Tory MP’s pants are on fire over upskirting issue

If you are forced to issue a statement over the weekend to clarify you are not a pervert, it is safe to say you’ve probably lost the argument. It was like this, the Tory backbencher Christopher Chope explained. Nobody was more opposed to the practice of upskirting than him. Except the other 649 MPs in the Commons. And everyone else in the country apart from a few perverts.

So when he had effectively killed off Wera Hobhouse’s private member’s bill on Friday by standing up to shout “object”, it had been an act of militant feminism. Chope was so disgusted by the fact that his own party couldn’t be bothered to initiate its own legislation against upskirting, he was determined to embarrass them into taking action. What kind of message would it have sent out to women if their only protection came from a Lib Dem private member’s bill? Far better to have your pants on display to all the world on someone’s Facebook page than a humiliation of that magnitude.

Chope’s Mea non perva hadn’t had quite the impact he had hoped for. His constituency office in Christchurch had been decorated with women’s pants on Sunday and his office in Westminster was given the same treatment the next day. To complete his misery, Hobhouse had managed to secure an urgent question in the chamber to see if the government felt as strongly about upskirting as he did.

This posed something of a dilemma for Chope. Whether to risk the humiliation of appearing in person or fight his way past the pants and hole himself up inside his office for the duration. In the event, Chope chose to do the right thing. Much as he would have loved to show his face in the Commons, it was much more important for him to watch the Belgium v Panama World Cup match. Not for the football, but to make sure none of the TV coverage “upshorted” any of the players. Chope was nothing if not a man committed to sex equality.

It was left to junior justice minister Lucy Frazer to hang Chope out to dry. Upskirting was an invasion of privacy, she declared, and would be made a criminal offence. Legislation would be brought before the house on Thursday with a view to the bill being given its second reading before recess at the end of July.

Hobhouse accepted the minister’s assurances graciously, but Labour’s Yasmin Qureshi was rather less obliging. Labour had demanded upskirting be made a specific offence more than 12 months previously and yet no one in government had seemed remotely bothered about it up till now. Instead it had left it to a private member’s bill that was almost bound not to be passed.

For the first time, Frazer looked rather less than assured. The government had been up to its neck in inertia over Brexit, she explained, and it wasn’t just her department that was sitting around doing nothing. Every department was doing everything in its power to make sure it did as little as possible. That was the whole purpose of the current government.

Besides, when there was so much spare time in the government’s legislative timetable, it actually made it that much harder to choose when to programme something. At this rarefied level of operation, government business was a matter of feng shui. Was upskirting a Monday or Thursday afternoon kind of bill? Decisions, decisions.

Labour’s Diana Johnson didn’t buy this. Why couldn’t the government get the whole piece of legislation done and dusted in a day? It was hardly difficult or controversial and just how many MPs did she expect to oppose it? Frazer again dithered. The government was rushing – no racing – against time and she couldn’t possibly commit to anything. And it was only fair to give potential upskirters an extra summer to indulge their perviness by delaying the final passage of the bill to the winter.

After that MPs from all parties stood up to voice their distaste both for Chope and for upskirting. If it was down to them both would be banned immediately. Even Philip Davies, a Tory MP who can usually be relied on to stand up for any form of sexist and unpleasant behaviour, weighed in. He didn’t just want his opposition to upskirting to be heard, he wanted it on record that when he had spent two hours talking out every other private member’s bill on Friday, it had never occurred to him that Hobhouse’s would not get debated. The speaker duly noted his remorse and assured him Hobhouse’s bill wouldn’t have been debated anyway. So that was all right then.