Rocker Corbyn and his Jezzabelles hit totally the wrong note
OH DEAR. As you can’t have missed, the tidier Labour leader, clad in a baggy belted navy suit and his trusty red tie, strode into conference last week with an entourage of no fewer than eight young female disciples: The Jezzabelles.
Has he – or Team Corbyn – learnt nothing from those pictures of a paunchy, baseball-capped Leonardo DiCaprio lolling on yachts all over the Med, surrounded by his bronzed ‘bevy’ (of twentysomething models in bikinis)?
Has Seumas Milne – or, if no longer Seumas, whoever is acting svengali for the Forever Fuhrer of the socialists – learnt nothing from those sickly pictures back in 1997 that made me embarrassed to be a woman?
I’m referring to the group photos that Our Tone hosted on the steps of Church House in Westminster of Himself surrounded by no fewer than 96 of his female flock, all wearing their brightest coats of many colours.
Even though the tag ‘Blair’s Babes’ was dismissed as ‘casual misogyny’ at the time, and even though one of them, Margaret Moran, protested she was more of a Blair Witch than a Babe, this ghastly outdated tradition persists.
Memo to Labour spinmeisters: please cease and desist from surrounding your male leaders with women for photo ops. We hate it. Let me explain.
Their subliminal message is this: the man in question is – or regards himself as – the prize bull, and sees his attendant females as his herd.
And women, for good reason, mistrust any male who can’t survive, let alone thrive, unless he has his ‘posse’ around him, like Simon Cowell before he shacked up with his friend’s wife, or Donald Trump, who marches in lockstep with a pack of family fembots with long, tousled tresses and bodycon dresses. It’s all like some post-retro remake of Robert Palmer’s Addicted To Love video from the 1980s, where the rocker strums his, um, instrument while identikit young women in tight black mini-dresses and red lipstick pout and play air guitar behind him.
The format doesn’t say ‘Me! I just love women.’ Instead, it says that only using women as a foil or fodder will do.
It also says no one woman will ever be equal to, or enough for, such a big, important guy; and most wounding of all, it says that the man (and/or his advisers) regards all women as being on one level, interchangeable. When a rock star uses women as a colourful backdrop, or has groupies, it’s bad enough. But this merely makes Mr Corbyn look pathetic.
Despite the cultish adulation of his camp followers, he is no rock star, no handsome playboy president.
When I last checked, he was a politician with a bus pass – while the women he’s surrounded himself with, I note, are young and nubile: as if they’re the chosen ones to increase the tribe of Corbynistas. Creepy.
The Jezzabelles only make me see Corbyn for who he really is: a crumbly, beardy, thrice-married male politician, who can’t tell women apart. PS I AM grateful to the kind gentleman reader who commented online under my column last week: ‘When will Rachel pose for the Playboy seniors’ edition?’ But I have learnt from bitter experience, when a man pays court or a compliment, not to take it too personally. I bet he says that to all the girls!