I was asked this morning to appear on BBC Radio Scotland’s Lunchtime Live show to respond to yesterday’s Mail on Sunday article while cited anonymous Conservative MP’s alleging that Angela Rayner MP deliberately attempts to distract Boris Johnson in the House of Commons through exposing and crossing her legs in an article headlined ‘Stone the Crows! Tories accuse Rayner of Basic Instinct ploy to distract Boris’ .
The article is a confection designed to discredit Rayner – who the author and the paper clearly see as a rival not just to Johnson, who they figure as up for replacement as Tory leader, but also his apparent imminent successor as PM; and the body of the article is much more about Rayner’s potential succession of Keir Starmer, and so as successor to Johnson, and a broader attempt to neutralise her as a credible rival. Political editor of the Mail Glen Owen does this through a comparison to the disarming tactics of Sharron Stone in the 1992 film in which she exposes herself by crossing her legs conspicuously to derail an interrogation; the analogy is a typical and familiar piece of rhetoric to discredit women through inferences of sexual deviousness, but fits tropes of dismissing working class women in particular by insinuating they have unruly bodies and are aberrantly sexual in their behaviour.
From the print edition of the article it is not at all clear if the Sharron Stone comparison was made by the unnamed Tory MP’s or is the creation of journalist Glenn Owen as none of the quotes contain the comparison. However a caption to a photograph of Stone on the MailOnline website infers that the Basic Instinct link was part of the speculation made by gossiping Tory MPs. What the MP’s do say is labelled as ‘mischievous’, suggesting that Rayner admits in private her distracting technique is a way of holding her own in debates where she can’t compete with Johnson’s Oxford union debating training. Both the quality of Johnson’s arguments and rhetoric, and Rayner’s opportunities to learn to construct and pursue and argument elsewhere, go unquestioned. That the working class might learn to argue effectively in school yards, pubs, factory floors, dole offices, union meetings, and public hustings and doorsteps, and that the real life stakes might be higher and lessons learnt more pertinent in those debates than in that of a debating club; or that women might be present in those circumstances, which don’t seem to apply to male ministers that have stood across the dispatch box. Rayner is framed by MPs as less capable, and resorts to using her (dirty) working class sexuality instead, boasting of it afterwards; despite having no evidence other than vague hearsay and the very photograph of Johnson at the dispatch box used in the article showing that Johnson would be out of the line of sight of Rayner’s legs on the opposite bench as such a moment, but not out of the sight of voyeuristic back bench MPs. And Owen runs with this, making the story about Rayner’s unruliness, not the outrageous lechery of these leering Conservative members.
These attacks are full of familiar arguments to the media historian, arguments that are centred in undermining and devaluing working class women, keeping them in their place by shaming them through their sexuality, their clothes, their conduct, all of which is marked as inappropriate, whether because they are displaying their working class-ness or because their modified behaviours are inauthentic – any way working class women’s bodies are marked as aberrant and abhorrent; and Rayner is explicitly marked as working class, and as deviant in the biographical hagiography “Ms Rayner, 41, a socialist grandmother who left school at 16, while pregnant and with no qualifications”. This not only attempt to shame Rayner as a youthful grandmother but casts her alleged sexual indiscretions in parliament as both inappropriate for a grandmother, but also marks her own teenage pregnancy as a history of socially inappropriate and indiscreet sexual behaviour.
Further claims by Chis Philp the minister put forward as spokesperson by the cabinet office this morning on the Today Programme that identifying the MP’s which made these speculations would be impossible because ‘journalists fiercely guard their sources’ – pushing the responsibility and blame from the parliamentary Conservative Party and the whip’s office and onto journalists, and the concept of journalistic integrity. It is precisely the job of the Conservative party, through the cabinet office, the whip’s office or the PCP to identify these individuals and make them come forward publicly, to face the impact of their voyeristic playground tittle-tattle in the way that Ms Rayner has been forced to.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0016qgr
Here's looking at you. 