It seems like a noisy night in my local bar is preferable to an afternoon in the House of Commons. Judging by the actions of the Deputy Prime Minister this week at the Despatch Box, there will be less chance of encountering dull jokes and whimsical body language.
In 2022, post #MeToo, it’s really okay to be seen with a proud grin on national television as you watch Angela Rayner, a working class woman, a working class woman who fought long and hard to make her way to the top in the awful bear to claw, offers pit what is British politics?
We are not talking here about a random guy on a building site. Some Neanderthal who had just arrived from Mars, or a poorly educated oaf who had spent his life in seclusion reading from dated copies of Penthouse, possibly hoping to meet a pet before he died.
No, the wink in this case attended both of Britain’s most prestigious universities and obtained degrees at both Oxford and Cambridge. A man who claims to have ‘wives’ as his friends.
Unfortunately, Dominic Raab does not understand that modern females have different expectations than his grandmother’s generation. We are not grateful to be recognized with a wink – the exception is Amanda Holden, who apparently lives in her own time warp, and tells reporters she is excited to be whistled by builders at the ripe old age of 51.
Dominic Raab’s sly gesture to the Deputy Labor leader during the Prime Minister’s Questions yesterday is a new low for the farmers who run Britain, but – after Partygate – is anyone surprised?
Pictured: Exchange in the Commonwealth today between Deputies Dominic Raab and Angela Rayner. Raab winked at Rayner and called her a champagne socialist because she enjoyed opera
One Labor MP tweeted ‘I will never spare Raab’s wink from the Despatch box. I feel dirty. ‘
Whereupon Rayner tweeted ‘Imagine how I feel’.
Why should women grow skins that are twice as thick as men’s? Pretend they can take a joke and a spot of low-level jokes to fit in?
Exchanges between our two main parties have degenerated into catastrophes and class warfare of the most infantile kind. Politics is now about attitude and posing – with the real policies that can affect our lives that are left along the way.
It’s so much easier for ministers to wink, make funny faces and turn the whole show into a circus performance in the vain hope that voters will be happy with the shocking cabaret and temporarily forget that they will not be able to afford their cars to fill. , heat their homes and do the weekly shopping without maximizing their credit cards.
With the Bank of England threatening yet another rise in interest rates, personal debt at a record high and rising food prices – what does it matter if Angela Rayner managed to cross the chasm that remains the posh people of the workers divorce, an opera in the Sussex Countryside?
Anyone would think she broke into Windsor and clipped the Queen’s Corgi basket.
According to Raab, she was guilty of drinking bubbles at Glynebourne while fellow leftists were on the wickets to support striking railway workers. Cue (extremely flat) joke about ‘champagne socialists’ in the Labor Party.
Angela Rayner, deputy leader of the Labor Party, speaks during Prime Minister’s questions
To which Rayner replies that Raab was ‘on a sun lounger’ during the crisis in Afghanistan. True enough.
On twitter, Rayner pointed out that Mozart’s marriage to Figaro ‘is the story of a working class woman who overcomes a privileged but dull villain’.
Composer Howard Goodall noted that Figaro was written as a satire about a ruling class that was not in touch, the bullies and sexual predators that the people who worked for them exploited. In Mozart’s time (unlike today), opera was popular entertainment enjoyed by the rich and poor.
Let’s not bother to explain it to Dom – the Karate black belt and former corporate lawyer has never been known for his subtlety or empathy.
In 2018, when he was appointed Brexit secretary, replacing his former boss David Davis, his daily secretary told the Daily Mirror ‘I’m not a fan. She revealed that he ate exactly the same Fun sandwich every day (since refused) and said ‘he is hard to work with and has tunnel vision. He finds it difficult to deal with women and is very dismissive.
Speaking of tunnels, Raab was not long in his new job when he shouted that he did not fully understand the importance of the Dover-Calais route for British trade.
In the photo: Janet Street-Porter
He constantly compiled an entire back catalog of unfortunate remarks. In 2017, I questioned whether people who use food banks were really poor, or ‘just had a cash flow problem’.
In 2011, he wrote that ‘men are more discriminated against than women’ for a political website, and suggested that they copy feminists and ‘burn their underpants’. Another hamstring attempt at satire.
The following year, I co-authored a book claiming that once they enter the workplace, ‘the British are among the worst idlers in the world’.
This does not apply to Dom, as he has since worked hard to try to become leader of the Tory party. But his all too frequent blaps make it a deviant possibility.
In 2020, when asked to comment on the Black Lives Matter movement, he said that the gesture of Taking the Knee as a sign of respect came from Game of Thrones.
But his most provocative downfall came in 2011 when he told the world ‘feminists are now one of the most unpleasant fanatics’.
Last December, Raab commented on the photo showing staff in Downing Street drinking in the gardens of Number 10 during a time when social gatherings were banned and the number of funerals attending funerals was limited. He said ‘this is clearly not a social gathering because you had people in work suits’ and added ‘those staff would have worked under exhausting conditions’.
No wonder Boris Dim Dom has appointed his deputy, because the chances of this charisma-free guy ever becoming party leader are less than zero.
Men like Dominic Raab and Boris Johnson have the emotional intelligence of random teenage students and have barely grown up since they partyed during freshman weeks many decades ago.
As for respecting the rights of working women, a committee of MPs voted to ban babies from the Commons, arguing that little ones would be a ‘distraction’ and would hinder parliamentary affairs.
This follows an incident last year when MP Stella Creasy brought her three-month-old son Pip to work to protest against the lack of childcare and maternity cover for female MPs.
Although young Pip slumbered through the proceedings, other MPs were furious and it was decided that a committee should investigate whether babies are acceptable in their workplace.
It does not appear. The decision stinks, but on the other hand, maybe it’s better that little Pip and his pals are not exposed to the variegated remarks, sticks and wink of the debate room. This can have a terrible impact on their future development.
For a glimpse into life in the past – forget Only Fools and Horses, just tune in to PMQs.