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14-8-2002 Scotsman Greer's message to the PM: 'Stop acting like a gorilla and leave Cherie alone' By Gethin Chamberlain GERMAINE Greer launched an extraordinary attack on Tony Blair's marriage yesterday, accusing him of behaving like a dominant male gorilla and urging him to give up his sex life for the good of his wife. Speaking just a week after Cherie Blair was discharged from hospital after suffering a miscarriage, the feminist writer claimed that the Prime Minister paraded his wife in public to reinforce his heterosexual credentials. And Ms Greer, who is best known as the author of The Female Eunuch, described the sexual politics of the Labour party as "Neanderthal". She told an audience at the Edinburgh International Book Festival: "The marriage of our very own Prime Minister is an interesting case in point. It seems to me that that's a very odd relationship." Referring to Cherie Blair's latest pregnancy and subsequent miscarriage, she said: "I want to say to him 'Leave her alone, for Christ's sake.' "She's 47 years old, she doesn't practise contraception because she's a Catholic - stay off her, it's pretty simple. What are you going to do, wait till she dies? "It seems to me they have contrasting notions of their duty to each other and that is very common in marriages." There was widespread public sympathy when it was announced last week that Cherie Blair has suffered a miscarriage. Her previous pregnancy, which resulted in the birth of their fourth child, Leo, prompted a debate about the wisdom and practicality of pregnancy in later life. But Ms Greer, who was at the festival to promote a book of poetry by women writers, was critical of the way the Blairs conducted themselves in public. She said: "I find this government hilarious in the sense that the top honcho appears always with his wife as a pledge of his heterosexual activity. We've had enough of those pledges, you can leave her at home. In fact, she's got an important job to do, I just wish she'd bloody well go off and do it for a change." And she likened the way the Labour Party treated wives to the behaviour of a band of gorillas led by a dominant silverback male. "Everybody else appears without his consort because they're all junior males and we've only got one silverback. "John Prescott used to be allowed to produce his wife but you'll notice that she hasn't been paraded for a long time so we don't want to know about his heterosexuality, he's been relegated to junior status. "Then we've got all the men who are still living with their mothers and will probably never marry who are very useful acolytes in the train of the silverback. The sexual politics of the Labour Party always were Neanderthal and they still are. At least the Tories are just straightforward, sexually perverse and corrupt." Ms Greer, speaking to a sell-out audience, also used the one-hour festival appearance to criticise the way in which rape is dealt with in Britain and to call for legislation to produce an effective law to tackle sexual assault. "We have police forces under pressure to accept rape complaints and follow them up and we have completely hopeless amounts of money spent and a terrible low conviction rate because a certain kind of violence against women, a certain kind of overriding of women's autonomy, is endemic in a heavy drinking population," she said. "Women are overridden or find themselves making dishonourable bargains for a peaceful life. All of this is the real dimension of rape. "Instead we end up with really stupid cases of girls who get drunk and take their clothes off and get into bed with a man who is probably equally drunk, sex occurs and then we find we've got a front page rape trial which just strikes us all as kind of daft. "You begin to wonder whether police are deliberately taking cases that they cannot win in order to prove that the law is unworkable, because the law is unworkable. We need a workable law of sexual assault which will take some recognition of the gravity of an assault against a person and the morale of that person." During the question and answer session, Ms Greer also restated her opposition to the idea of marriage, but spoke out in support of working mothers. "The problem with being a working mum these days is that you just feel you are letting everybody down and you feel inadequate and frazzled and fed up and disgusted with yourself, you're supposed to be a perfect lover, a perfect mother, a perfect middle management person and it's too much, and we really have to have a support system for mothers otherwise we won't have any mothers," she said. A couple of hours later Mo Mowlam, the former Northern Ireland Secretary, also used an appearance at the Book Festival to attack Tony Blair and the Labour Party, criticising plans for war on Iraq and warning that the power struggle between Mr Blair and Gordon Brown, the Chancellor, was damaging the party. Asked whether Parliament should be recalled to discuss a possible conflict in Iraq, she said: "Well they should and we shouldn't go in, it's as simple as that. You don't beat terrorists by bombing and shooting. All that does is increase work for the recruitment officers for terrorists." Ms Mowlam said she was "signed up" for the New Labour project but she insisted the Government had become too centralised. She added: "It's not that they don't accept dissent, it's just that there's a very small clique, an elite, which I described as something like a law form where there's four or five people deciding what's happening and it just filters down. That's not politics." Asked whether she thought there was a power struggle between Mr Blair and Mr Brown, she said: "The gang of two - it's a problem." She added: "I think they have got to sort it out. If Gordon and Tony keep arguing and fighting each other and announcing things without telling each other, they won't do any good." During the talk to promote her new book - Momentum - Ms Mowlam also spoke about the Northern Ireland peace process, claiming that Unionists attempted to undermine her position and that of Peter Mandelson when he was in office and that they were now attempting to do the same to John Reid, the current Northern Ireland Secretary. And she singled out UK Unionist Bob McCartney as the only person involved in the peace process who she was prepared to criticise in public. "Bob McCartney has no socially redeeming value at all. McCartney is a shit," she said.
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................................................................................................................. Copyright ©2004 Gethin Chamberlain. All rights reserved. |
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