BY ALEXIA JAMES

Back in April 2015, the then Labour Leader Ed Miliband called for a female James Bond and was shot down in flames by the British press as well as by many on social media.

Miliband met actress Rosamund Pike during his failed 2015 election bid and tipped her to make history by becoming the first woman in the role. “I think she’s a great British actress, she’d make a great Bond,” Mr Miliband said at the time, during a visit to Magic Radio studios. “This is 2015, I think we can move with the times.”

Pike was of course a former Bond girl. She played the role of Miranda Frost, who – even more inconveniently for the hapless Mr Miliband – happened to have died in the 2002 film Die Another Day.

Miliband made gender equality a key part of his 2015 campaign and committed to ensuring his Labour Cabinet team was 50 per cent female. He urged the makers of James Bond to follow his lead.

So, when – on Sky TV’s The Pledge – commentator June Sarpong last week also claimed Britain should have its first female Bond, she was merely repeating a view that is genuinely and widely held by social justice warriors and other equality-driven militants.

The journalist Martin Daubney commented on the Miliband demand for a James Bond back in 2015 and caught the national mood with this excellent piece in the Telegraph here

Daubney opined that “if the easily offended had their way, the fangs of equality would drain the very lifeblood from cinema, TV, sport, video games and even children’s books, leaving in its wake a desolate landscape of State-Approved, gender neutral propaganda. Few would doubt Idris Elba would be a shoo-in as a Black Bond, while Homeland’s Damien Lewis would be a cracking Ginger Bond (who could say “the name’s Bond – Strawberry Blonde”). Equality can only go so far, however, before it skates on the thin ice of poor taste, so it’s unlikely Harriet Harman would approve an undoubtedly populist Dwarf Bond – say, In Bruges star Jordan Prentice as Double-Oh-Three-And-A-Half.”

Last week Daubney also spotted the June Sarpong female Bond request and commented on Twitter:

While Bond has moved on into modernity to some degree from Ian Fleming’s violent, alcoholic Tory with an unquenchable penchant for gorgeous women, he’s still the same man as in Fleming’s books. One of the best James Bonds ever, Roger Moore, was clear: James Bond can’t be gay or a woman because that “wasn’t what Ian Fleming wrote”. The current Bond, Daniel Craig, was more careful not to ruffle any feathers by saying he had no problems getting replaced by a female.

Calling for a female James Bond is just another example of my fellow females going too far. There has to be a point where women recognise there are boundaries to feminism – boundaries which, when they are crossed, embarrass all women.

Let’s recall the Swedish Left Party Chapter who called for men peeing while standing to be banned, the feminist-run cake sale where cakes for women cost 75 cents for women and a dollar for men, Hillary Clinton’s moronic statement that “women have always been the primary victims of war – women lose their husbands, their fathers, their sons in combat” and that chicken brain Daniella Herzog who demanded that Father’s Day be banned as it was so offensive to same-sex parents and single mothers.

Not in my name.