If the Prince Andrew story is a dead cat - and I have little doubt there’s at least something dead and feline in its make up - it’s not a very good one in terms of distracting from the Tories (bear with me here....)
Why? Because there are some big themes in the story that hit (or should hit) the Tories where it hurts. This is about privilege (a Tory thing), this is about ‘tradition’ (a Tory thing), this is about male power (a Boris Johnson thing). This is about a cover up (...)
Most directly, this is about a middle aged, posh, arrogant, entitled, white man with an awful attitude to women and the sense that he can get away with anything so long as he blusters about it and says something pretending to be sincere.
And was I talking about Prince Andrew or Boris Johnson in the last tweet? It could have been either of them. It applies to both. Just hearing one of them can make you think of the other. They’re two manifestations of the same poisonous kind of privilege.
And we need to see that, to say that, to be clear about it. These aren’t random things, unconnected to anything else. These are part of a bigger picture. Why can men in these positions do things like they do, and assume they can get away with them?
Most importantly, why *do* we let them get away with them? And let’s not pretend otherwise, they do get away with them, again and again and again. And will this time (in both cases) pretty much inevitably, unless we’re very, very lucky.
Anyway, we need to see the connection. We need to make the connection. We need to understand the connection. Then we’ll not just see the dead cat, but what’s killing all the cats. /end rant
