Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson is having a hell of a time of it. In his first few months at the helm, he has put six votes to Parliament and lost all six. This is the first time this has ever happened to a Prime Minister. The deal he has proposed to the EU is rubbish and they almost certainly won’t accept it and his vow to leave the EU, with or without a deal, on the 31st October has almost certainly been scuppered by the Benn Bill, through which MPs voted that leaving the EU without a deal would be illegal. And he lost a case in the Supreme Court, which concluded that he had given illegal advice to the Queen.
During his leadership election campaign, the police were called to his home when neighbours heard Carrie Symonds shouting “get off me” during a heated argument. And his relationship with an American business woman is being investigated in case she had been given too much government cash while Johnson was Mayor of London.
You could almost feel sorry for him, if he wasn’t so awful.
Now, journalist Charlotte Edwardes has accused Johnson of groping her thigh, “high up”, at a lunch in 1999. She also alleged that he had done the same to another woman at the same lunch event. He was the editor of the Spectator magazine at the time.
A few weeks ago, the Prime Minister was caught referring to the opposition leader as a “big girl’s blouse” and it emerged that he had referred to David Cameron as a “girly swot”. Why are his insults focused on femininity or womanhood? Does he have a problem with women?
His colleagues are generally defending their boss to journalists. What a surprise. A few Conservative activists have, however, spoken up with concerns, such as Aceil Haddad, who has previously run as a Conservative council member and Greater London Authority member.
Haddad told the Guardian, “You only need to look at the Sunday Times to see what is being accepted, and the reason why I left is I can’t stand as a Conservative and say I can see the greater good because that means I’m allowing it to happen.”
She told activists at this week’s Tory Party Conference, “I want you to do something. Say this is not acceptable.
“Politics and the act of law making has been boiled down to willy-waving, theatrics and ‘he said-he said’.
“Look at his attitude towards women … Unfortunately we have got women who are scripted. They don’t feel like they can say anything.”
A private matter
Some of the defence of Johnson, and some of the attempts to silence the question of whether Edwardes’ allegations are true, have been based on an idea that this is a “private matter”. He did not criticise others for their private lives, so Matt Hancock, the Culture Secretary, urged that he should not be criticised for his own.
But allegedly groping a female colleague is not a matter of a person’s private life, it is an assault, and it is sexual harassment. Newsreader Krishnan Guru-Murthy urged his journalist colleagues on Twitter to consider this.
Dear colleagues. Please stop calling allegations about groping “private life”. It isn’t private life. Having affairs can be said to be private life. Groping is about public conduct, respect for women and is potentially criminal.
— Krishnan Guru-Murthy (@krishgm) October 1, 2019
Further allegations
As if this is not looking miserable enough for Boris Johnson, comedian Shappi Khorsandi has come forward with a statement that could back Edwardes up about Johnson’s respect for women’s bodily boundaries.
In a piece for the Independent, Khorsandi wrote, “When I read [Edwardes’] article, I just thought, with a shrug, “yeah, I can well believe he did that”. He had reached under the table and squeezed my hand while I was sitting on the panel for Question Time after knowing me for roughly 20 seconds.
“My hand, to be clear, was resting on my thigh. It wasn’t a frightening experience, just odd and discombobulating a few seconds before the beginning of a live TV debate. I mentioned it in my stand-up routine for a while and thought nothing more of it. I’m sure he won’t even remember being on the programme with me, let alone the rogue squeeze of the hand.”
Many people don’t believe Charlotte Edwardes and, in turn, won’t believe Shappi Khorsandi. But women who have been groped by men more powerful than them more times than they remember, especially in the 90s, will have a small nod of recognition in the stories they read.
It is unlikely that this case will go to court, so there will be no guilty or not-guilty verdicts to rule definitively on whether this happened or not. But we have to start from a position of believing victims, treating them with respect, and avoiding the myth that anything unpleasant between two individuals is automatically a “private” matter.
Image credit: UK Prime Minister
