Fielding chat-up lines from powerful men was part of the political world
Parliament is a Wild West of sleazy behaviour – it needs lessons from sanitised corporate life
My first job in British journalism involved marauding around Westminster on the coat-tails of its most feared political blogger, Guido Fawkes. The work – picking up gossip and producing a weekly video – provided quite an education. And one of the things I learned quickly was that in the heavily male-dominated watering holes of Westminster, any woman under 40 could expect a certain kind of attention.
So it’s not much of a surprise to me that a sex scandal of this kind is now brewing, with revelations over the weekend that one minister made his secretary buy him sex toys and that another MP was trading sexual texts with a prospective employee. I never experienced anything that I would call harassment, but fielding bad chat-up lines from people more powerful than me was a regular feature of the landscape. I learned that it was beyond no man’s ability to imagine that you were interested in him when, in fact, you were on the look-out for a story.
There were certain contexts in which being young and female was a definite advantage: crashing drinks parties, catching the eye of certain potential contacts, standing out amid a crowd of mostly male aspiring journalists. But there were serious drawbacks too. It was hard to navigate the swamp of sexual interest and professional advancement. There were invitations forgone because I suspected the man had more than work on his mind. There was a certain chummy, male world of gossipswapping that was out of reach. I once went to a party of Right-wing culture vultures in a Notting Hill house where a few of the men positioned themselves under the glass staircase so they could peer up the skirts of passing women.
After this rather lurid introduction to politics, however, I moved into business journalism. In finance, it also wasn’t unusual to be one of a handful of women in the room. The bankers I was meeting alternated between arrogant slicks and total geeks, but never once did any of them roll out the cheesy chat-up line or make an unwanted advance.
That’s not to say that the sexual politics of London finance aren’t still problematic. I saw senior women working hard against a masculine status quo. The head of PR at a major American bank, who transferred here from the US, told me of her shock at the scarcity of senior women in the London office. Despite that, there was something rather sanitised about the sleaze. It was kept within stricter bounds than at Westminster due, I think, to the sterilising effect of “compliance culture”.
No doubt, some women are harassed in financial settings, but the men doing it are taking more of a risk than MPS. For example, I once covered a conference for mining industry executives and investors in South Africa. At one event, the programme ended with a “fashion show”, which turned out to be a stage full of strutting women in bikinis. I wrote a small article mocking it and mentioned a few extremely senior British industry figures who were present.
The article, no more than 200 words, unleashed a small storm. I soon found out that one of the poor sods I’d named – among the most senior people in his firm – had been forced to write a five-page letter to his compliance department explaining that, while he had indeed been at the event, he hadn’t enjoyed it, hadn’t known what the “fashion show” would entail and had gone to bed early. That’s in addition to the awkward conversation he had with his wife. What was “acceptable” in South Africa was definitely not in London.
MPS, unlike bankers, lawyers and fund managers, don’t have armies of compliance officers breathing down their necks. They each have a staff of a few people, often young, with whom they work, travel and drink. Westminster is a peculiar environment, in which the mighty rub shoulders with fresh-faced, ambitious youths just out of university, who are struggling to get noticed. I have no doubt that the Harvey Weinstein Hollywood culture is similar.
Depressing as it is to think that we need corporate structures to mediate human relations, it’s also difficult to see how Westminster can continue without any of the tools used by major companies to ensure good behaviour, such as whistle-blowing procedures, compliance departments or human resources. Reporting sleaze to the whips is clearly not a sufficient check, because they are there to protect their parties, rather than hold politicians accountable.
It’s normal for men and women who work in close quarters to form relationships. But in most professional settings, it is not kosher for a boss to date an underling even if the relationship is consensual. So perhaps it is time for the Wild Wests of today’s professional world, from Hollywood to the House of Commons, to take some lessons from the sanitised corporate environment. Either way, change is coming. For sleazebags can no longer rely on secrecy policed by traditional hierarchies when all it takes to uncover scandal is a group of indignant young researchers forming a Whatsapp group. If Parliament and the parties don’t change their working practices, they will soon be overtaken by events.