PM: Internet trolls are like sad men at end of the bar
THERESA May has described social media trolls who abuse women MPs as the modern equivalent of the sad man sitting at the ‘end of the bar muttering into his beer’.
The Prime Minister also blamed male chauvinist Tories who ‘think they are the greatest’ for keeping women out of Parliament.
And she claimed her refusal to take part in the ‘clubby culture’ of male MPs in the Commons Smoking Room held back her career.
Mrs May made the candid remarks in a new book on sexism in politics based on interviews with women MPs. Commenting on the abusive messages regularly sent to female MPs via Twitter, the PM said: ‘It’s the chap who used to sit on the corner end of the bar every night muttering into his beer who can now mutter on social media. People pick it up and believe it and send it round. There’s a thing about social media that people don’t feel any inhibitions at all on what they’re saying. They almost don’t feel that it is directed to another person.
‘But of course, it is – it can hugely affect somebody.’
Asked how women MPs cope with such abuse, Mrs May said: ‘I suppose... you get used to it.’
When she entered the Commons in 1997, she decided to boycott the Commons Smoking Room. Her ‘disavowal of clubbishness’ was one of the reasons she fell out with ‘David Cameron’s Eton- educated male cabal’, according to the new book, Women of Westminster: The MPs Who Changed Politics by Labour MP Rachel Reeves.
Mrs May said she was determined not to be the type of woman Tory MP who felt they ‘had to go into the Smoking Room and be part of that kind of clubby culture in order to be seen to be doing the job the way the men did it’. She added: ‘I didn’t do that. Some people would say of course that’s been one of my problems over the years – I haven’t done it in the way that the men did it.’
Mrs May became the longest-serving Home Secretary in history and used the position to become Britain’s second female Prime Minister.
This was despite her Cabinet battles over immigration and civil liberties with Liberal Democrat Deputy PM Nick Clegg, which Mr Cameron is said to have described as a ‘f***ing car crash’. Veteran Tory MP Ken Clarke famously called Mrs May a ‘bloody difficult woman’.
The book describes how Mrs May helped set up the group Women2Win in 2005 to increase the number of female Tory MPs and end ‘the situation in which “women think they’re in competition with other women – whereas men don’t think they’re in competition, they all think they’re the greatest”’.
Referring to the PM’s fondness for leopard print kitten heels and leather trousers, the book claims she ‘uses clothing, and shoes in particular, as a way of expressing herself and refusing to fit the masculine mould of an MP’. Baroness Jenkin of Kennington, who co-founded Women2Win with Mrs May, argued that some elements of the Tory party held an inherent bias against women MPs.
She said: ‘You’ll show local Tory associations three great women and they’ll say, “Those women were fantastic”, and in walks a bloke and they’ll say, “But there’s our MP”. Especially if he’s got a nice labrador and a lovely wife on his arm.’
Former deputy Labour leader Harriet Harman said it was embarrassing her party never had a woman leader. She wants an all-female list of contenders at the next contest.
‘It can hugely affect somebody’