What Boris does to women

On Sunday, Diane Abbott made the startling claim on a BBC radio programme that Boris Johnson liked ‘assaulting women’. It would be absurd, of course, to argue that Mr Johnson is a faultless animal of unimpeachable probity. We have seldom in the past century had a Prime Minister whose faults have been so numerous and glaring.

But if other politicians were alive today, how would the whole camorra of professional liberals and puritans treat them? Take George Washington. He was the richest man in the United States, a land grabber and an exploiter. He knew more profanity than scripture, despised the common people and took no interest in morality. Lord Melbourne said ‘damn politics’ and enjoyed spanking women. Pitt the Younger had questionable sexual tastes and was a drunken spendthrift.

Inhabiting the world today, none of these men would be eligible for political office. Of course some types of behavior that were acceptable then are not acceptable now, and rightly so. But in all the years I have known Boris, I have never heard of him sexually assaulting a woman. Indeed, he is remarkably timid where females are concerned, and employs a sort of dull, persistent verbiage, like a vicar importuning his congregation with an overlong sermon.

Queen Victoria once complained of Gladstone that he addressed her like a public meeting. Boris addresses women as if they were members of a classical symposium. His idea of assault is to force them to conjugate Latin verbs. This is indeed uncalled for and distressing, and can be extremely traumatic. I myself, when faced with such unprovoked attacks, have often felt victimised and tearful. On occasion, I wondered if a law should be passed against it.

Boris had just become an MP at the time I met him. But despite his constant attacks on me with editions of Shakespeare’s Richard III and the Iliad, he was not known as The Beast of Henley. This will doubtless disappoint Ms Abbott, who appears to see sex pests everywhere, like the rest of her party. What attracts her to hunting them is probably a form of sadism. She is the sort of person who gets a thrill out of being cruel to Conservatives.

This obsession with the pursuit of sex pests in the Tory Party is becoming more and more inexplicable. Labour hunts them on the grounds they are rabid animals, but anybody who knows anything about the ecology of the Conservative party knows that like toffs, there are hardly any sex pests left in it. With a few exceptions like Chris Pincher, who allegedly prefers assaulting men, they are now in the nightclub business or interior design.

As for Boris, he should perhaps desist from beating women into submission with Homer, and try something more in tune with modern tastes. A nice, but unsuggestive, remark about the voluptuousness of one’s intellect, for example, or the beauty of one’s prose. I admit that, historically, his offensives have been too one-sided and nonconsensual. Having said that, after Ms Abbott’s assault, his character remains mercifully intact, and Ms Abbott’s character as intact as it is ever likely to be.