During his time in office, Rishi Sunak has done much to popularize an amplifier favored by men who want to advertise their commitment to women’s interests while erasing any previous indifference: “As a father of daughters.”
Without his internal revelations, Sunak, ‘as a father to daughters’, might never have understood the need for girls to feel safe walking around at night or to be educated to the same extent as boys. Which is disturbing, but still. Better late, etc. His daughters are also credited in Sunak’s tribute to the Lionesses’ victories and in his appreciation of the need for segregated sex areas for women.
While relying on daughters for gender equality is less impressive than promoting it on principle, Sunak undeniably shines when compared to politicians who, even after being blessed with girls, remain in a natural state. Donald Trump has daughters. Ditto Vladimir Putin. David Cameron, with two, maintained a primitive preference for male colleagues/banter. George Osborne’s daughter could not inoculate him against expressing psychopathic fantasies about Theresa May. That Boris Johnson was the parent as Prime Minister of two and then three girls also confirms that hiring only men who have daughters cannot, unfortunately, be the solution to misogyny at Westminster, the City or the Metropolitan Police.
Unfortunately, hiring only men who have daughters cannot be the solution to misogyny in Westminster, the city or the police
Admittedly, since producing another girl, Johnson has apologized to the female colleague known to his old WhatsApp friends as ‘that cunt’. Perhaps in difficult cases you need a ratio of at least four daughters to one brute to achieve the level of insight that two Sunak are said to be gifted with?
Although even that project, we discover, has its limits, if not in reverse. As the father of daughters, Sunak has just confirmed that jokes about date rape drugs are not a criminal offence.
Specifically, as the father of daughters, he has decided that talk about intoxicating women with Rohypnol, the sedative virtually synonymous with drug-facilitated sexual assault (DFSA) by predatory men, should be tolerated, even if its author – James Cleverly – not only the Home Secretary, but speaking on the day his department announces measures designed to, in addition to tackling surges, increase public understanding that it is an “abhorrent” offence.
Shortly before Christmas, Cleverly’s Home Office colleague Laura Farris, the Minister for Victims and Safety, told the House of Commons: “Spiking is an abhorrent predatory crime that ruins lives.” The evidence of harm, she said in outlining changes to the law, was “irrefutable: the main victims are young and predominantly women”.
In a statement ahead of his department’s proposals, Cleverly wrote: “Spiking is a perverse crime that can have a lasting impact on its victims.” If ‘perverse’ seems too underpowered a word to choose – it could even be taken to mean that perpetrators, when temporarily poisoned, select a particularly unreliable means to achieve their goals – perhaps this can now be recognized as a new unfortunate hint, to add to an extensive collection, which, if not actively unsuitable for high office, is Cleverly one of the best arguments yet for not going all out.
But nothing, from calling a northern city a “shit-hole” to describing the Rwanda plan as “batshit” before it became “common sense,” compares to Cleverly’s achievement on the day the severity of the spike was officially declared, shedding light on the crime that same evening. Not that every day is perfect for belittling your own department.
The Sunday mirror reported that he had said of his wife at a No. 10 reception that “a little bit of Rohypnol in her drink every night” was “not really illegal, as long as it was just a little bit.” The tribute to Les Dawson (“I said to the chemist, ‘Can I have some more sleeping pills for the woman?’, he said ‘Why?’, I said ‘She keeps waking up'”), continued with the benefits of maintaining a husband “always slightly sedated, so that she can never realize that there are better men out there”.
Survivors of and anti-spiking campaigners – some of whom had contributed to the Home Office report – immediately denounced comments that are unlikely to have educated the kind of men who think that stunning and abusing women through memory-impairing drugs is within being missing for several hours is a form of anesthesia. joke. The Home Office notes that there is repeated evidence of fun in tracking down perpetrators and explicitly states: “This is not funny, and we must make sure the message is clear.”
Even without specialist knowledge, it is clear that Cleverly’s attitude towards the crime is far removed from anything generally considered responsible. There is nothing sensible, as leftists have been cited in his defense, about recognizing the trivialization of the DFSA as anything more than just distasteful, when offenders in nightclubs and at festivals make so little effort to traumatize and expose only politically-minded young women to fall.
You don’t have to find Sleeping Beauty’s awakening problematic, or want to put a trigger warning on Keats’s The Eve of Saint Agnes, to understand why men who publicly joke about DFSA are sinister, scary on dates, and should expect swift disciplinary action in any workplace outside the incel community. Or the Metropolitan Police. Or as it turns out: the cabinet.
Since Cleverly could hardly claim ignorance of the offense, his spokesman’s best defense was “an ironic joke.” And, desperately, that a No. 10 press reception was ‘private’. Most despicable, however, is Sunak’s response: the celebrity father of girls “considers the matter closed”.
Is there a downside to a sixth in four years? – Home Secretary, it does not detract from the benefits of not flying Cleverly’s red flag over Downing Street, signaling the government’s tolerance for playful boozers. Especially when the Home Office’s ‘Enough’ campaign calls for a ‘whole of society’ approach to changing attitudes to violence against women and girls, and urges bystanders to intervene. For example, “If you heard him talk about spiking predatory drinks, what would you do?”
Like many daughters, the Sunak girls may have thought they deserved some time off at Christmas, but look at the result.
• Catherine Bennett is an Observer columnist