Angela Rayner says she had a “boob job” when she was 30 because her breasts looked like “two boiled eggs in socks”, or “basset hound ears”. There’s a lot to chew on here: are those visual images better or worse than my previous favourite: “sideways bananas in a Waitrose bag”? And what conversational conditions could produce this disclosure, in an interview with the Financial Times?
On the subject of cosmetic surgery, I am agnostic. I just will not have one more conversation about whether internalising social expectations of the female body-shape is empowerment or enslavement. “Do what thou wilt” is the whole of my law, at least with regards to thine own body. On the subject of the media, however, I have opinions – more than opinions, dark prognostications. That the minute that was published in the FT, it would appear in the tabloids. The initial reporting would be played colourless and straight, with the odd marmalade-dropper adjective (“remarkably candid,” say). The drive-by assassination attempts will come later, and they’ll never, ever stop. One day, she’ll crop up in some whither-equality diatribe, “when even supposed ‘feminists’ must mutilate themselves without wondering why”; the next, it’ll be a hit job on her vanity, or her financial acuity, or her out-of-touchness.
For Labour politicians, no disclosure goes unpunished by the tabloid media. Their typical defence mechanism is to disclose nothing, which is then leveraged into the charge that they’re boring. And that’s fair: it is quite boring when you won’t divulge anything. Seeking election to public office, it is more than boring: you’re trying to sell yourself to the public without telling them who you are, like the proverbial guy with a cache of knock-off watches who won’t open his coat.
Typically, when a politician won’t show him or herself, and there’s a burning appetite to pick them apart for faults, newspapers just find photos of them eating. It’s a weirdly effective way to discredit a person; I thought about it a lot in the early 10s, around the time of the Tumblr account “women who eat on tubes”. It was clearly a proto-misogynist playground, a dark corner of the internet where men held women in contempt, just because we’re sometimes hungry. But I puzzled over it for ages: why was it debasing to be caught eating on a tube? It’s just a Twirl!
Ed Miliband and the bacon sandwich clarified things a bit. We’ll leave to some other time the question of whether or not the ruinous obsession with a man eating a portable breakfast bap had antisemitic overtones. It was enough just to see him with his mouth full to strip him of his statesmanship. As soon as a person is chewing, all nobler activities – giving a great speech, riding a horse into battle – are gated off by the imagination. They’re just another hungry mammal.
The subsequent Labour leader was wronged in ways that you couldn’t even list without sounding crackers, and the current incumbent is not an eating-on-the-hoof kind of man. Starmer, you’ll recall, was pilloried anyway for eating a curry during a lockdown, which the Daily Mail ran a photo of. On closer inspection, the picture was so old that it predated the pandemic. How could we tell? It had Frank Dobson in it, who died in 2019. The leader of the opposition’s generally unreactive team did complain to the Independent Press Standards Organisation about this, and received a reply that was, in precis, “That’s just what they’re like ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.”
Here is an exhaustive raft of methods Labour leaders have used to deal with the worst excesses of the tabloids this century: placate them with weird spiteful policies they didn’t even ask for (Blair); appeal to their non-existent better natures (Brown); ignore them and hope they’ll go away (Miliband); point out their bias in a way that, infuriatingly, makes you sound like a crank (Corbyn); appeal to a higher authority (Starmer). Angela Rayner is taking a different approach, something more like: “Bring it on, then, mofos. Do your worst.” I think it might work; nothing else does.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
