Angela Raynor said she would not be deterred from “vile lies” after a widely criticized report suggested that Conservative lawmakers believed she was crossing her legs during the prime minister’s questions to distract Boris Johnson.
The Mail on Sunday reported that the unnamed senior Tories had “rumored” the deputy Labor leader to deploy what she called “the fully clothed parliamentary equivalent of Sharon Stone’s infamous scene in the 1992 film Basic Instinct”.
The article quoted a Conservative MP as saying: “She knows she can’t compete with Boris’s Oxford Union debate training, but he has other skills he lacks. She admitted this when enjoying drinks with us at [Commons] terrace. ”
He also contrasts Raynor’s origins as a former care worker who dropped out of school at 16 with that of the Prime Minister of Old Italy.
In a series of furious tweets on Sunday morning, Raynor responded to an anonymous briefing by saying she was a victim of “sexism and misogyny.”
“I am accused of a ‘trick’ to distract the helpless prime minister – as a woman, I have legs and wear clothes,” Raynor said. She accused Johnson’s allies of “resorting to spreading desperate, perverse slander in their doomed attempts to save his skin.”
“He and his cheerleaders obviously have a big problem with women in public life. They should be ashamed of themselves. I will not let their vile lies deter me. “Their attempts to harass and intimidate me will fail,” she said.
Johnson tweeted Sunday: “As much as I disagree with Angela Raynor on almost every political issue, I respect her as an MP and regret the misogyny directed at her anonymously today.
Conservative Chairman Oliver Dowden also dismissed the allegations as “completely ridiculous”.
“I like Mail on Sunday and I enjoy reading it, but I think it’s a completely ridiculous story that I don’t recognize,” he said. Former House of Commons leader Andrea Leedsum has agreed to criticize “completely unacceptable comments and reporting”.
Raynor last confronted Johnson over questions from the prime minister in January, when Keira Starmer isolated herself with Kovid. She challenged the prime minister on the cost of living crisis, pointing to his previous calm stance on inflation, and asked, “How did you get it so wrong?”
Raynor sparked controversy at a Labor conference last fall for describing conservatives at a party event as “homophobic, racist, misogynistic and scum”.
In Basic Instinct, Stone plays a brutal killer psychopath who briefly flashes his vulva in a famous scene while being questioned by a police detective played by Michael Douglas.
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