Section:GDN 1J PaGe:3 Edition Date:190907 Edition:01 Zone: Sent at 6/9/2019 18:03 cYanmaGentaYellowblac
Saturday 7 September 2019 The Guardian •
3
Gaby
Hinsliff
B
oris Johnson has blown it, surely.
Even the man who invariably gets
away with murder – rising above things
that would sink any mortal politician- can only push the Tory faithful so
far. Or so I thought, at any rate, the
night it emerged that police had been
called to his girlfriend Carrie Symonds’
fl at by worried neighbours.
Whatever happened between them – and the police
went away satisfi ed it was nothing but a lovers’ tiff – the
episode seemed at best embarrassing and distinctly
un-prime ministerial. Surely older Conservatives, pens
poised over leadership ballot papers, would worry about
the risks of putting such a volatile character into N o 10.
But I was wrong, just as Democrats were wrong to
think in 2016 that women wouldn’t vote for a man caught
on tape bragging about assaulting women, and just
as remain campaigners were wrong to think people
wouldn’t make a referendum choice that could render
them poorer. During the summer, the Johnson camp
succeeded in arguing, however preposterously, that
the neighbours were the real villains here for wading
into a private row, even one loud enough to hear from
the street. It was a salutary lesson in not assuming that
everyone is thinking what you’re thinking, and one I can’t
get out of my mind as a general election looms.
It has become a cliche to compare scandals to Rorschach
blots – vivid splodges into which voters can read whatever
they like, regardless of the facts. But while some women
who voted for Donald Trump doubtless did so after
convincing themselves that those who came forward
to accuse him of sexual misdemeanours during the
campaign must be lying, or that the media was out to get
him – that’s not the the whole story. In exit polls, 70 %
of female voters said his behaviour towards women was
a problem, yet a third of those with qualms admitted
to voting for him anyway. These women knew what
he was but didn’t let it stop them, and anyone who
fi nds that diffi cult to believe is probably forgetting the
moral gymnastics they may have executed in the past
to support a candidate with whom they agreed about
almost everything else.
Women came out in their droves for Bill Clinton in the
1996 presidential election, knowing full well he had at
ILLUSTRATION:
MATT KENYONbest repeatedly cheated on Hillary. Earlier this year, a
ComRes poll found 15% of voters thought Labour had
a serious antisemitism problem but were still planning
to vote Labour anyway. Time and time again, the
evidence suggests that party allegiances consistently
override other considerations: voters will swallow more
principles than they would probably care to admit in
pursuit of whatever they feel matters more. But even
fi erce partisanship doesn’t quite explain why people
often go against what seem, on paper, to be their best
interests. The biggest factor in women backing Trump,
according to a singularly depressing study carried out
by the LSE , was that they shared his prejudices.
Women who were Republicans to start with were,
unsurprisingly, 29% more likely to vote for Trump than
those who weren’t. But women who scored highly
for racial resentment, sexist attitudes and socially
authoritarian values were 37% more likely to do so. These
women weren’t holding their noses and voting for Trump
despite his unreconstructed views – but because of them.
Women for whom feminism is a dirty word may still be
a relatively niche group in Britain electorally, but there are
almost certainly more of them than liberals like to think.
One in four women in a recent poll for the charity
Hope Not Hate agreed that “feminism is to blame of
making some men feel marginalised and demonised in
society”. Two-thirds of people polled for Sky News last
year thought feminism had either gone too far, or as far
as it should. Even at the height of the MeToo movement
inspired by the downfall of Harvey Weinstein in 2017,
some women still took it on themselves to argue that
maybe young actresses shouldn’t go to producers’ hotel
rooms late at night if they didn’t want to get assaulted,
or that women should stop portraying themselves as
helpless victims; just knee the offi ce creep in the groin,
rather than running to HR. There are rich pickings here
for politicians unscrupulous enough to go after them –
it’s a backlash waiting to be exploited.T
oo pessimistic? Perhaps. But the last
three years have exposed the idea
of a broad moral consensus, some
unwritten national agreement on the
red lines politicians shouldn’t cross,
for the comforting myth it is. Old
moral certainties are dissolving in
the acid bath of Brexit. Being caught
out in a barefaced lie isn’t necessarily a deal-breaker
now, if you think all politicians are liars anyway. The
Tories’ current poll lead seemingly confounds those
who have spent decades arguing the party could only
win by detoxifying the brand, appealing to women and
minority voters – but what if the rules have changed?
After a week in which Johnson lost his majority, his
control over Brexit and the trust of his brother , it’s
tempting to believe that his sidekick Dominic Cummings’
run of confounding conventional wisdom is over :
Johnson will surely go on to lose an election too,
on a surging tide of exasperated progressive votes.
But if he is arguably out of his depth running
a government, Cummings has twice led winning
referendum campaigns (on Brexit and on John Prescott’s
plan for regional devolution to the north east) by
exploiting the other side’s complacency; the sense that
it was already in the bag, that voters couldn’t possibly
fail to be thinking what you’re thinking. Maybe this time
he’s wrong. But the lesson of the last three years is never
to ignore that tiny, niggling voice of doubt.Think this
prime minister
is toxic? Don’t
be so sure
Opinion
Women
for whom
feminism is a dirty
word may be a niche
group, but there are
more of them than
liberals like to think
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