“Just pat her on the bottom and send her on her way.” When, as rarely happens, Boris Johnson is forced to cooperate with women in authority, it may help that, as he’s occasionally mentioned, he possesses a fair few insights into female behaviour and woman-management, some of them perhaps gleaned from his father.
Though it must be painful, given his attitude to women in the workforce, to be forced to deal with them at all. He once depicted female employment as “an ever-growing proportion of British women [who] have been ‘incentivised’ or socially gestapoed into the workplace”. When can he stop acting as if Sue Gray is his equal?
Isn’t it humiliation enough that Johnson, Big Dog, a man who publicly identifies as the Incredible Hulk, should already have been thwarted by Lady Hale, then denied revenge on another female adversary, Kathryn Stone, the parliamentary commissioner for standards? Just last week Stone was again acting as if Hulk could be defeated by a woman, saying it is “bonkers” she can’t investigate the funding of his dodgy refurb.
“The madder Hulk gets, the stronger Hulk gets,” Johnson once warned fellow leaders. But the Hulk never had to deal with a police investigation, albeit heavily compromised, by three female officers. True, one is Cressida Dick, but add deputy assistant commissioner Jane Connors and commander Catherine Roper and that’s still an entire troika of nightmare “girly swots” (as Johnson describes conscientious people of either sex). DAC Connors, who expressed sadness about people “flagrantly” ignoring Covid rules, is certainly a contender for Johnson’s signature insult. Not long after declaring his proroguing of parliament illegal, Lady Hale pointedly applied it to herself.
Which is the kind of thing that happens when the professions fail to learn from Johnson’s example that the correct approach to hiring women, allowing for occasional lapses, is not to do it in the first place.
Even the young, blond, cheatworthy ones will end up old, like the “sweaty old peeresses”, “old bag” and “kind of woman who owns fifteen cats” referred to in Johnson’s novel Seventy Two Virgins, a fast-moving catalogue of sexist and racist slurs, set in Westminster.
Like David Cameron, Johnson likes to boast about the female prime ministers who outwitted men like himself, while ensuring his own administration is modelled, thus ruling out further such anomalies, on admission arrangements at his old school. Any Tory female visibility in the Commons and cabinet should not, as became clear in reports about No 10’s lockdown lifestyle, be interpreted as evidence of progress. The most arresting aspect of the covertly photographed drinks/meeting at No 10 is, for example, less the refreshments than the quaint sex ratio, apparently 16 to three. Two of the women being the girlfriends of Matt Hancock and Boris Johnson.
The latter’s insistence that these garden drinks were “people at work” conveys his confidence that an appearance of institutionalised sex discrimination will always be less shameful than booze-related rule-breaking. Written accounts of the No 10 work/booze timetable also depict a sex monoculture you’d probably blame on the prep school culture that created Johnson if that hadn’t, in comparison, been thrillingly diverse.
The narrator of King Solomon’s Mines, published in 1885, at least acknowledges to his schoolboy readers that “there is not a petticoat in the whole history”. That is, except for a female fiend and “she was a hundred at least, and therefore not marriageable, so I don’t count her”. It’s still one more petticoat than you get in a Johnsonian “quad”.
Questioned about the non-existent female membership of his inner cabals, with their idiot nicknames and boxing-glove accessories, Johnson has protested, like Cameron before him, that he is doing his best, helpless to correct the shortage of female candidates as accomplished as Gavin Williamson, as trustworthy as Hancock, as authoritative as Dominic Raab. After elected women were sidelined in the national Covid response, including almost entirely from public briefings, a sniggering Johnson told the parliamentary liaison committee: “It’s certainly true that I would have liked to have had more female representation in the press conferences so far.” Though not enough to do anything about it. “And, erm, you know, er, what can I say?”
Keen Johnson students would have heard the echoes, here, of the Spectator column where, along with the bum-patting tip, he offered this to future editors: “You will receive threatening letters from female journalists, urging you to have more female bylines, starting with their own, and I would not dream of advising you there.” For Johnson, the persistence of women who are neither flattering nor shaggable has never stopped being hilarious.
But his long-diagnosed “woman problem”, as this common-or-garden prejudice is usually euphemised, has recently taken on, thanks to difficulties entirely of Johnson’s own making, a delightful new meaning. If it’s too much, judging by last week’s evasions, to hope for poetic justice, in the shape of his subjugation by the sex he has patronised for half a century, the mortification alone is joy. While Johnson was either snogging female colleagues or declaring them unpromotable, other professional women prevailed.
Now the Hulk has to answer their questions. Probably his misogyny runs too deep to allow Johnson some reflection on the possible benefits if he hadn’t presided over a frat house from which unwanted women could be summarily ejected. But if so, it will have made any impertinence on the part of middle-aged women (who may even own cats) all the more personally agonising.
How agonising? Hard to say, but he once compared the horror of being overtaken by a female driver to “being treated as though you were an old woman by a young woman”.
• Catherine Bennett is an Observer columnist
