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The Conservative Woman (“TCW”) has been a free-to-read, independent voice for British conservatism for 12 years.  Due to censorship, social media bans and the consequential lack of funding, the site will be closing down and archiving its more than 26,000 articles behind a paywall.

Note from Rhoda Wilson: Those who rely on truly independent voices will sorely miss them, including myself.

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TCW: An Announcement

By Kathy Gyngell, as published by The Conservative Woman (“TCW) on 4 July 2026

It is with great sadness that I have to announce the closure of TCW on 18 July, two weeks today, when our last “edition” will go out.

As some of you know, I have edited TCW voluntarily seven days a week for 12 years. It might look as though it appears by osmosis, but believe me, it doesn’t. It was only with the advent of Margaret and Alan Ashworth in 2017 and their commitment and professional expertise that the site truly “took off.” 

Though I say it myself, 12 years is an incredible record for a site run on a shoestring. We have taken readers through some of the most turbulent years of dissent and unease in Britain’s democratic history. Brexit, the plandemic and lockdown, one election after another and five Prime Ministers; a sixth arriving as we leave. A period when the mainstream corporate media catastrophically failed in its role as the fourth estate by not holding government to account. Many readers have told me TCW is what the Spectator should be, but isn’t. A “merit” achieved by a tiny, underpaid (but principled) team compared with their lavish staffing.  

Yet despite the high quality of our output, my best efforts at pitching for the investment that would have put us on a secure financial footing have come to naught. I have failed to attract either the type of funding behind The Critic or UnHerd or sufficient regular reader subscriptions to make us viable. Why?

Well, we have been hoist by our own petard. TCW has never slotted into that carefully curated, acceptable face of dissent that establishment figures dare endorse. When you are blacklisted, investors run scared. That blacklisting also took the form of a barrage of censorship that stopped us advertising – a significant source of revenue. We were banned by every single online ad agency and by the whole of Facebook (Meta) during lockdown which, we were advised via a government tip-off, was because of an issue with Whitehall, most likely over our covid reporting. Such was the Conservative government’s covid censorship crackdown. From then on we were totally reliant on donations and never recovered the readership to fund the revenue stream we needed to grow. There was another reason for that. 

In early May 2022, we were banned from all mobile phone access right through to the autumn of that year by the British Board of Film Censors, the government’s pre-Ofcom quango tasked with monitoring mobile phone companies. That July, I was also banned from Twitter along with a host of vaccine-injured people, reinstated only well into 2023, a considerable time after Elon Musk bought the social media company. A five-month battle with the BBFC ended with our agreeing compromises over age verification privacy settings and stringent Disqus comment moderation. Only then did they finally agree to allow mobile access to the site. 

In my view, there was no clearer sign of the threat to the establishment that we were perceived to pose. This, remember, was under a Conservative government and we were a small ‘c’ conservative website. There is no doubt this lost us readers. People thought we had shut down or they never knew we existed. Since then, the social media market has become ever more saturated with podcasts, substacks and X posts, all costing less to run than a site designed along more traditional lines. 

“There is a tide in the affairs of men” for reassessment and change. This is one. We cannot carry on as we are. We must adapt to the times. 

However, all is not lost for loyal TCW writers and readers. The fight goes on.

The fact is that Substack offers a much lower cost and less demanding way to publish news, analysis and commentary. We will be continuing TCW’s “mission” there. 

The new Substack is @RightTimes with Kathy Gyngell. Please follow it. It will build into a similar politics and culture war platform to TCW. It will host critical commentary, news and analysis by some of the TCW writers you have come to know, as well as my own posts. It will have a similar dissenting, no-holds-barred mission, principled and informed.

From 19 July, the TCW site will become a member-only archive, i.e. it will be behind a paywall. We hope to be able to give current recurring and recent generous “one-off” donors a free login to access any of the 26,000-plus archive of articles, an extraordinary chronicle of dissent over the last 12 years. 

Although we are posting articles as normal until July 18, we are stopping all donations and subscriptions today.

Finally, my sincere thanks to all of you who have supported us over the years. Without you, TCW would not have got this far. Or have been that “nagging voice pulling at people who would otherwise think themselves able to go on with impunity,” as Steve Doughty put it to me. Certainly TCW has provided a constant challenge to the complacent and often shameless mainstream corporate media which didn’t even tick the boxes when it came to questioning lockdown and vaccines, and is still failing on every other marker of the country’s de-civilisation.

It has been a huge education running this site. TCW‘s list of “awake” contacts – readers and writers – has expanded around the globe, as well to all corners of Great Britain. We are a network, and networking is what we must keep doing. To my regular correspondents whose “heads-up” emails I have woken to every morning: you have kept me and the site on the ball. For that, my final thanks and plea: keep in touch.

You may also want to read: ‘And Another One Down … (But Not Out)’, Steyn Online, 6 July 2026