PA
Prime Minister Boris Johnson has responded to a vile report in the Daily Mail, which claimed that Labour Deputy Leader Angela Rayner tried to distract him by ‘showing off her legs’. This playground behaviour has been slammed by BoJo, but he’s perhaps not one to talk…
In a Tweet posted on Sunday morning, Johnson felt the need to distance himself from Rayner’s political views before offering her some very basic human decency. He rejected the offending Mail on Sunday article as ‘deplorable’ and ‘misogynistic’.
“As much as I disagree with Angela Rayner on almost every political issue, I respect her as a parliamentarian and deplore the misogyny directed at her anonymously today.”
Boris Johnson
Rayner herself has responded to the bizarre – and downright weird – claims made by The Mail. Although she thanked Johnson for his show of support, the firebrand politician still slammed the PM for ‘dragging his party into the sewer’. Ouch…
“Boris Johnson’s cheerleaders have resorted to spreading desperate, perverted smears in their doomed attempts to save his skin. It is the PM who is dragging the Conservative Party into the sewer – and the anonymous Tory MPs doing his bidding are complicit.”
Angela Rayner
Meanwhile, many social media users have been keen to point out that Boris Johnson *maybe* isn’t the best person to call out the use of misogynistic language. After all, Boris is very well versed in his own use of sexist terms…
We’re talking about the same bloke who once said the best way to manage a female colleague was to “pat her on the bottom and send her on her way” – a remark that even drew condemnation from Priti Patel.
In his journalistic days, Boris was previously scathing of single mothers, and even made reference to a ‘tottymeter’ in one of his columns. His time in politics hasn’t been much better. During a 2005 election campaign, her argued that voting Tory would ‘make your wife’s breasts larger’. And it doesn’t end there…
‘Girly swots’, ‘women volleyball players glistening like wet otters‘, and ‘big girl’s blouse’ are all terms used by the Prime Minister during his career in public service. All that, without mentioning his sincere belief that misogyny shouldn’t be classed as a hate crime.
We can probably see why, now. And it makes messages like these seem suspiciously hollow…
