Harriet Harman vows not to let The Sun drop Page 3 lightly: 'It won't be quiet – we will be making sure it is not quiet'

No announcement has been made, but the tabloid has stopped printing photographs of semi-naked models on the page

Harriet Harman’s stance against the continuation of The Sun’s time-honoured Page 3 tradition has been so strong, it led the tabloid to brand her a “feminist fanatic”.

And the Shadow Culture Secretary has pledged to remain equally vocal in hailing what appears to be the publication’s decision to drop the topless feature.

No announcement has been made, but The Sun has stopped printing photographs of semi-naked models on the page for the first time in four decades since Friday.

Fanfare or not, Harman told LBC that she’ll make sure the efforts of countless campaigns against the seemingly exploitative regular do not go unmarked by the backdoor editorial change.

“It won't be quiet – we will be making sure it is not quiet,” she said.

Speaking on behalf of other anti-Page 3 protesters, she continued: “We do think that, in a newspaper that is about news, the idea of a girl standing there in her knickers with some sort of pseudo political quote really is not the representation of women's role in this country that I want to see.”

Labour MP Stella Creasy similarly added: “I know people kept saying ‘Turn the page, don't look at it if you don't want to see it' – it missed the point that it was having an impact on our society.

“The sexualisation, the objectification of women in this way was basically saying to all of us that what mattered, frankly, were our breasts not our brains.

“Challenging that and saying the impact of just letting this stuff lie, of saying that somehow it's some great British institution like James Bond and moaning about the weather, that's not the world we wanted to live in anymore.”

The news item about the end of Page 3 dominated the Today programme this morning ahead of reports on Isis threatening to kill Japanese hostages and the first organ transplant successfully carried out from a recently deceased newborn baby.