Women Journalists From England

"It was here that [[Michael Fallon|[Michael] Fallon]] lunged at me. This was not a farewell peck on the cheek, but a direct lunge at my lips. When I have previously written about this incident (referring to an unnamed MP) I have described it as a "kiss" – but a kiss suggests something romantic, consensual. This was anything but. I shrank away in horror and ran off to my office in the press gallery. I felt humiliated, ashamed. Was I even guilty that maybe I had led him on in some way by drinking with him? After years of having a drink with so many other MPs who have not acted inappropriately towards me, I now know I was not."

"For reasons that have never been clear to me, the call centre for my insurer – a policy bought through a broker in Dubai, regulated in the Channel Islands, and falling under the umbrella of one of the biggest insurers in the US – is located in Scotland, ensuring that the man who picked up my call had to strain as hard as I did to pretend this situation was normal."

"[P]opulists offering easy answers hate nothing more than the long, boring, mercilessly exposing business of trying to put them into practice. If the biggest risk to Reform is being shut out of power, then the second biggest might be winning it."

"But the reason I'm not naming Sex Kitten Man either is that making this about any one particular idiot risks letting all the other idiots off the hook. For the point is it could have been any idiot."

"[A]ll the wrong people are in the spotlight. We have spent too long demanding that famous faces justify what they earn, rather than asking their anonymous managers to justify what they pay. It's not enough for salaries to be transparent if the assumptions underpinning them are shrouded in mystery. For if nobody will tell you the rules of the game, then it's impossible to know if somebody somewhere is cheating."

"So I didn't say anything, and for years continued to have a perfectly professional and often productive (in story terms) working relationship with Sex Kitten Man. And he rose into cabinet, where eventually his career imploded over an entirely unrelated error of judgment. Well, I say unrelated; a man who once did something slightly stupid went on to do something much more stupid."

"These incidents are only trivial if you compare them to, say, the fact that women MPs are frequently mistaken for researchers, or that there are currently more British male MPs than there have been female ones in the entire history of parliament. And if the men who govern us aren't capable of seeing women as anything other than totty, sluts or dears then what hope do we have of them taking the issues that affect us seriously?"

"Female friendships are built on knowing about the minutiae, and just like news, they require your presence."

"The opening scene of Breathtaking, in which fictional consultant Abbey Henderson discovers that a mask meant to protect her from a deadly virus doesn’t fit because it was shaped for male jaws, meanwhile almost uncannily echoes the evidence given by senior civil servant Helen MacNamara to the Covid inquiry last year about how hard it was to get the problems women were experiencing with PPE taken seriously in Whitehall."

"Many years ago, I went to a party in central London thrown by a host known for curating interesting and heavyweight guest lists and, on entering, encountered David Irving, the disgraced historian and Holocaust denier. As a marker of social pariahdom, Holocaust denial is up there with – or perhaps even more potent than – a conviction for sex offences, and I turned around and walked out; not through any particular moral superiority, but because I thought "notoriety" as a criteria for inclusion on a guest list was stupid and offensive. As I left, I remember looking across the room at the host and thinking: you silly bloody bint, I'm embarrassed for you."

"Have been thinking about whether or not to tweet about it, but actually that is NOT on and lobby women shouldn't have to put up with it."

"So I have passed the MP's name on to a whip. I don't betray sources. But I will betray sexists."

"Last night, an MP who I've only met a couple of times actually said to me as his opening gambit "I want to talk to the totty.""

"There is a lesson to be learned from [[George Galloway|[George] Galloway]]'s comments, though, which is that rape is not well understood at all. When he says something is "not rape as most people understand it", this is because society still largely imagines rape as an unexpected attack on a woman walking down a dark alley late at night. By describing what [[Julian Assange|[Julian] Assange]] is alleged to have done as "bad sexual etiquette", Galloway demonstrates that he does not understand the legal definition of rape, or of sexual assault for that matter. Neither, he suggests, do many other people."

"Politicians often repeat the mistakes of the past – the level of turnover in parliament makes it even more likely that no one will notice."

"The message from [[Rosie Duffield|[Rosie] Duffield]]'s experience is that if you are a woman in politics, you'd better think really long and hard before you dare stick your neck out on issues you really care about – and not because people will argue with you, but because they'll threaten you."

"I understand now why, if you are in an emotionally abusive relationship, how difficult it can feel to speak up or escape it [...] Part of the abuse is that it removes your layers of self-confidence until you are so co-dependent that you don’t think you can exist without the other person. Often the other person is telling you things like "You'll never find anyone who loves you like I do." I’ve had that said to me in that relationship."

"As I stood in a group near the bar, a Tory MP came over to introduce himself. "What are you doing here?" he asked abruptly, in what I can only assume was an attempt at small talk. "I work with the party’s host," I explained. “What are you doing here?" ... And then he said: "If you work at the Telegraph, do you know that slut who writes that Single Girl About Town column at the back of the magazine? What's her name? Bryony Gordon?" The room seemed to fall silent. "Yes," I managed to respond. "I know her very well, because that slut is me." The new minister for can-you-guess-what blushed crimson and spent the rest of the evening apologising profusely."

"If the prevailing feeling is that Latin and Greek are for toffs, then Boris [Johnson], frankly, is not the man to dispel that notion."

"I love the British Museum, despite everything. I have had my eyes opened, my imagination set on fire, my intellect challenged by it too many times to mention. ... A fortnight ago, I stopped by to admire the beauty of the Parthenon sculptures, the galloping horsemen and reclining gods innocent of their role in a diplomatic feud. The museum was full of schoolchildren. The place was vibrating with the energy and excitement that comes from the encounter with glorious, awe-inspiring objects. But taking £50m from a polluter? It fills my heart with dread that the museum should take so wrong a turn."

"The classics and class have always been ­uncomfortably linked. In this country's education system, knowledge of the classics was traditionally the gatekeeper of privilege. If you ­acquired the classics (even as a humble stonemason's son, like Thomas Hardy) you gained a passport to the establishment. Fail (like Hardy's character Jude) and the corridors of power remained out of reach."

"The wording chills me slightly, with its suggestion of a regular consignment of Eton scholars as if by a law of nature."

"In north Staffordshire, it is perfectly acceptable, indeed polite social practice, to turn over a plate and inspect the backstamp if you are eating at a friend’s house. Because Stoke has historically had a rather stable, immobile population, memories are long and the tentacular reach of families into the pottery industry goes back generations."

"But "the classics" are so much more than this careless and aggressive chucking around of Latin and Greek tags, as if they were bread rolls at a Bullingdon club dinner."

"The episode of February 28, 1988, was just a normal one in the BBC’s consumer series That's Life!. ... But deep in the centre of the programme, where we always placed our most serious items, we had a unique moment that 35 years later still has the power to move and inspire. Nicholas Winton was revealed for the first time to have rescued more than 660 children, most of them Jewish, from being murdered in the Holocaust. And three of those children learnt for the first time who had saved them, how he had done it and, sitting with him in our studio audience, turned to him and thanked him for their lives. It was the only time in my professional life when, as a presenter, the emotion stopped me. I had to break off our recording, leave my chair and take a moment to wipe my eyes. We were the only factual programme that would have told his story that way because we were the only one with a studio audience. And we were thrilled to be able to stage another surprise for Nicky one week later, when we invited him back. This time I asked members of our audience to stand if they owed their lives to him. Nicky was once again sitting in the front row, so I asked him to turn round to see the whole ground floor audience in the television theatre standing."

"When I started as a researcher in the BBC, I was working for an editor who was a self-confessed misogynist. He used to practise shooting by aiming his air gun at an aerosol can balanced just over my head. I made it a matter of pride not to flinch as the pellets whizzed by."

"[Describing a visit to Germany to prepare a radio documentary] The country's military past and future demands collide, often awkwardly but in a way that reminds us that one "change in times" is often soon succeeded by another emergency. The museum ship in the port is named after Werner Mölders (the first pilot in aviation history to shoot down 100 enemy aircraft while supporting Franco in the Spanish civil war and against France in the Second World War). It’s a bit unclear in the presentation whether he is seen as a dashing military ace or a legacy embarrassment."

"I have joined Dignitas. I have in my brain thought, well, if the next scan says nothing's working I might buzz off to Zurich – but it puts my family and friends in a difficult position because they would want to go with me. And that means that the police might prosecute them. So we've got to do something. At the moment, it’s not really working, is it?"

"My older daughter, Emily, had ME for 14 years. Thankfully she is better now and lives with me. She recently joined Kabbalah and changed her named to a more biblical name, "Miriam" – a little hard for me as she was named after my maternal grandmother, Emily, whom I adored. But I get round it by calling her "Em"."

"The Nationwide editor, Michael Bunce, asked me if there was any particular film I'd like to make for them, so I asked if they would send me to Belfast to report on the Troubles. He said he would need time to think about it. Then he rang me back: "The thing is, Esther, what would you wear?" It was such a serious dilemma, he decided I couldn't film there."

"[On Giorgia Meloni, at the time prime minister of Italy] After decades of fractious coalitions and technocratic solutions, supporters relish her dominant leadership approach and mission to “defend” the country from outside influences. Meloni has now announced the "mother of all reform packages", a power grab that would allow prime ministers to be directly elected on minority vote shares. She will first have to escape the opprobrium of opposition in parliament and win a possible referendum. Given her success in manoeuvring herself and her party from the fringes of Italy's changeable landscape to outrun other far-right contenders such as Matteo Salvini and heirs to the Berlusconi legacy, it would be unwise to underestimate her chances."

"Surely, if the Windsors were a business, analysts would say that it has a key vulnerability built on the absolute primacy of the chief executive, too small a board and too little flexibility in its model."

""I don’t have all the answers to old age. In fact, I rarely think about it"."

""I have never consciously chosen to keep on working, for example, even though I’m the proud owner of a Freedom Pass (and I will never, ever vote for any political party that takes it away!)".#"

""Loneliness is the scourge of old age, which means there has never been a better time to enjoy those water-cooler moments"."

""I’m running in the last lap of life. But instead of relegating myself to deterioration, I try to regard myself as simply fraying at the edges"."

"When you have 50 per cent of women filling the top jobs, it becomes just uninteresting. Now, a few stand out – a few run companies, a few are famous. People have a go at them."

""There’s no right way of doing it. Nobody looks at blokes in boring suits and criticises them"."

"But during the first lockdown, I found it really hard to write, it seemed such a self-indulgent thing to do."

"Then I met an ICU doctor during a swim at a local reservoir, and she told me the only way she was coping was by listening to audio books, and that made me start writing again."

"I’m very driven, and I think you have to allow yourself, especially as a woman, to give yourself time to write, and to treat it seriously."

"I’ve never thought of myself as a cultural activist, but thanks! The reason I work in different fields is mainly to make a living – professional authors in the UK now earn an average of around £10,000 a year, it’s usually impossible to live just from writing books."

"Also I don’t get bored if I have several projects on the go."

"[M]y experience of an all-girls' school, followed by twice as long as a trustee of a prison charity, informed a lot of my politics, including why I became a transgender ally. Before I had thought seriously about trans rights, and the immeasurable preciousness of any human being with the courage to live their most meaningful and truthful life, I thought: "Wait, are you saying all-female spaces are kinder? Purer? Inherently less violent? More supportive? Are you joking? Are you out of your mind?""

"Later, they were both part of the metropolitan elite, or, as we used to call them, "Londoners"."

"It's an extremely peculiar situation, if you come at it cold: neither the Labour leader, nor any of his shadow cabinet, can get through a broadcast interview without being asked who has a penis and who has a vagina. Why, at this moment of both national and international crisis, has the media decided that the most important question for a party that hasn't been in government for 12 years, is a hypothetical one about genitals?"

"[In the late 1990s] But the conversations we had then were whether or not it was feminist to wear fishnets. There was never any subtext of violence against women. By the late 00s, lad-mag controversies were of a completely different nature. Danny Dyer had an agony uncle column in Zoo that he used to advise a reader to cut his ex's face to stop anyone else wanting her. Other advice was to set fire to a readers's girlfriend’s pubic hair that he didn't like. These were ghostwritten and as such can only really speak to the new mood in lad-mags, but two things had changed. One was a complete normalisation of violence against women and the other was a void where the humour used to be. The norm had been flipped: the argument in the 90s, that anything was fair game so long as it was funny, had turned into: "Anything is allowable, so long as I say it is funny.""

"This is why with a no-deal Brexit now "illegal" we are heading for a second referendum, and the Tory Party's obliteration. The problem with brilliant men in politics is that too often their brains go to their heads."

"Indeed, if Boris Johnson does the only thing he can feasibly do and resign, the big risk is that the Conservatives will tip back into civil war."

"Why haven't the ERG drilled into results from the recent local elections, which reveal Tories are haemorrhaging in “safe” areas from Essex to Somerset? The Brexiteers should use this evidence as a basis for arguing that it's no-deal or bust. Or they should do us all a favour, and defect to the Brexit Party."