- The Guardian
Thursday 1 August 2019 5
the merit of consistency. He could
never be accused of hypocrisy.
There is nothing new about
politicians having extramarital
aff airs, nor their partners doing the
same. The list of prime ministerial
philandering is long and almost
certainly far from complete. David
Lloyd George was a notorious
womaniser, once allegedly
interviewed while in bed with two
women (although a decade after he
had left Downing Street), who fi nally
married his mistress after 30 years.
Herbert Asquith wrote passionate
letters to Venetia Stanley, a friend
of his daughter’s, during a
ministerial argument over the
carnage on the western front.
Labour prime ministers were
no more uxorious, merely more
discreet. Ramsay MacDonald
allegedly had a long relationship
with a Vietnamese woman
in a house a short walk from
Westminster.
But, in the face of stories
this weekend involving the
arrangements for the traditional
prime ministerial visit to Balmoral
in August – and whether it would
break royal protocol for Symonds
to accompany Johnson before
his divorced is fi nalised – the
Downing Street line is that this
isn’t the 1920s, but 2019. There is
no such thing, by implication, as
respectability, a word redefi ned in
a special Johnsonian way so that it
smothers its underlying reference to
problematic ideas such as morality.
Obviously, ideas have changed
since the mid-20th century, when
Dorothy, the wife of the Tory prime
minister Harold Macmillan – and a
daughter of the ducal Devonshire
family – had a long relationship
with another Conservative MP, Bob
Boothby, a fact that her husband
reluctantly accommodated for
30 years. Throughout her life,
the aff air remained both widely
known at Westminster and entirely
unreported. Unsurprisingly, when
Macmillan’s defence minister, John
Profumo, was found in 1963 to
have lied to the House of Commons
about his intimate relationship with
Christine Keeler, conducted while
she was having an aff air with the
Russian military attache, rais ing
genuine issues of security, the
prime minister was ready to dismiss
it as a private matter.
The Profumo aff air was the fi rst
modern sex scandal. Ever since,
policing politicians’ private lives
has been a media staple, and what
goes on behind the glossy black
door of N o 10 is treated with as
much hypocritical reverence as if it
was a template for the times.
From John Major’s
misinterpreted attempt to return
to basics (despite his infi delity)
to May’s #MeToo crisis, in which
a series of ministers were sacked
for predatory sexual conduct,
the history of Downing Street
politics could be summed up as
one unending contest between
respectability and scandal. The
prime minister’s role, according
to Johnson biographer Andrew
Gimson is “to marshall the forces of
respectability ... to uphold, both in
his or her own person and as leaderof the government, the standards
of behaviour which command the
support of respectable people”.
The question now is whether
asking a media grown rich on
prurience to accept Symonds
as fi rst girlfriend is just another
appeal for tolerance of Johnson
exceptionalism or something more.
Could it be that his fans in the
media-owning classes see him not
as the admirable epitome of the new
norm of social liberalism, but rather
as the vehicle for the restoration of
a status quo in which the private
morality of powerful politicians is a
matter only for them?
That might depend on wherethe bar for this particular type of
“respectability” really lies. To most
people, cohabitation is the new
normal; it just hasn’t been tried at
N o 10 before. The statistics show
that it is creeping up on marriage as
the preferred form of coupledom.
It is true that most couples still
choose marriage, and less than
a fi fth cohabit, but that tots up
to nearly 5 million people living
together without any formal legal
status. Another million cohabit with
new partners after divorce. Many of
them will be of the same generation
as Symonds. And, if there are
enough Tory millennials for there
to be a type, then Symonds appears
to be it: socially liberal, greenish,
economically to the right. Johnson
has a partner who is recognisable
to younger voters, and it is clear
from his early pronouncements
as PM that he recognises the value
of her brand, too. In each speech,
there were nods to the green agenda
sitting uneasily alongside less green
pledges such as ending the ban on
genetically modifi ed organisms and
the party’s commitment to a free
vote on fox hunting.
In the end, it will likely be the
weight of small-c conservative
attitudes to marriage against the
weight of attitudes to Johnson
himself that decide. He is such a
profoundly divisive character that
those who love him do so in the
face of his record and, probably,
regardless of his personal life. For
those who don’t, the list of reasons
to dislike him stretches too far for
his private arrangements to be
decisive. But evidence suggests
that the Brexit divide is a values
divide and the latest YouGov polling
shows that women are much less
impressed with Johnson than men.
And while the question of
Symonds’ status might be the most
revealing of the dilemmas faced by
female partners on the threshold
of No 10 , it is not the only one. Last
week , she stood expressionless
among Downing Street staff in a
mirror image of Philip May at earlier
prime ministerial lectern moments,
although more strikingly dressed in
pink. But, even if she wants to, she
will struggle to stay invisible.
Being the prime ministerial wife
(in very distinct opposition to being
the PM’s husband) has probably
always been a performance art, and
the challenge is how to escape it.
Since the 90s, when the media hit
on attacking Cherie Blair as a way
of undermining her husband, it has
become a bitter contest between
predators and their victim. She
wanted to be recognised for what
she was: a good lawyer with a
successful independent career.
But she knew she also had to play
the traditional role and she never
managed to do it in a way that
refl ected the status of her own
professional life.
Her successors – Sarah Brown,
Samantha Cameron – learned from
her miserable experience and
managed more successfully. But
Symonds understands the PR. She
is a smart woman. It may be that her
biggest headache is whether she has
long enough in Downing Street to
PHOTOGRAPHS: STANDARD/REX/SHUTTERSTOCK; AFP/GETTY; IMAGE MANIPULATION BY GUARDIAN DESIGN even unpack.
In its own way,
the switch from
May to Johnson
represents
a reversal as
startling, if not
as signifi cant,
as the US turn
from Obama
to Trump
Shana Grice – like so many
women – died because of
police ignorance
Yomi
Adegoke
O
f all the horrifi c details of teenager Shana
Grice’s murder by her ex-boyfriend in
2016 – her reporting him to authorities
fi ve times over six months, her throat
being slit in her bedroom and his
attempts to burn her body afterwards- there is another that particularly disturbs. Grice was
fi ned £90 by Sussex police for wasting police time , after
it emerged she initially failed to disclose that she had
previously been in a relationship with her eventual killer.
On Tuesday, a misconduct panel found that former
offi cer Trevor Godfrey’s behaviour amounted to a
breach of police rules. But, during the two-day hearing,
he maintained that in the lead-up to her death, Grice
wasn’t being harassed as she had sent her ex texts
punctuated with kisses. He also claimed she had lied
as a “smokescreen to disguise her aff air”, so her new
boyfriend did not fi nd out that she was still seeing
her ex; Godfrey considered the latter relationship to
be consensual.
The police force failed Grice in many ways, among
them not acknowledging how many women engage with
men they are afraid of. It is commonplace for women
to placate those who may harm them (or in the case of
Grice, kill them) if they do not.
We can comprehend a negotiator
saying what they need to in order
to bargain with a kidnapper for the
lives of hostages. But as a woman,
when you are the hostage, doing the
same leads to s cepticism and scorn –
even more so if you have a previous
relationship with your tormentor.
As the counsel presenting the case
against Godfrey put it: “ There is
a stereotype that if Person A is in
a relationship with Person B, one
cannot be at risk from the other.”
Yet we know the opposite is true –
two women die at the hands of former
and current partners in England and
Wales each week. A fi fth of women
killed by their partners had contacted
the police.
Cases like Grice’s are chillingly
common. In 2013, Joshua Stimpson
began harassing a young woman after
they had been on a Tinder date. She
had reported him to the police but it was not recorded as
a crime. Four years later, Stimpson murdered
student Molly McLaren two weeks after she ended
their relationship.
In 2016, Alice Ruggles had her throat slashed by an
army signaller, Trimaan Dhillon, while she was in the
shower at home. Just days before, she reported him to
police after he hacked into her social media accounts
and began skulking outside her property. The police left
it to the soldier’s superior at his barracks to warn him
about his behaviour – despite Dhillion having a history of
off ending against ex-partners.
We often say the hardest part of seeking help as a
victim of domestic violence is taking the fi rst step of
contacting authorities. What we omit is the suspicion
and stereotyping you may face once you have done so.
These young women are put on trial long before their
killers. Their deaths come at the hands of brutal men
after a police force has chosen to punish them instead
of treating them as victims.
The police didn’t
acknowledge that
many women
engage with men
they are afraid of
David and
Samantha
Cameron; Cherie
and Tony Blair;
John Profumo
and his wife,
Valerie
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