Worst Opinion of the Week: Boris Johnson's Brexit Deal is Sexist

Story: Boris Johnson potentially agrees a new Brexit deal with the EU.

Reasonable take: I hate every aspect of the Brexit negotiations with my life.

Brain rot: Theresa May, a normal women just like you, has been struck down by the patriarchy yet again.

This week Boris promised us a “very good deal" on Brexit had been struck, with the EU with all conviction of a man who just sold his wedding ring to lay a bet on a knackered stallion at the 14:20 at Wolverhampton.

The new deal proposed by Johnson is largely similar to the one agreed by Theresa May that was put through Parliament and then rejected, but removes the “backstop clause”, which detractors argued would have kept the UK indefinitely tied to EU customs rules.

Writer Sara Gibbs then took this development to emphasise how former Prime Minister Theresa May was, actually, another victim of institutionalised sexism. Indeed, I'm sure every woman can relate to May's experiences of the workplace. Tfw you suggest "deporting LGBTQ+ refugees to their potential death" in a meeting, but no one listens, then a man suggests the same and you are incredulously left fuming, “That was my idea to kill the gays!”

The frivolity in which middle-class commentators turn any woman of immense power and privilege into an “everywomen” simply weighs down the soul. We see the same spiel whenever the Queen is baselessly portrayed as a keeper of receipts and spiller of tea who “despises” right-wing Royalists. Unsurprisingly, Gibbs contributes to Have I Got News for You – a show whose axis has rotated on 29 years of Ian Hislop making a quips about the Tory party he undoubtedly votes for and Paul Merton turning his head like around incredulously and saying nonsensical bollocks like “a badger stole my wellingtons” to hoards of #FBPE cackling.

Making out Theresa May to be “just like us” is insulting to the women she has stepped on since she became a MP in 1997. Is anyone meant to find it empowering that, instead of a man impoverishing their life, it’s a woman in Louboutins? It’s no surprise it’s predominately privileged, upper-middle-class women who think this is remotely “liberating”.

There is an infinite supply of ammunition for misogyny in British politics without needing to venerate Theresa May in the process. We’d do well to remember her as the architect of the "hostile environment” policy that destroyed the lives of families up and down the UK, rode along on immigration raids like a racist Velma Dinkley and okayed those undeniably fascist "Go Home" vans.

On Windrush Day, she posted video monologues on Twitter about how immigrants helped build “the country that will always be their home” when as Home Secretary she oversaw the destruction of evidence that could have spared members of the Windrush generation from deportation, then ordered them to leave the country because they had no proof they “belonged” here. Many of the wrongly deported have since died.

Even in her desperate clout-chasing speeches May had the audacity to cite Grenfell without ever acknowledging the complicity of Tory governments, or pay tribute to asylum seekers when she fought tooth and nail to stop child refugees coming to Britain from Syria, opting to bomb them out of their misery instead. May might as well have tweeted: “equal opportunities to die via airstrike for young girls and boys”, punctuated by handclap emojis.

I'm curious to know where on this checklist May exhibits “girl power” and comes across a tragic feminist character deserving of our pity:

“Celebrating” women on International Women’s Day but refusing to rule out the closing down of women’s shelters?

Deporting women’s husbands to be murdered by the Taliban?

Allowing breast cancer screenings to fall to their lowest point in decades?

Impoverishing single mothers with Universal Credit sanctions?

Selling arms to Saudi Arabia to bomb Yemeni women and children?

Like many party leaders before her, May is a disingenuous liar whose actions and self-conception never inform one another. The obituary of her time in office reads as years of abject failure with unbelievable amounts of cruelty and incompetence, despite the revisionism that our sympathies should lie with our oppressed “safe pair of hands”. Let's not forget her final fart as Prime Minister was to award a knighthood to convicted assaulter Geoffrey Boycott in her resignation honours list.

In a week of truly stinking takes about Extinction Rebellion and Piers Morgan, I am genuinely shocked that the ghost of third wave feminism has risen to topple them all by saying: "Get in, bitches, we're siphoning off Theresa May's politics into an out-of-sight septic tank to make flimsy point about misogyny!"

@MULLET_FAN_NEO