Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
Turning the tables in political stables
THE reason Michael Fallon gave for resigning as Defence Minister was that he’d fallen short of expected standards.
“What might have been acceptable 15 years ago is clearly not acceptable now,” he said, after being outed for putting his paws on a journalist’s knee in 2002.
The implication being, according to his groping time chart, that his unwanted sexual advance fell just within the parameters of acceptability.
So he didn’t really believe his behaviour had fallen short. More that the standards bar was raised higher, probably by the PC Gone Mad Brigade, and no-one had told him.
Part of his defence was right, though. Sex used to freely oil the wheels of politics. Party conferences didn’t so much alternate between Brighton and Blackpool as Sodom and Gomorrah. And few saw much wrong with it.
In fact, in 1996 I was spun by Gordon Brown’s PR man to portray him as a cross between Don Juan and Warren Beatty. False rumours were flying round that the then Shadow Chancellor was gay and I was offered the chance to put to Gordon that he was in fact a red-blooded womaniser.
He wasn’t, but he went along with it. Because back then it was deemed good for his image to be seen as a bit of a lad. Team Gordon even provided me with a list of conquests (call it Mr Brown’s Girls) which included Princess Margareta, the daughter of the King of Romania.
The Loaded Shadow Chancellor was what The Mirror nicknamed him, after the racy lads’ mag of the time. His team approved.
In the same year, I interviewed Edwina Currie about a book she’d written which portrayed Westminster politicians as “bonking their eyeballs out”. She bragged about living in a penis-shaped converted windmill in Derbyshire and loving sex.
“You just wake up in the morning and feel like it. It’s God’s gift to humankind. If we weren’t meant to enjoy sex he wouldn’t have given us the dangly bits that get us turned on,” she told me.
Although what she didn’t tell me was that she’d been bonking the eyeballs out of John Major’s dangly bits for four years behind their spouses’ backs.
When that story came out about Major, it was like hearing today that Jacob Rees-mogg has transitioned into Jackie Rees-mogg and is running a chain of crack dens.
Which is why nothing in this dossier about alleged sexual improprieties concerning 40 Tory MPS, which brought Fallon down, shocks me.
But it does disturb me. Not least because many claims are unsubstantiated, have been flatly denied or are about consensual relationships and personal proclivities, and they have been placed alongside charges of serious sexual offences. As though they are the same thing.
Yet, inadvertently, coming on the heels of the Weinstein scandal, it has inspired other women in Westminster, notably Labour’s Bex Bailey, to speak out about how she was silenced when she came forward with rape allegations.
Meaning that, regardless of the moral rights or wrongs of the ‘sex-pest dossier’ it could be a turning point in the fight against sexual harassment. It could, as Ruth Davidson hopes, clear out the stables.
Maybe in future, rather than Westminster’s male politicians wanting to be associated with Loaded, they’ll be letting you know the only magazine they subscribe to is Celibacy Weekly.
Which for the sake of every young woman who wants a job there is surely no bad thing.
The party conferences were like Sodom and Gomorrah