Boris Johnson has written to Angela Rayner to insist ‘misogynistic’ claims reportedly made about her by an unidentified Tory MP were not in his name (Gareth Fuller/PA)
(Picture: PA Archive)Oh, get a grip, people. The row about Angela Rayner is getting out of hand. There’s been uniform, cross-party outrage at a Mail on Sunday report suggesting the deputy leader of the Labour Party likes to put the PM off his stride by crossing and uncrossing her legs. Or, as the article by the paper’s political editor Glen Owen had it: “Tory MPs have mischievously suggested that Ms Rayner likes to distract the PM when he is at the dispatch box by deploying a fully-clothed Parliamentary equivalent of Sharon Stone’s infamous scene in the 1992 film Basic Instinct.”
Don’t you love that “mischievously”? As a way of suggesting that the whole thing is terrifically light-hearted and it didn’t quite work out. And the suggestion that MPs quoted were paraphrasing joke remarks by Rayner herself, something she’s vigorously denied.
