An anonymous Tory MP who spoke to an English newspaper about Angela Rayner was “inappropriate” but did not break Commons rules, the leader of the house said yesterday.
Then change the rules.
The sexism, the classism, the utter disregard for any semblance of decency from the “source” of this story to the journalist and newspaper which printed it, is an affront to politics and the media.
The tawdry newspaper article claimed Tories “insiders” had accused Rayner of a “Basic Instinct ploy” to put the PM “off his stride” by crossing and uncrossing her legs at PMQs.
Not one woman who has ever worked in politics or in the media is in the least surprised.
According to the article, when the PM is at the dispatch box Rayner deploys “a fully clothed Parliamentary equivalent of Sharon Stone’s infamous scene in the 1992 film Basic Instinct”.
Translated: “Fully dressed woman shifts in her seat”.
One Tory MP told the paper: “She knows she can’t compete with Boris’s Oxford Union debating training, but she has other skills which he lacks.”
We witnessed the verbal dexterity Oxford has afforded Johnson in his Peppa Pig speech to the nation’s captains of industry.
His impersonation of a car, “arum arum aaaaaaaaag” is his most honest and coherent representation to date.
In fact, the Labour Deputy Leader regularly skewers Johnson at PMQs like he’s a flailing haddock.
The privileged Tory crowd resent seeing one of their chaps being trounced by a woman they deem to be from a “below stairs” background.
This article was the equivalent of putting Rayner in the public stocks for her audacity.
And the faux outrage of Johnson has been sickening, a man who said: “Voting Tory will cause your wife to have bigger breasts”.
A Benny Hill characterture who has referred to women as “fillies”, “chicks”, “waggling their rumps”.
But you have to hand it to Johnson and his cronies, this poisonous attack has been another masterful execution of the tactics of distraction.
Just to drive home the impudence of Rayner, the paper highlighted she is “a socialist grandmother who left school at 16 while pregnant and with no qualifications before becoming a care worker”. An unmarried mother at 16. Dear God, where are the Magdalene Sisters when you need them?
That she was a care worker, would in any other sphere but the hallowed halls of Parliament and the London media draw admiration.
In fact she did night shifts in a care home when her eldest son was a baby, and she also trained as a Samaritan while Johnson and his ilk were restaurant-trashing and “pleb”-taunting with the Bullingdon Club.
They see Rayner as having ideas above her station and, unable to discredit her intellect or her aptitude, they target her gender, her looks and her class.
And in the newspaper they chose to air their rancour, they found a like-minded organisation.
The newspaper in question ironically had a long-running unofficial ban on its female journalists from wearing trousers. Heels were encouraged.
Its newsdesk was known to berate its state-educated journalists as having “come from nowhere”, hence it was a privilege they were in its employ.
And the idea floated that the political editor was in any way coerced into writing this story is nonsense, as any journalist who didn’t want to write it, would have kept it to himself.
There is as virulent a strain of misogyny prevalent in the media as there is in politics.
Rayner has come out fighting and yesterday in her interview with Lorraine Kelly, condemned the article as not only as “sexist” but “classist”.
But Rayner also admitted she had deliberately worn trousers because she didn’t want to be judged. In truth no matter how bullish she appears, Rayner will forever more be self-conscious about what she wears and how it will be perceived.
This grubby affair is sadly a win for the men who perpetrated it and women in politics and the media will feel only further depressed and demeaned by it.
Free speech is not safe in Musk's hands
Twitter should be a platform for open discussion, but is too often the space where rational debate goes to die.
And it is about to become even more of a wild west of social media now it has been bought as the plaything of Elon Musk. The CEO of Tesla Motors is a self-described “free speech absolutist”, which will manifest as open season for hate speech.
As Twitter allows more conspiracy theorists, racists, sexists, homophobes and holocaust deniers and all round hate-baiters to spout their bile, reasoned voices will be increasingly silenced.
Prepare for alt-right harbingers of poison from Trump to Tommy Robinson to be legitimised as purveyors of “truth”.
Twitter needs more regulation, not less.
Musk is so rich that he says he doesn’t even care about Twitter’s profits, which means he is only interested in the power it wields.
And let’s remember, that is the power to interfere in elections, to demonise immigrants and strike a match to a tinderbox of bigotry.
Handing Musk Twitter is like giving a three year-old a gun as a toy.
