Channel 4 News presenter Cathy Newman has weighed into a row over sexist behaviour by an MP, describing a Daily Mail column about it as “frankly poisonous”.
Newman took issue with a column written by the Mail’s associate politics editor Isabel Oakeshott which condemned Spectator assistant editor Isabel Hardman for reporting an MP to the whip’s office after he asked to “speak to the totty”.
Oakeshott, the biographer of David Cameron, suggested Hardman “should have been pleased” at the attention.
“The sadness is that male MPs will be a little more guarded next time they talk to her and, no doubt, to the rest of us. That’s the last thing we journalists want.”
The column was been widely condemned on social media. Writing on the Channel 4 website, Newman said Hardman had “done exactly the right thing”.
She wrote: “So many of us have been forced to put up with sexism in Westminster – the lascivious texts from a well-known peer; the “noble Lord” whose hand found its way to my bottom in a crowded bar; and the select committee chairman who assumed I was a secretary because I was the only woman in the room.”
“I never complained about any of it when I was working in the lobby five years ago. But I wish I had. It reflects badly on me that I didn’t.”
Hardman’s complaint did not publicly name the MP.
The affair is likely to reignite concerns about the representation of women in political journalism. Data from 2013 shows that less than a quarter of lobby journalists are women, and while there have been a number of senior appointments of women to top political reporting roles in recent months, the profession is still overwhelmingly dominated by men.
Newman added: “If this kind of low-level harassment is tolerated, the culture will never change. Women will be belittled, undermined and shown no respect. They won’t be equal citizens in male-dominated workplaces like the lobby, let alone securing the top jobs and equal pay.”
