It may appear accidental, but Boris Johnson knows exactly what he’s doing when he goes jogging.
With the wind behind him, his top clings tantalisingly to his shapely, sweat-soaked frame, a wet T-shirt competition for one.
Every masterful stride he takes with the alluringly naked legs he’s brazenly flaunting in his skimpy shorts is calculated.
Boris is well aware that none of his political opponents will be able to concentrate on boring old matters of state after this. He’s bamboozling them, distracting them, making them come over all of a fluster thanks to his irresistible masculine wiles.
There’s a reason you didn’t believe a word of that for a single second, and it’s not just because Boris Johnson is the antithesis of attractive to most – but, famously, far from all – women.
No man would ever be accused of that, written about like that, reduced to that. But a woman? Regularly. Constantly. Endlessly.
That’s why I was so surprised about the outcry over Angela Rayner’s Leg-gate story, where anonymous Tory MPs claimed she crosses her legs in the Commons to distract Boris Johnson.
Obviously it was revolting, clearly untrue and incredibly insulting but I never expected fury or condemnation because it’s just one of oh-so-many examples. Isn’t that depressing? My expectations have been set to zero. I’m pathetically grateful, stunned and delighted, that there’s outrage over something undeniably outrageous.
This is how women are treated. Any achievements can’t possibly be down to hard work, talent, or intellect – we must have used our bodies. When Theresa May and Nicola Sturgeon – both leaders of their respective governments at the time – met for Scottish referendum talks in 2017 the least interesting thing about it was that they both happened to be in skirts.
Yet one right wing newspaper ran the photo on their front page with the creepy headline, “Never mind Brexit, who won Legs-It?”
Home Secretary Jacqui Smith made her first statement to Parliament in 2007, but the focus for many media outlets was “the amount of cleavage she had on show”. They appeared not to have noticed she had spoken a word. As former Deputy Labour Leader Harriet Harman told ITV’s Good Morning Britain today: “It’s a way of undermining senior women in politics.
“Over the years, all of us who have been subjected to this kind of behaviour have just kept our heads down and thought, ‘I’m just going to try to ignore it and get on with it’.” That’s the tactic most women employ - be it in the House of Commons, office, supermarket, factory, call centre, boutique, corner shop or wherever they’re employed - because we all deal with this. It’s the common thread for female workers from the highest to the lowest paid and everywhere in-between.
It’s always what we have in common, the unifier that’s anything but great.
Speaker of the House of Commons Sir Lindsay Hoyle has summoned the editor responsible for Leg-gate for a meeting this week. Good.
But he said that the gross ‘Basic Instinct’ article would deter women from politics, and he’s wrong there. It won’t, because it simply can’t.
If this kind of misogyny deterred women from career paths, no woman in the world would ever work anywhere.
