Porn, power and politics The toxic cocktail that rocked Westminster
The writer Sonia Purnell was sitting in a TV studio, just about to go on air, when the Conservative politician beside her leaned in close.
And then, she says, he whispered in her ear a shockingly graphic slur about her sex life. It was meant, she believes, to embarrass and befuddle her just as the cameras rolled; as the author of a highly critical biography of Boris Johnson, she isn’t popular with his supporters. “I wasn’t confident enough to just say ‘this man just said THIS in my ear!’ And yes, of course, afterwards I was a bit flustered,” she remembers.
What Purnell describes is an aggressively sexualised form of undermining that many women in politics have experienced. For some it was male MPs mouthing obscenities across the chamber when they rose to
