We chatted about the Kardashians with Harriet Harman

She’s pretty sound

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Shadow deputy prime minister Harriet Harman made a rare appearance at UEA on Thursday night.

The feminist minister and spokeswoman for the No More Page 3 movement chatted to us about Norfolk’s lack of voter engagement, UKIP’s antiquated attitudes towards women and her love for Keeping Up With the Kardashians.

Harriet <3’s The Tab

But the Labour Minister also made an embarrassing gaffe, when she revealed she was unaware of the government’s 5% VAT ‘tampon tax’ on sanitary products.

When asked what she thought about UEA’s subsidizing of sanitary products, and whether she too would support the total abolition of VAT on tampons, Harman insisted that sanitary products were “already VAT exempt”.

Despite repeated contradiction, Harman dismissed the issue as “terribly misinformed”, saying that it had already been resolved in 2000 by Labour’s then-Paymaster General, Dawn Primarolo.

But when it was pointed out that Primarolo had simply cut VAT down from the luxury VAT rate of 17.5 per cent, and that female sanitary items were in fact still charged VAT at the everyday rate of 5 per cent, Harman conceded she would “definitely have a look at that”:

“Either I’m completely right and you’re completely wrong or you’re completely right and I’m completely wrong.”

The Labour minister also spoke of her confidence that her party would beat the Greens in the student vote: “When you come up to elections, the most important thing is not to second guess what people are going to do.”

She also blasted the Sun’s handling of Page 3 as “just messing around, really”, and expressed confidence that Page 3 itself was “definitely on its way out.”

Loving the Campus Kitchen mug

Harman was at UEA for a talk at the Thomas Paine Lecture Centre alongside former Home Secretary Charles Clarke.

The event – part of a series hosted by UEA guest-lecturer Clarke in the run-up to the general election – was part of the Department of Political, Social and International Studies’ Eastminster discussions. The conversation was based around the theme of “Discovering why politics matters”.

The rest of the series features talks from Green Party leader Natalie Bennett, and UKIP MP Douglas Carswell.