How could any woman vote for this sorry excuse of a man?

Misogynist put- downs. Neglecting his wives while expecting them to do all the chores...

I’VE always had my suspicions about Jeremy Corbyn. It wasn’t just the moment last December when he seemingly mouthed ‘stupid woman’ across the benches at Theresa May in the House of Commons. Nor was it his ensuing protestation that he hadn’t said ‘woman’ but had, in fact, called the Tories en masse ‘stupid people’ – this, in spite of the fact that professional lip-readers and the musician Evelyn Glennie, who is deaf, all insisted otherwise.

It is not just that he presides over a party that has never elected a female leader or that, in the May 2017 regional mayoral elections, he fielded an all-male line-up and ignored the critics who pointed out this was, well, sexist.

No, it’s not any of these things taken in isolation. Rather, it’s a mild drum-beat of discomfort, a vague but un- ignorable sense that Corbyn has a tricky relationship with the opposite sex. As women, we get used to discerning the casual sexism that so often masquerades as humour or supposedly ‘harmless banter’. We recognise those private slips of the tongue that reveal what an inherently sexist man really thinks, even if this man is trying hard to prove his right-on feminist credentials in public.

As women, we’re often accused of being overly sensitive or seeking out offence where none is intended. But the truth is, we’re just practised at spotting unspoken prejudice. We’ve had a lifetime of it. We’re used to being passed over for job promotions or told we ‘can’t take a joke’. We’re accustomed to the silent eyeing up in the lift from a lecherous male colleague or being trolled on Twitter for expressing an opinion. And as a result, most of us can sniff out a misogynist at ten paces.

So I wasn’t all that surprised when I read Tom Bower’s new biography of Corbyn to discover a lot of what I suspected about the Labour leader turns out to have some veracity. This is a man who, according to Bower, routinely expected his wives to do all the domestic chores and household drudgery so he could be free to concentrate on loftier things such as attending Labour Party meetings and strategising the proletariat revolution.

‘He didn’t acknowledge my emotional side. He doesn’t recognise a woman’s feelings,’ said his first wife, Jane Chapman, recalling vegetarian meals she made that were wolfed down without acknowledgement and Corbyn’s utter lack of interest in going to the cinema when he could be sitting on the floor singing IRA songs with members of the Hornsey Labour Party instead.

The marriage lasted four years. When Chapman left him, she says he was incapable of working out why the marriage had collapsed: ‘He thought I left him on a feminist kick but it was because I wanted some fun.’

Blaming the breakdown of a relationship on feminism rather than analysing your own actions is, of course, the ultimate misogynist put-down. If a woman is behaving in a way you don’t like, just dismiss her as a feminist and be done with it, the reasoning goes. That way, you’re demeaning both feminism and a woman’s ability to make her own decisions. Result!

His second wife, Claudia Bracchitta, fared little better.

WHEN she was giving birth to the couple’ s first child in the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead, Corbyn was on the phone to his constituency agent worrying about whether they’d put out a leaflet about Northern Ireland.

Later, he would prove to be in competent at managing financial affairs and unreliable when it came to keeping to any kind of timetable that wasn’t his own. Bracchitta went on to bear two more of his children, but clearly couldn’t rely on much help from her spouse.

Family holidays were blighted by Corbyn’s absence, as he would disappear without explanation.

On one occasion he re-emerged after 36 hours claiming he had been to a ‘meeting’ and that the unexplained delay had been a necessary sacrifice for ‘the movement’. Her desire to get a cleaner to help with all the chaos that comes with havi ng t hree small children was greeted with derision: one of Corbyn’s friends questioned whether she had ‘bourgeois tendencies’.

When Bracchitta asked Corbyn to clear out the fridge and the garage ahead of a house move, he forgot to do even this most basic of tasks (despite the fact that the garage was mostly filled with his discarded railway memorabilia and junk picked up from neighbourhood skips). It would be funny were it not so pathetic. I’m sure many of us will, at some level, be able to relate to this retrograde behaviour. We have all encountered the man who single-mindedly pursues his interests at the cost of everyone else’s because he believes his work is more important than any of that boring old domestic stuff. The husband who refuses to lift a finger around the house and yet expects it all to fall into place without any effort. The father who does not turn up for family outings because he’s otherwise engaged. The enthusiastic hoarder who stuffs everything into a garage and expects his wife to sort out the mess.

One of these traits might be enough to drive even the most patient partner to distraction. But for a single individual to possess all of them seems unfortunate, to say the least. You’d think, given that Corbyn has been married three times, that he might have learned from his earlier mistakes. After all, he’s had enough practice. But no. This seems to be a man who is so blinkered in his self-belief that he never believes anything is his fault.

In between his first two marriages, he had a brief affair with Diane Abbott, now the Shadow Home Secretary. Abbott would soon discover that her paramour had no intention of marrying her or fathering her children.

His absences were as lengthy and unexplained as ever. ‘It’s hard to have a relationship with someone who doesn’t come home for two weeks,’ Abbott said as she was packing up her bags to leave. What did Corbyn do when he saw another woman upset by his inability to commit? Did he seek to engage with Abbott’s concerns? Did he sit down to have an adult conversation about how to tackle her dissatisfaction? Did he have a moment of self-reflection? Did he ask himself what he might have done to contribute to the ending of yet another romantic relationship? Apparently not. According to Bower, ‘ he walked away without comment; he was off to a meeting, he said’.

It seems Corbyn didn’t really care about the women in his life. His politics always came first, but it feels as though his ideology was also a convenient fig-leaf behind which to hide his laziness and emotional myopia. That’s the thing about ideologues: they find real people rather inconvenient. Individual needs tend to get in the way of an overarching political worldview. You can’t redistribute the means of production if you’re having to clean out the fridge.

Well, you might think, fair enough, he wasn’t exactly a domestic god and perhaps he had traditional notions about a woman’s place in the home, but maybe he had a fun side? Sadly not. This is a man, according to Bower, who spent holidays camping in tents and cooking tins of beans on a single-ring Calor gas stove while his first wife wanted to go to restaurants and sleep in a proper bed once in a while.

ON A trip with Chapman to Czechoslovakia, he declared palaces too ‘royal’ to visit and boulevards too ‘capitalist’ to appreciate. About t he only t hing t hat swayed Corbyn’s interest was British manhole covers, particularly their dates of manufacture. Can you imagine someone proudly stating that as their hobby on a dating profile? It’s hardly the stuff of romantic fantasy.

Worse than any of this, to my mind, is what his first wife described as ‘the absence of books in her husband’s life’.

‘ Throughout the four years of their marriage, he never read a single one,’ Bower writes.

Unless someone is dyslexic, it’s very hard to trust anyone who doesn’t read books. It’s especially hard to trust a man with ambitions to be our Prime Minister who doesn’t read books. It displays such an inherent lack of curiosity in other ways of being and other people’s lives and speaks of a person who is satisfied he already possesses all the knowledge he needs, which is the worst form of arrogance.

Perhaps, you might be thinking, Corbyn has changed? Perhaps it’s unfair to judge him on his past, youthful mistakes? After all, he’s been married to his third wife, Laura Alvarez, since 2013 – even if she has also discovered Corbyn was ‘not helpful with the housework’.

But the truth is, I don’t believe he has, not really, not deep down. Bower recounts a revealing episode when, 20 years after the breakdown of his marriage to Chapman, he invited his first wife for tea in the House of Commons. Instead of accepting any sort of responsibility for what had happened between them, Corbyn told his ex-wife – the woman he had dragged around on joyless camping holidays while he examined manhole covers – she ‘should lighten up’.

Accusing a woman of lacking a sense of humour because she ended a relationship has to be the last refuge of a scoundrel.

It wasn’t that she couldn’t take a joke, Jeremy. It was that she couldn’t take being married to you.

You can’t redistribute the means of production if you’re having to clean out the fridge