You’re a capable woman but you show too much leg, Dame Joan tells May
BROADCASTER Joan Bakewell, a veteran champion of women’s rights, has a tip for Theresa May – don’t show so much leg.
Dame Joan, 84, has suggested the Prime Minister may be revealing far more of her long legs than is wise.
In a candid interview, Dame Joan described Mrs May as a “capable woman”.
But she added: “I think her skirts are a bit short. Please don’t make a thing of that.”
Grandmother-of-six Dame Joan also described singer Beyonce as the “one with the big thighs”.
She then quickly added: “What a terrible thing to say about another woman.”
Dame Joan, once dubbed “the thinking man’s crumpet”, said she remembered telling her mother she would have preferred to have been born a boy because men “went out into the world”.
She also opened up about her torrid seven-year affair with playwright Harold Pinter, while both were married.
“I remember thinking, ‘If I’m going ahead with this, I’m not going to be racked by guilt’,” mother-of-two Dame Joan told the Radio Times.
“I have quite a strong moral background that I suppose I was flouting but who’s to say people shouldn’t have affairs?”
She said she was lucky to have conducted the liaison for so long while also managing family life with her first husband Michael Bakewell.
“Once I got a flight to Paris to spend the day with Harold, who was filming there. I was back to cook supper for the children,” she said.
Their love affair inspired Pinter to write the play Betrayal, which left Dame Joan “deeply shocked” as it drew closely on her private life.
She has now penned the drama Keeping In Touch as her response to the play and it will be broadcast on Radio 4 this week. She said she wrote it for her “own satisfaction” and admitted that Pinter, who died in 2008, aged 78, “would not be very pleased”.
She also revealed that sexism was “a way of life” in the 1960s and “there was no man who didn’t leer”.
She added: “It was the tenor of the times which is why, strangely enough, no one bothered with Jimmy Savile.
“He was just a strange man. There were plenty of them around.
“As someone who was quite pretty in those days, you got stroked and pinched everywhere and, in a way, the thing was not to let it matter.”