This is probably going to shock a lot of people, but Angela Rayner has legs. What’s more, when she sits on the Labour frontbench in parliament, sometimes you can see them. Sometimes they might be crossed one way, sometimes the other. Imagine! It is, the Mail on Sunday panted, a bit like a “fully clothed” version of that bit in Basic Instinct where a knickerless Sharon Stone flashes detective Michael Douglas – except, of course, for all the many, many ways in which it’s nothing like that. But anyway, no wonder the poor, helplessly distracted prime minister barely knows what a Covid-busting party is, let alone whether he went to any.
“She knows she can’t compete with Boris’s Oxford Union debating training, but she has other skills which he lacks,” leered the paper’s unsavoury source, perfectly illustrating the oldest misogynistic trope in the book: the idea that if women ever succeed, it can only have been by using their bodies. For how else could they possibly compete with the kind of towering male intellect that thinks it’s smart to portray their own leader as some kind of drooling lech, whose mind is anywhere but on the actual job?
Boris Johnson dissociated himself from all this very swiftly, saying he deplored the “misogyny directed at [Rayner] anonymously today”. There’s even talk of disciplinary action against whichever backbencher is found to have planted it, although probably don’t hold your breath on that one. As Theresa May and Nicola Sturgeon found out in 2017 when the Daily Mail reported their meeting (next to a picture of both women in – wait for it – skirts) with the headline “Never mind Brexit, who won Legs-it!”, even now, no woman in public life is so powerful that she can’t be instantly reduced to the sum of her body parts. What really enrages many women both in and out of Westminster, however, is that stories like this risk legitimising a locker-room culture still all too prevalent in politics that provides cover for more serious sexual predators.
At the weekend, it was also reported that three cabinet ministers and two Labour shadow cabinet ministers have now been reported to the watchdog set up in the wake of the #MeToo scandal to investigate claims of sexual misconduct in parliament. So far, 56 MPs have reportedly been accused of anything from sexually inappropriate comments to alleged criminality, including an allegation that one MP “bribed a member of staff in return for sexual favours”. As ever with sexual harassment at work, it’s the young and the powerless and those who don’t dare complain if they want to get on that find themselves on the sharp end, as Rayner herself would be quick to acknowledge.
A byelection in Wakefield is likely to be held later this year following the conviction of its sitting Tory MP, Imran Ahmad Khan, for sexually assaulting a 15-year-old boy, while the Conservative MP David Warburton still has the whip suspended over allegations of sexual harassment, which he denies. Crispin Blunt was forced to quit as chair of the all-party LGBT group after complaining that he thought Khan had been harshly treated, but he still has the Conservative whip, as do several backbenchers who provided support and character references for Charlie Elphicke, the former Dover MP who served a prison sentence for sexual assault.
Labour has no reason to get complacent, either. It recently emerged that two former Labour staffers, Laura Murray and Georgie Robertson, were asked to sign gagging orders after complaining about the “inappropriate” behaviour of a senior official in March 2020. Both women have since left politics.
It’s not just the fact that MPs are responsible for the laws governing everything from rape to equality at work that makes all this so shocking. Like doctors and priests, MPs are in constant contact with vulnerable people, at some of the most desperate moments in their lives. If you’re a woman needing their help on a sensitive issue, you may have no way of knowing when you walk into a constituency surgery whether yours is one of the 56 against whom allegations have been made – or even the sort who thinks a woman crossing her legs in the workplace constitutes, in 2022, some kind of juicy scandal.
Times have thankfully changed at Westminster since I started out as a lobby reporter in the late 1990s. A new home secretary’s Commons debut probably wouldn’t be reported now, as Jacqui Smith’s was in 2007, with breathless comments about her cleavage (for the record, she was giving a statement on a failed terror attack at Glasgow airport) – and one reason the news seems suddenly full of political predators is that at least these days such stories are less likely to be brushed under the carpet. But a weakened prime minister who can’t afford to make any more backbench enemies may not be ideally placed to clean up parliament, and many female MPs on all sides still worry that – in the words of the Conservative chair of the equalities select committee, Caroline Nokes – the watchdog’s long-running investigation may not “deliver all that we would have wanted it to”.
Let’s hope the backlash over the treatment of Rayner jolts a few more reluctant MPs into realising that the real risk comes not from washing their dirty linen in public, but from leaving it to fester until it stinks.
Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
