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Has Westminster faced its #MeToo reckoning? Ask Angela Rayner | Gaby Hinsliff
The treatment of Labour’s deputy leader betrays a misogynist culture that provides cover for serious sexual offences
This is probably going to shock a lot of people, but Angela Rayner has legs. What’s more, when she sits on the Labour frontbench in parliament, sometimes you can see them. Sometimes they might be crossed one way, sometimes the other. Imagine! It is, the Mail on Sunday panted, a bit like a “fully clothed” version of that bit in Basic Instinct where a knickerless Sharon Stone flashes detective Michael Douglas – except, of course, for all the many, many ways in which it’s nothing like that. But anyway, no wonder the poor, helplessly distracted prime minister barely knows what a Covid-busting party is, let alone whether he went to any.
“She knows she can’t compete with Boris’s Oxford Union debating training, but she has other skills which he lacks,” leered the paper’s unsavoury source, perfectly illustrating the oldest misogynistic trope in the book: the idea that if women ever succeed, it can only have been by using their bodies. For how else could they possibly compete with the kind of towering male intellect that thinks it’s smart to portray their own leader as some kind of drooling lech, whose mind is anywhere but on the actual job?
Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
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