So Angela Rayner does not have Boris Johnson’s ‘debating training’. Is that a reference to mumbling about Peppa Pig World?
The battle rages on about the Mail on Sunday story that last weekend accused Angela Rayner of using her sexual wiles to distract the prime minister. Lindsay Hoyle, the House of Commons Speaker, summoned the newspaper’s editor to account for this bizarre eruption of misogyny. In the name of “free speech”, a notion that becomes more laughable as the flaws it seeks to justify mount up, its sister paper, the Daily Mail, filled Wednesday’s front page with the words: “No, Mr Speaker!”
However, what has troubled me most is not the assertion that, in having legs and sometimes moving them, Labour’s deputy leader was trying to distract and manipulate Boris Johnson. It’s not a million years ago (actually, five) that the same newspaper headlined a meeting between Nicola Sturgeon and Theresa May “Never mind Brexit, who won Legs-it!”. Both women were wearing tights, you see, so they were asking for it.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
