Nick Cohen Nick Cohen

The martyrdom of St Andrea

He may have died in the seventeenth century but in his Mysterie of Rhetoric Unvail’d  of 1657 John Smith showed he understood how sneaks such as Andrea Leadsom operate.  Defining the rhetorical device of ‘apophasis’, Smith described it as

A kind of irony, whereby we deny that we say or doe that which we especially say or doe

Leadsom proved herself the queen of denying what she says and does: the apotheosis of apophasis. She made a political issue of the childlessness of Theresa May, a loss we know is a matter of sorrow to the Home Secretary and her husband, as it is to many couples, while denying that she was politicising the private life of her opponent.

I am sure she will be really sad she doesn’t have children, Leadsom said of May with a slipperiness worthy of Uriah Heep, and continued

So I don’t want this to be ‘Andrea has children, Theresa hasn’t’, because I think that would be really horrible but, genuinely, I feel being a mum means you have a very real stake in the future of our country, a tangible stake. She possibly has nieces, nephews, lots of people. But I have children who are going to have children who will directly be a part of what happens next.

It was a naked appeal to the Tory grassroots to consider a prejudice many among them did not know they possessed. A childless woman, is incomplete, a decadent failure without a stake in the future of her country.

Until that moment, believers in the emancipation of women were enjoying the shortest of celebrations. They were able to say how pleased they were that the two candidates for prime minister were both women. What progress we have made! What a new world we live in where the triumph of women leaders is taken for granted!

Ms Leadsom took an all-women shortlist as an opportunity to mount a sexist attack no man would dare employ, and I am delighted to say it has ruined her ambitions.

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