EVERYONE Is Angry About Brexit – Why Is Konnie Huq The One Being Criticised For It?

Without a trace of hyperbole or melodrama, this is crisis point. Brexit has boiled into a scolding shitshow and the gloves are off. Watching Boris try and steer us into a no-deal crash and/or election is like watching a snotty-nosed kid, goaded by his skinny mate, Dominic, driving his remote control car repeatedly into a wall – despite the worried pleas of responsible onlookers. We are now mid-implosion, witnessing a constitutional coup, protesters on the street, a dog in downing street (What about Larry?!) and a nation’s economic welfare, not to mention pride, in tatters. No wonder tensions are running high.

But fear not, some things remain as they ever were. As Nina Simone once sung, “there are not many things in life one can be sure of / except rain comes from the clouds / sun lights up the sky / and sexism pervades even when The Men have really cocked things up”. Or something to that effect... After all, Brexit is a boys’ club unlike any other. Cameron made the mess, and was last seen hiding in a shed before signing an £800,000 book deal. Next Theresa May was drafted in to do the difficult bit of actually trying to negotiate a deal, an impossible task the men didn’t want to attempt themselves (see: glass cliff). And now Boris, Cummings and Rees-Mogg barge in, trying to bulldoze their way into history books, come what may.

This calamitous chain of events is causing outbursts left, right and centre. House Speaker John Bercow’s bellowing in parliament about the ‘Oxford union’ and his yelling at Michael Gove to ‘be a good boy’ forced one American journalist to tweet “has anyone confirmed Britain is real?”. Boris himself is forever finger-pointing, fists clenched, shouting, huffing and puffing, his red face redder and redder, his voice louder and louder (often over the protesters outside Downing Street). The force of a scathing Jacob Rees-Mogg or Nigel Farage on LBC could knock a small person over through the radio waves alone.

Yet despite this behaviour, and to my mind, the reasonable accusation that male ambition and ego has quite a lot to do with where we’ve ended up, it is the women who need to “calm down”. (See how all things lead back to David Cameron?)

This week onlookers have been up in arms about Konnie Huq on the Jeremy Vine show getting into a rather heated discussion with journalist Mike Parry. I think it is fair to say she does Lose Her Shit, and right now, who can blame her? Her arms are raised, she’s standing, she’s shouting (not “screeching” as men on the internet claimed). She’s angry. And she has, in my opinion, good reason to be. Watching Brexit makes me want to run over my own foot, and I don’t even have to explain why on live national television. But it’s well documented, most recently and most brilliantly by America Journalist Rebecca Traitster, that “we” – society, especially men – don’t like or tolerate angry women. Because they are not acting how women ‘should’; their rage, volume and opinions are not conforming to the feminised ideal image of nodding, smiling, agreeable, never questioning, especially not questioning men.

It’s not that surprising therefore that it was Piers Morgan who seemed most offended and scared about her anger. His smug face turned red as he impersonated her on GMB, putting on a high-pitch voice, like a stand-up comedian who still makes jokes about have sex with the mother-in-law. He turned Huq into a little old women, nagging men everywhere, to the point you could almost see a silk scarf wrapped over his head, his neck hunched, his whole body taking on this role, vilifying an angry woman into some sort of grotesque pantomime old maid. Tellingly, viewers complained to Ofcom about Huq’s “ugly”, behaviour reinforcing the idea that women’s anger is “unattractive”, and therefore unapproved by men. Morgan’s undermining of Huq smells like fear to me, with a healthy dose of sexism and racism. And of course, when he has his furious, spitting outbursts on live television, I can well imagine his defence to be that he is a journalist, simply doing his job.

A similar thing happened with Shami Chakrabarti{ =nofollow}, Labour’s shadow Attorney General. When she labelled the Brexiteer’s as “thugs” and said one Tory aide had been accompanied out of Downing Street “at gunpoint” to the BBC, she was accused of “ranting” and using “inflammatory language”. It is not insignificant that she is also a woman of colour. For both Huq and Chakrabarti, the intersection of gender and race compounds the belief they have stepped out of line. For women of colour, their “permitted” barriers of acceptable behaviour are even narrower. And when they are perceived to have stepped out of them, the outrage, and the mockery and undermining, is even greater. “What a charming woman…” wrote one person of Chakrabarti sarcastically.

These are strange times. Last night, 21 Tory MPs rebelled. ‘Spreadsheet Phil’ Hammond, who was Chancellor less than six weeks ago, has now lost the whip. Rory Stewart was at the GQ awards, alongside Debbie Harry. And most worryingly of all, we’ve allowed bullyboys to get into the seat of power via the back door. No wonder everyone is furious. Everyone is seething. Yet even in these most trying of times, the problem still seems to be women’s rage, not what they are raging at.

READ MORE: Will A No-Deal Brexit Actually Be Worse For Women?

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