Westminster is not a hotbed of misogyny
This overheated sexism row risks sanitising British politics.
Few things are more anti-climactic these days than a Westminster sexism scandal. We got in a lather over someone disrespecting Angela Rayner only to discover she may have started the Basic Instinct story herself. We got all worked up about an MP watching porn in the House of Commons before finding out he was someone no one had ever heard of and the circumstances were more comical and embarrassing than anything else. The first time it happened, Neil Parish claimed he’d been innocently Googling Dominator tractors before clicking on to a porn site of a similar name.
Honestly, it’s enough to make you long for a John Major and Edwina Currie re-match. There we were hoping the final nail in the coffin of Matt Hancock’s career would be him perving over images of women’s backsides on the green benches, or that Jacob Rees-Mogg had been getting his rocks off over a glimpse of ankle, and instead all we got was Neil Parish’s fondness for combine harvesters. It’s like the first Pestminster scandal all over again. We were promised a scandal and the best we got was a claim that a roving hand may once have been placed on a journalist’s thigh during a particularly booze-filled lunch.