellow members in one of our earliest meetings was the need to draw a clear boundary: It was agreed that we would not work with Laurence Westgaph.

Unfortunately for me, Liverpool is a small city, and word seemed to have reached Westgaph that I was trying to raise the alarm. I soon found myself the target of social media attacks from some of his most ardent supporters: prominent local women who used their considerable platforms to reprimand me for not including Westgaph in my work, accusing me of “erasing history”.

At this time, I noticed that I was receiving fewer invitations to cultural events in the city. I had already blocked Westgaph on social media, so I was disconcerted when he attempted to gain access to a sold-out online talk I was giving in November 2021. I told the organisers that I did not want him there. When the event organiser later informed me that he was still trying to access the digital event, just hours before it started, I tried not to let it shake me.

After all this, it felt safer to step back from community spaces where I ran the risk of seeing Westgaph and focus on my wider work across Merseyside. Occasionally, people from Liverpool’s Black community would reach out with stories alleging his violence, intimidation or other worrying behaviour towards women – people knew to come to me because it was an open secret that I wouldn’t tolerate him — but as someone with no formal role in the city, all I could do was offer them my belief and solidarity.

It wasn’t until the summer of 2022, when Westgaph was alleged to have spat on and verbally assaulted writer and mental health advocate Faris Khalifa at Africa Oye festival (as detailed in The Post’s investigation) that I took further action. Faris called me to raise his concerns after the attack, and my priority was supporting him during a police investigation into the incident. So I removed Westgaph from a small Facebook group of campaigners I adminned, as the group included them both. This didn’t feel like a particularly significant action, but soon afterwards, I found myself on the receiving end of several angry phone calls from women I respected. One woman went as far as to tell me: "I won’t let you try to ruin a good man”. I was forced to leave a Black wellbeing group because a woman who said she did not want to share space with me was using the group to discredit the allegations against Westgaph.

A few days later, while attending an activist event in the city centre, I tried to resolve the matter and was verbally attacked by that same woman. She was so angry she had to be dragged away by her partner. This moment made me reflect on a police briefing I had attended about sexual harassment in the workplace — specifically, how perpetrators of abuse recruit and manipulate women in positions of authority to defend them against allegations. It appeared that Westgaph was surrounded by well-respected women of all races who were ready to protect him from any accusation that came his way, meaning he had to do very little to defend himself.

This encounter prompted me to call Janet Dugdale, the director of museums at NML at the time. It felt like a repeat of my 2020 call to the museums, but now, almost two years later, I was speaking to someone with the authority to act, and there were fresh concerns I needed to raise. Dugdale justified Westgaph’s appointment by saying his convictions were “spent” – so they can be disregarded for disclosure after a certain number of years. However, there is an exception: employers can ask for details of convictions if someone is working with vulnerable people.

I was shocked to read NML’s statement in The Times earlier this week, saying they were aware of Westgaph’s “spent convictions” but that a certificate produced by the Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) “was clean”. Spent convictions notwithstanding, a sexual offence should always appear on an enhanced DBS. (NML has not responded to multiple specific questions from The Post concerning his DBS check and whether or not it was enhanced.)

The conversation with Dugdale did not fill me with confidence, but I left her with something to think about. I pointed out that I had acted on the new information I had received and that it was important that the museums did the same. Otherwise, she might one day have to answer for the fact that she knowingly did nothing. (When The Post reached out to Dugdale with detailed questions, she said she no longer works for the institution and so is unable to respond.)

When it was published a week ago, The Post’s investigation caused an immediate stir and was clearly being shared in WhatsApp groups across the city. But I was struck by how muted the online reaction was. Very few key community or political figures in Liverpool shared the article on their social media or condemned the damaging abuse these multiple former partners of Westgaph had allegedly faced. (In a particularly sad quote towards the end of the piece, one woman was quoted saying: “It takes a lot of time to trust yourself again, to make decisions on even small things.”) There were no public mea culpas by public figures who had happily appeared at events with Westgaph or joined him for cosy interviews – including former mayor Joanne Anderson, who sat down with him on Slavery Remembrance Day in 2021 for a “poignant conversation” which was shared by Liverpool City Council on its YouTube account. That video is one of two currently listed on Anderson’s profile on a website touting her services as a public speaker (she’s available to speak at events about, among other things, “female empowerment”).

This silence – which surely must frustrate those who have risked their safety to speak out and seek accountability – is multi-faceted and complex. Those who continue to close ranks around Westgaph know that the allegations against him will be used as a cudgel by the far-right, misleading the public to believe that crimes against women and children are only committed by melanated members of society (despite statistics showing that crimes such as group-related child sex offences are more likely to be committed by white people). So it’s understandable why diverse communities might choose to respond to safeguarding risks privately. Black men have long been brutalised and disproportionately killed at the hands of the police, and Black women experiencing domestic abuse often refuse to engage with the authorities for this reason. To do so can feel like a betrayal — one that could risk a Black man’s life. Paradoxically, several Black men known for decrying police brutality are now refusing to engage in a dialogue about the allegations against Westgaph until they hear the outcomes of a full police investigation.

Civil rights movements have never waited for the police or the criminal justice system to legitimise an injustice, believing that the only way to expose such wrongs is to amplify the voices of oppressed people. The sceptic in me wonders if deferring to an institutionally misogynistic organisation — one that contributes to a rape conviction rate that currently sits at just 2% — is merely a way of ignoring those who speak out. Shying away from a broader community discussion about these allegations would mean missing an opportunity to demonstrate a proactive response to the women and girls in our community, at a time when many are asking what men are doing to keep women safe. Merseyside, and specifically Knowsley, where I live, was recently named as the constituency with the highest rate of femicides in the United Kingdom.

Ignoring The Post’s investigation might seem like the safest option for those who have known or defended Westgaph in the past. But this is a crucial moment to reflect. It is only through reflection that we can recognise the warning signs and the webs of influence that might mislead us. And it is only through brutal honesty that we can admit we might have been wrong about Laurence Westgaph.