The electoral experts have all dug out their psephological instruments. The political nerds are as excited as if they’d just been gifted Taylor Swift tickets. The damning report into Chris Pincher’s behaviour by the Committee on Standards in Public Life looks likely to force the MP’s resignation or recall, and thus the fifth by-election on the trot for an unpopular Tory government. Crank up the swingometer! Fire up the opinion polls!
Each time an MP is forced out over yet another sexual harassment scandal, certain media outlets leap to dissect the political advantages this may give one party over another. The result is a betrayal of victims and a helpful distraction from harder, structural questions about why the culture of Westminster still seems to enable sexual predators in politics. The press lobby is far too often complicit. But the tone is set inside the political parties themselves.
In July 2019, I found myself sitting at the next table in a restaurant to a Thatcher-era Tory grandee who evidently, given the booming audibility of his voice, had no sense he might be sitting next to a campaigner on sexual harassment in Westminster. Halfway through dinner, the news came in that Charlie Elphicke, MP for Dover, had been charged with three counts of sexual assault.
The Tory personage was furious. This was a tragedy! A horror show! Why? Because, as he indignantly complained to his companions, a charge would mean the party was forced to suspend the whip from Elphicke, and that would leave Theresa May’s Conservative majority perilously thin. If there was only some way to get round the pressure to suspend Elphicke. If only the women complainants could have kept their mouths shut.
Elphicke had already been restored to the whip once, having previously been suspended, when Theresa May needed his vote in the December 2018 confidence motion. One year later, he would be convicted on all three counts – one victim testified that after she had shouted “no” to his approaches, Elphicke chased her around the room chanting “I’m a naughty Tory, I’m a naughty Tory.”
But for too many in CCHQ, just like my neighbour at dinner, the experiences of Elphicke’s victims were fundamentally irrelevant. Elphicke’s crimes were a political inconvenience, his suspension from the whip an obstacle to be circumvented as soon as his vote was needed. The underlying issue – the unacceptably high incidence of sexual assault by Britain’s parliamentarians – was a side show.
Boris Johnson’s own attitude to the Chris Pincher affair exemplifies this attitude. A year ago this week, retired civil servant Simon McDonald broke his lifelong policy of political silence and made public that the then-PM had been notified of a sexual harassment complaint against Pincher, months before Johnson appointed the man to be his Deputy Chief Whip.
On Thursday, the Committee on Standards published a report affirming that Pincher had committed an “abuse of power” by groping two men in the Conservative Party’s social club, The Carlton. The report only investigated the events of that night, but the findings of fact about Pincher’s behaviour at the Carlton read as uncannily similar to several stories also published last summer which alleged sexual misconduct towards junior men on the Tory Party power ladder. (Pincher has denied all such allegations.)
McDonald had been Permanent Secretary of the Foreign Office when Pincher had served as a junior minister in the department. He wrote to the Commissioner for Parliamentary Standards on 5 July last year to notify her that Pincher had been warned then about complaints “similar to those made about his behaviour at the Carlton Club”, and that Johnson “had been briefed in person” about the matter.
As McDonald tweeted that day, he had felt driven to go public because “No 10 keep changing their story and are still not telling the truth”. In other words, the Prime Minister had lied to the public.
For Johnson, as for so many denizens of Westminster, the only calculus at play when confronted with a sexual harassment allegation is a political one. His admirer and former aide Guto Harri thought it helpful last month to let slip that, presented with Pincher’s behaviour at the Carlton, the PM remarked “if we took away the whip from everyone here who’s pinched someone’s bottom, we’ll lose our majority”. (Is that a majority of legislators it is worth Britain’s while to keep, one wonders?)
Johnson’s own behaviour has been the subject of several reports which raise questions about his ability to separate the responsibilities of power from the pursuit of sex – one woman recorded him promising her he’d tried to get her a job in City Hall after their sexual encounter, and readers will be familiar with the Jennifer Arcuri affair – as well as a complaint by the writer Charlotte Edwardes that he had groped her at a work lunch during his tenure as editor of The Spectator. (He denies the allegation.)
Boris is no longer the man who sets the tone in Downing Street. Rishi Sunak has, notoriously, promised “a new era of integrity, professionalism and accountability at every level”. But every week still brings a new story of sexual harassment in the corridors of power, and an immediate rush by Westminster to reframe it as an electoral excitement.
Last week saw the collapse of Daniel Korski’s campaign to be the Conservative candidate for Mayor of London: the floodgates opened on him following the writer Daisy Goodwin’s account, which I consider highly credible, of how Korski allegedly groped her many years ago after inviting her to a meeting in Downing Street. (Korski denies the allegation.)
The news was depressing in many ways – for full transparency, I had considered Korski my own preferred candidate, and was disappointed by many things I later learned about him – but equally disappointing was Goodwin’s account of how CCHQ failed to respond to her attempts to make a formal complaint. I have been repeatedly promised in meetings with senior Tory figures that the Conservative Party now has an accessible and publicly visible complaints system; like Goodwin, whenever I actually ask how it works, no one seems to have an answer.
The Korski story, like the Pincher story, also saw a rush by many commentators to move to the aspect of the story which really interested them: what did this mean for the race for London Mayor? Political maths always matter more than sexual ethics to the insider gang: two well-meaning friends of mine in the Tory Party genuinely seemed to believe that Downing Street opening an investigation into Korski’s time there would constitute “taking sides” in the most important issue of the day, the intra-Tory fight for the mayoral candidacy.
But some things matter more than the latest electoral bunfight. Next time there’s a sexual harassment scandal – and there will be a next time – let’s take a breath before we leap onto OddsChecker to see how the political odds have moved. Victims of sexual harassment in Westminster deserve that, at the very least.
