Tory rag's basic instincts are still misogyny and snobbery

AN anonymous Tory MP who spoke to an English newspaper about Angela Rayner was "inappropriate" but did not break Commons rules, the leader of the house said yesterday.

- ANNIE BROWN

Then change the rules.

The sexism, the classism, the utter disregard for any semblance of decency from the “source” of this story to the journalist and newspaper which printed it, is an affront to politics and the media.

The tawdry newspaper article claimed Tories "insiders” had accused Rayner of a "Basic Instinct ploy” to put the PM “off his stride” by crossing and uncrossing her legs at PMQs.

Not one woman who has ever worked in politics or in the media is in the least surprised.

According to the article, when the PM is at the dispatch box Rayner deploys “a fully clothed Parliamentary equivalent of Sharon Stone's infamous scene in the 1992 film Basic Instinct”.

Translated: “Fully dressed woman shifts in her seat".

One Tory MP told the paper: "She knows she can't compete with Boris's Oxford Union debating training, but she has other skills which he lacks." We witnessed the verbal dexterity Oxford has afforded Johnson in his Peppa Pig speech to the nation's captains of industry.