It must have seemed to someone in the Tory party a fantastic idea the week before last to release a story to the Mail on Sunday about Angela Rayner and an absurd, vicious and gendered (and classist) allegation about how she sought to distract Boris Johnson in the House of Commons. After all, what could be the harm to the Tories, given they were keen to distract from Johnson's travails with regard to Covid breaches. The MOS was keen to play along. The media would focus on Rayner to the exclusion of Johnson. Win win.
But a week or two later it doesn't seem like quite such a fantastic idea. Not when there's one Tory MP overboard in the form of Neil Parish, a man who thought it was appropriate to watch porn on his mobile in the chamber of the House of Commons.
And moreover a large number of women Tory MPs who have come forward with accounts of sexual shaming and harassment by their male colleagues. That it has come to this is no great mystery. The sense in the last few years, perhaps longer, of such issues being downplayed, diminished, minimised, is all too strong. A sense of retrenchment and indifference to such matters. And this is telling:
One former Tory MP thinks things started sliding backwards during the parliamentary battle over Brexit, which saw bitter party infighting and a more rightwing, proudly "anti-woke" faction of MPs in the ascendancy. "The party was very split, and the kind of one-nation Conservatives were fair game for all sorts of misogyny. It was all very blokey, and there was kind of a Praetorian Guard in the WhatsApp groups that felt very able to criticise and put down women who were making perfectly valid comments or raising concerns, making derogatory and false comments about women and leaking them to the press."
Some also wonder whether the perception that ministers no longer have to resign for breaching the ministerial code, or the Partygate scandal, have emboldened rogues. "Johnson creates a culture in which it's felt that whatever you do there aren't really any consequences, so I think that makes people do things they might not have tried before," says Sonia Purnell.
And there's a further point. This culture permeates well beyond Westminster. But, good to see some pushback this last fortnight.
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