Of dead cats, engagements and babies

Ever since Boris Johnson romped into power with an 80-seat majority last December, he has created a cottage industry of dead cat-dumping. He got into training years before the election when he explained the art of dumping a dead cat on the dining room table to create a distraction when you're losing an argument in a column for The Telegraph in 2013. 

And last June, when he wanted to be the Conservative Party leadership frontrunner without any of the scrutiny, he took the heat off by claiming to paint wooden models of London buses for fun. As a bonus, this weird claim helped drop Google results about dishonest Brexit referendum claims emblazoned on buses, and his shameful waste of public money with the dreadful "Boris buses" when he was mayor of London, way down the list.

So it comes as no surprise that the PM's lust for dropping dead cats continues apace, now he has the job to which he has felt entitled since he was a boy. 

Reviving the ridiculous idea of a bridge between two remote points in Scotland and Northern Ireland a few weeks ago was a classic of the deceased feline genre. Johnson knows full well why it would be an expensive, dangerous engineering nightmare, although this probably won't stop him spending more of our money on a feasibility study even though the outcomes are a foregone conclusion. 

It took a serious brass neck to drop the big bridge dead cat - Johnson does not have a great track with bridges. The Garden Bridge debacle from his time as mayor wasted millions of pounds of public money, raised as-yet-unanswered questions about corruption and conflicts of interest, and the stupid project was ultimately, mercifully abandoned by an exasperated Sadiq Khan, his successor as mayor of London. It was the inevitable result of letting Joanna Lumley dictate urban planning.

But talking up a big, dumb bridge between Scotland and Northern Ireland was an excellent distraction from big issues around that time, such as the Streatham stabbing, which could be directly attributed to the early release of terrorist offenders on the watch of the Conservative governments over the past decade. This dead cat also stalled any proper scrutiny of the UK's Brexit negotiation preparations ahead of talks with the EU, which are due to resume this month. What a handy fictional bridge that was!

And yesterday, we were treated to the news of Boris Johnson's engagement to Carrie Symonds, complete with an early summer baby on the way. But this does not necessarily automatically fall into the category of dead cat, despite Twitter last night exploding with claims of ex-pussies. There were a few appalling commentators urging Carrie to take advantage of Britain's liberal abortion laws - but here's the thing about being pro-choice. It means you do not condemn women for making choices that you wouldn't make for yourself. 

Even with Johnson's notorious virility, it is preposterous to suggest that he and Carrie planned a productive bunk-up late last year that would coincide with an engagement/pregnancy announcement to fall on a weekend where the Sunday papers had plenty of embarrassing front page options. 

Anyone who knows about female biology would realise they have been aware of the pregnancy for a while, and anyone who knows about the Conservative Party's need to appeal to social conservatives would realise the announcement would have to wait until after Johnson finalised his divorce with Marina Wheeler, his second wife. Who knows if they really did get engaged last December and, frankly, who cares? It was just a necessary part of the announcement to appeal to Tory pearl clutchers. And the pregnancy announcement obviously couldn't be delayed forever. 

In any case, if it was a dead cat, it was a pretty unsuccessful one. While the engagement/pregnancy made its way to most front pages - and it is naive to expect otherwise - it was really only The Sunday Telegraph which went for the full-on, Hello!-magazine-style gush-fest. I'm not surprised there was no byline on that story - any journalist with even the tiniest shred of credibility would be embarrassed to have that on their CV.

The Mail on Sunday ran the Instagram photo of a stubbled Johnson kissing the cheek of a beaming Carrie but tempered the soppy, sickly claim to an "exclusive inside story of their love" with a "CRIPES!", which was probably the reaction of plenty of people across the country yesterday. And across the bottom of the front page is a damning story about a leaked government memo that demonstrates that not being content to "fuck business", Boris Johnson may well be tempted to fuck farmers as well in his quest to give Dominic Cummings his wet dream Brexit.

The Independent ran an old photo of the happy couple with a discreet caption but went big, and rightly so, on Sir Philip Rutnam's departure from the Home Office amid claims of bullying, lying and intimidation by Home Secretary, Priti Patel.  Bizarrely, the apologists for this wretched government seem to think Priti Patel's existence as a powerful woman of Asian heritage is some sort of gotcha-headfuck for those who oppose this government. Nope, sorry, Johnson fans, Priti Patel does not get a leave pass from scrutiny because of her gender or ethnicity. How patronising.

The Sunday Times and The Observer also led with the Home Office troubles, with both pieces holding Priti Patel's feet to the fire. The ST added a teaser for an exclusive on the forthcoming budget with news of entrepreneurs losing a big tax break. The engagement/pregnancy headline was a wry "What a good day to announce a No 10 baby", while The Observer went with a picture caption of the happy couple, and a story at the bottom about Matt Hancock's absurd plans to pull NHS doctors out of retirement to deal with the coronavirus. 

The Sunday Mirror made the obvious "Carrie to go into labour" pun and described her salaciously as the "PM's lover" in a splash of barely disguised judgement. But the lead story was still an exclusive on Mo Farah's ongoing drug row.  

And The Daily Star, which exists in its own glorious bubble of madness, had no mention of engagements or babies at all. Instead, it went big with "QUACKERS - Plastic ducks barred from charity race to save the planet", along with some Love Island gossip.

So it was reassuring that, apart from the Sunday Telegraph, the newspapers weren't too badly distracted by the PM's personal announcement, news that was, in all honesty, as predictable as it is banal.

Of course, the ball is now in Johnson and Symonds' court - with wedding plans and a baby due in a few months, there are plenty of dead cats they could gleefully drop, especially if negotiations with the EU go as pear-shaped as many expect. 

There are golden opportunities for pictures of an engagement ring to be sent out into the ether, wedding dress design speculation is compulsory, maybe some hints will be dropped about the decor of a Downing Street nursery, and because every pregnant woman in the public eye must have her private choices exposed, there is plenty of scope for the "Will Carrie give birth naturally to whale music?" genre of intrusive journalism. 

Will they opt for privacy or will they happily let fluffy wedding-and-baby stories take on a life of their own next time Johnson cuts his own throat, fucks up, or would rather not face hard questions about the path on which he and Classic Dom are dragging the country?  

Photography by rawdonfox/Flickr

My feminism is better than your feminism!

It has been rather unedifying to watch the slanging match unfold in the wake of Suzanne Moore's "Brazilian transsexual" one-liner. In her piece, written for an anthology and reprinted in the New Statesman, this was the bit that caused the most furore:

"We are angry with ourselves for not being happier, not being loved properly and not having the ideal body shape - that of a Brazilian transsexual."

Once it was published in the New Statesman, after existing for months without causing controversy, it didn't take long for Twitter to erupt, slamming Moore as transphobic. She quit Twitter after firing off a few angry responses to her critics, she returned to Twitter and she apologised. And now people are arguing about whether her apology was the right kind of apology.

Moore's initial defence of her turn of phrase was that it was a "throwaway line". Perhaps it wasn't her best use of the English language, but as someone who has been a newspaper columnist, I know how easy it is to write a word, a phrase, or even an entire column and not realise you've caused offence until it has been published. That happened to me back in 2004, when I wrote a column for the Sydney Morning Herald that compared the attention breast cancer research receives in comparison to bowel cancer, which kills more people but gets far less publicity. It didn't attract the same onslaught of comments as Suzanne Moore's  piece, but I was called out for using the word "funbags" in a breast cancer column. Among the angry emails I received, one reader told me how awful I was and wondered out loud how I'd cope with the pain of breast cancer.

Then Julie Burchill weighed in to defend Moore in the pages of The Observer, but it has now been deleted. Her childish, hateful rant made Moore's piece look about as tame as a polemic on church tea parties. Aside from pushing the bizarre and ill-informed notion that all transsexuals are middle-class and over-educated, Burchill blathered on about "dicks in chicks' clothing", "shims", "shemales" and "a bunch of bed-wetters in bad wigs." When she compared the word "cisgendered" to words like "cistern", she morphed into a puerile schoolkid who just realised "pianist" sounds a bit like "penis".

A moving piece from Paris Lees, a trans woman, does Moore more favours than Burchill's ham-fisted attempt at being heroic.

Then Lynne Featherstone, former Equalities Minister and Lib-Dem MP for Hornsey and Wood Green added to the idiocy by calling for Burchill to be sacked. As a freelancer, Burchill isn't actually on staff at The Observer, but that didn't matter to Featherstone. Unless a journalist has actually broken the law, it is completely inappropriate for an MP to call for a sacking. That is not the role of any MP who wants to be seen as not attempting to influence the press. And people wonder why I am cynical about the Leveson Inquiry...

Featherstone can now calm down. The offending article has been deleted. On one hand, it's a shame because I like to know exactly what people are thinking and what ideas they are putting out there. If the hatred is out there where we can all see it, we know what we're dealing with. But it is the editor's prerogative to take down a piece if they look back and decide it is inappropriate. No editor has 100 per cent perfect judgement 100 per cent of the time.

It has become a very nasty argument very quickly, frequently boiling down to semantics at the expense of real issues. Honestly, critics from the right must be loving this "my feminism is better than your feminism" spectacle. It is only a matter of time before some cretin from the right will describe it as a catfight and think he or she is being incredibly hilarious and original.

And in the midst of it all, Moore made an interesting point when she said she is "less concerned with people's genital arrangements than the breakdown of the social contract." This line caused offence but it requires more nuanced analysis.

We could argue until the cows, sacred or otherwise, come home about whether one is born or becomes a woman. And that argument would end up with most participants sounding like crappy motivational posters.

Instead, it is important to acknowledge that the experiences of teenage boys who decide to undergo gender reassignment surgery as adults can be different to those of teenage girls struggling to find their place in the world. But both groups frequently experience abuse, oppression, confusion, physical pain, emotional distress and other assorted horrors of adolescence, great and small. And both groups can equally call themselves women and they deserve all the respect that should entail.

Trans women are part of the feminist fold. Different women face different issues and the experiences of sexism (or lack thereof) are not the same for everyone. The issues faced by Saudi women on a daily basis, for example, are different to those I face in my day-to-day existence in London. I have learnt about how trans women have experienced poor treatment by some members of the medical profession in ways that I have never experienced or had imagined until I was made aware of the issues.

Feminism is a broad church and there are as many interpretations of feminism as there are women. Lecturing each other on how to do feminism isn't helpful. Not when there are real issues that need to be discussed, real battles that need to be fought and many voices that deserve to be heard.

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Update: Suzanne Moore has eloquently responded to this often absurd situation here.


Image courtesy of www.kozzi.com