Johnson’s casual misogyny has kept women out of the election campaign | Zoe Williams
Does Boris Johnson have a problem with women? The Conservative campaign has certainly been very male: Matt Hancock and Michael Gove the most prominent voices besides the prime minister. Liz Truss ranking 65th among media presence of cabinet and shadow cabinet ministers, with a mere 0.2% of appearances.
In the interests of fair-mindedness, it should be pointed out that all female Conservatives who are halfway decent – in the sense of stringing effective sentences together that aren’t composed mainly of lies – have left the party. Amber Rudd, Anna Soubry, Nicky Morgan, Justine Greening, all supposedly the faces of the new, caring Cameroonianism, all gone. You could say that to lose a couple was natural wastage, but to lose them all signals that the party had taken a masculinist turn that its female futures couldn’t support. You could say that if the prime minister had any serious commitment to gender diversity, he would have worked harder to keep them, maybe even to the point of brooking some ideological compromises. What you can’t say is that he has a rich pool of female talent in his cabinet to draw from that he’s ignoring. I cannot call it misogyny to keep Priti “52 extra murders a year under Jeremy Corbyn” Patel out of the dead centre of the limelight. The longer she speaks, the greater the risk of her doing a Jacob Rees-Mogg.