In his time in office, Rishi Sunak has done much to popularise an intensifier favoured by men wanting to advertise their commitment to women’s interests while effacing any earlier indifference: “As a father of daughters.”
Without his in-house epiphanies, Sunak might never have understood, “as a father to daughters”, the need for girls to feel safe walking around in the evening or to be educated to the same extent as boys. Which is disturbing, but still. Better late, etc. His daughters are credited, too, in Sunak’s tribute to the Lionesses’ victories and with – “women’s rights are personal to me” – his appreciating the need for women’s single-sex spaces.
If depending on daughters for instruction in sex equality is less impressive than promoting it on principle, Sunak undeniably shines when compared with politicians who remain, even after being blessed with girls, in a state of nature. Donald Trump has daughters. Ditto Vladimir Putin. David Cameron, with two, maintained a primitive preference for male colleagues/banter. George Osborne’s daughter couldn’t inoculate him against airing psychopathic fantasies about Theresa May. That Boris Johnson was the parent as prime minister of two, then three girls, similarly confirms that hiring only men who have daughters cannot, sadly, be the solution to misogyny in Westminster, the City or the Metropolitan police.
Admittedly, since spawning another girl, Johnson has apologised to the female colleague known to his old WhatsApp pals as “that cunt”. Maybe in hardened cases you need a ratio of at least four daughters to one brute to achieve the level of insight that two are claimed to have gifted Sunak?
Though even that project has, we discover, its limits, if it hasn’t gone into reverse. As a father of daughters, Sunak has just confirmed that jokes about date rape drugs are not sackable offences.
Specifically he has decided, as a father to daughters, that bantz about stupefying women with Rohypnol, the sedative virtually synonymous with drug-facilitated sexual assault (DFSA) by predatory men, should be tolerated even when its author – James Cleverly – is not only the home secretary but speaking on the day his department announces measures designed to, as well as combat spiking, improve public understanding that it is an “abhorrent” offence.
Shortly before Christmas, Cleverly’s Home Office colleague, Laura Farris, the victims and safeguarding minister, told the Commons: “Spiking is an appalling predatory crime that ruins lives.” The evidence of harm was, she said outlining legislative changes, “irrefutable: the principal victims are young and predominantly women”.
In a statement prefacing his department’s proposals, Cleverly contributed: “Spiking is a perverse crime which can have a lasting impact on victims.” If “perverse” seems an underpowered word to choose – it could even be understood to mean perpetrators are selecting, in temporary poisoning, a singularly unreliable means of achieving their ends – perhaps this can now be recognised as another unfortunate hint, to add to an extensive collection, that, if not actively unfit for high office, Cleverly is among the best arguments yet for not bringing your whole self to work.
But nothing, from calling a northern town a “shit-hole” to describing the Rwanda scheme as “batshit” before it became “common sense”, compares with Cleverly’s achievement, on the day spiking’s seriousness was officially declared, in making light of the crime that same evening. Not that any day is perfect for belittling your own department.
The Sunday Mirror reported him saying, of his wife, at a No 10 reception, that “a little bit of Rohypnol in her drink every night” was “not really illegal if it’s only a little bit”. The Les Dawson tribute (“I said to the chemist, ‘can I have some more sleeping pills for the wife’, he said ‘Why’, I said ‘She keeps waking up’”), continued with the benefits of keeping a spouse “always mildly sedated so she can never realise there are better men out there”.
Survivors of and campaigners against spiking – some of whom had contributed to the Home Office’s report – promptly denounced comments that are unlikely to have educated the sort of men who think that sedating and violating women via drugs that impair memory but are traceless within hours is a joke. Noting repeated mention of fun by spiking perpetrators, the Home Office explicitly states: “This is not funny, and we must ensure that message is clear.”
Even without specialist knowledge, it is plain that Cleverly’s attitude towards the offence is remote from anything commonly understood as responsible. There is nothing woke, since lefties have been mentioned in his defence, about recognising the trivialisation of DFSA as more than just distasteful, what with offenders in nightclubs and at festivals taking so little trouble to traumatise and assault only politically like-minded young women.
You do not have to find Sleeping Beauty’s awakening problematic, or want to put a trigger warning on Keats’s The Eve of St Agnes, to understand why men who joke publicly about DFSA are sinister, scary on dates, and should expect prompt disciplinary action in any workplace outside the incel community. Or the Metropolitan police. Or as it turns out, the cabinet.
Since Cleverly could hardly claim ignorance about the offence, his spokesman’s best defence was “an ironic joke”. Plus, desperately, that a No 10 press reception was “private”. Most abject, however, is Sunak’s response: the noted father of girls “considers the matter closed”.
If there is a conceivable downside to a – sixth in four years? – home secretary, it is nothing to the advantages of not, in raising Cleverly’s red flag over Downing Street, signalling government tolerance for playful drink spikers. Especially when the Home Office’s “Enough” campaign advocates a “whole society” approach to changing attitudes towards violence against women and girls and urges bystanders to intervene. For instance: “If you heard him make light of predatory drink spiking, what would you do?”
Like many daughters, the Sunak girls may have felt they deserved some time off for Christmas, but just look at the result.
• Catherine Bennett is an Observer columnist
