Why Rishi Sunak’s ‘mansplaining’ can’t be helped
I struggled to watch the first instalment of Our Next Prime Minister: The Build-Up on Monday night, on account of what critics have described as Rishi Sunak’s “mansplaining” to Liz Truss on the economy. It was hard, nay impossible, to stomach. Sunak is a geek and a scholar, yet he felt the need to respond to Truss with asinine stories from his childhood and patronising explanations of why he was right.
No matter how many sleek Savile Row suits he dons, it seems he can’t stop coming across like that “briefcase w----r” Will McKenzie, from the cult TV show The Inbetweeners. Like Will, Sunak admits he wishes he could have been a Jedi.
Accusations of mansplaining have long haunted politics, from Britain to Australia, though Tory backbenchers are the worst according to the SNP’s former MP Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh. In a 2016 exchange with Chris Grayling, then-Leader of the House, she said: “May we have a debate on ‘mansplaining’, and the fact that male Tory backbenchers are not the only ones to have been elected to the House with an understanding of difficult and complex issues? The House will then find that women are very good at it too. I shall be happy to elaborate further if the Leader of the House needs any help.”
To which Grayling ‘mansplained’ away the intelligence of the entire SNP. “It is perfectly fair to say that the Scottish National Party does not understand the importance of defence issues to this country, and if we challenge them… it is right and proper to do so.” Her spokesman might have replied, as Truss’s did after the first debate: “His aggressive mansplaining and shouty Oxbridge behaviour is desperate, unbecoming.”
Still, Sunak had the tenderness of Winnie-the-Pooh talking to Truss’s Piglet compared to Al Gore’s huffing, sighing and intellectual maulings of George W Bush during the US Presidential debates of 2000. Nothing cranks up the mansplaining opportunities like the economy, stupid.
But can you ever counter it? I’m not sure it helps to know your stuff. During an infuriating debate with a notorious mansplainer in my family about why society needs cash, I felt like my body was 95 per cent fury and five per cent tears of frustration, because there was no way he’d ever hear a word a woman spoke. Everything we said was silly to his ears and if we might know something more than him on a topic he simply chose not to discuss it. Faced, however, with a testosterone-charged alpha female, he crumbled, whimpering about her cleverness.
Unless you have a killer comeback – which poor old Liz didn’t – I’d follow the strategy of a successful woman who services the travel needs of super-rich workers in the financial sector: “I teach all my staff that the one fail-safe way to curb male bullies and mansplainers is to talk to them like matron at school. Speak to them like arrogant naughty little boys in short trousers. Be clear and be very firm.” (Margaret Thatcher knew this.)
Perhaps the single most infuriating subject to mansplain is not the economy but feminism – as a middle-aged male journalist once did to me. Clearly I wasn’t listening, however, since I’m wondering whether the accusations against Sunak might be a bit babyish?
Nadine Dorries was the first with the complaints on Monday: “It’s a terrible look… he’s loosing [sic] it”. And: “Here he goes again, talking her down.” Dorries has complained of being mansplained to in Parliament, but the awful truth, I hesitate to say, is that she does need some things explained to her, such as the correct way to spell “losing” and why we should not be celebrating a wannabe Prime Minister based on her choice of cheap earrings. Especially not when that wannabe PM has talked about reducing our dependence on trade with China, which is, incidentally, how Claire’s Accessories are able to sell earrings for under a fiver.
At Winchester, Sunak won a scholarship and was the Sen Co Prae, possibly the grandest word ever for Head Boy (or “briefcase w----r”). What Truss’s chums called “mansplaining” was more likely a taste of how very clever little boys speak to the rest of us, whatever gender. Or to an entire nation that needs a bit of mansplaining about where money comes from, and how it didn’t just grow on Rishi’s Magic Pandemic Money Tree.
Perhaps we all, this week, regardless of gender, are getting a taste of how a Wykhamist PM in a smart Savile Row suit might speak to us. The question is, does it beat the “smooth criminal” tones of Etonians? Or do we want the girl in the cheap pearl earrings? Conservative Party members are sure to tell us.
