Here’s why I blamed Jo Swinson’s defeat on the sexist media for showing a picture of her shoes

“Pablo, I mean, you literally blamed the ‘sexist media’ for her disastrous campaign,” a tabloid journalist recently chortled down the phone to me. “You literally said it was our fault for showing a picture of her shoes on TV!” They continued to laugh.

But the defeat of Jo Swinson is far from funny. Here’s why I stand by what I said that night.

Polls had closed; it was 10 pm on the 12th of December 2019 and our party’s pitch to ‘Stop Brexit and Build a Brighter Future’ had ended with us failing to make a single net gain.

Elections are always exhausting; you don’t sleep or eat properly, you don’t see friends or family and you frequently miss or forget important life events. Any campaign or political staffer will tell you that the aftermath of any election is spent apologising and making it up to the people around you. After many years of the same routine, they eventually come to accept that for some reason, you’ve chosen this life.

Boy, it is worth it when you win, though.

But as I stumbled into the BBC’s Salford Quays studio wearing the same clothes I had put on 19 hours earlier, bleary-eyed, and running on empty, I already knew things were not going that way.

This election was the culmination of half a decade of my life. I first began working on the campaign to Remain in 2015 and since then, in some form or another, I have been working to stop Brexit, so I was determined to fight until the very last minute.

I sat down in front of the microphone and looked up to the digital clock which read 21:56 and appeared to be moving at an agonisingly slow pace.

Just before the clock hit 22:00, I greeted the hosts, Stephen Nolan and election expert, Dr. Victoria Honeyman.

There was no time even to take a breath before I began to furiously spin the grim-looking exit poll as they were announced to me live on air. After all, I had been here many times before.

I was described as “desperately scrambling to excuse Swinson’s poor showing at the ballot box”, but in reality, I described the 2019 general election as I saw it.

And that was, I said, as having a “very real, quite scary sense of sexism that went unnoticed.”

And yes — much to this journalist’s horror — I did blame some national media outlets for showing a picture of her shoes during our manifesto launch.

“I mean, why did they do that?” I said in an aerated tone that perhaps set the mood for the following two hours.

No one showed a picture of Boris Johnson or Jeremy Corbyn’s shoes, so why was it relevant — in the middle of a serious pitch to fix the country with well-thought-out, fully costed policies — to cut to a picture of Jo Swinson’s shoes?

This really bothered me: “It’s just like, ‘oh look, just a reminder that this particular party leader who wants to be Prime Minister is a woman, and we’re going to remind you by showing a picture of her high heels instead of letting you listen to how she could make our country better.’”

Referring to her much-maligned pitch to be “Britain’s Next Prime Minister”, Nolan responded, “You don’t think it might also have been down to; she just wasn’t effective enough and so farcically overly optimistic that she lost all credibility? You don’t think that anything to do with it, Pablo?”

I refuted by praising Swinson’s ambition for high political office as “gutsy.”

Perhaps unknowingly, the media and other party leaders quietly built a narrative that didn’t just enable, but encouraged voters not to take her seriously primarily based on her gender.

Nolan seemed unconvinced, “But she was rejected, not because someone asked about her shoes or whatever it was, but because of her judgement — her policy on cancelling Brexit.”

“But this is my point,” I interrupted to reiterate. “That is an element of not taking her seriously.”

“Yep,” my female Conservative equivalent next to me quietly agreed.

“Instead of asking her serious questions about what her policies were or what she would do for the country, it would be, ‘oh what are you going to buy your kids for Christmas?’ or her teeth are too big,” I said.

“That’s not true though, is it?” Nolan went on, “Maybe her policy of cancelling Brexit was just too extreme, even for Remainers. It was nothing to do with her shoes.”

I continued to hammer my point and defended our controversial Revoke policy by citing an internal poll that showed 80% of Remainers backed our position to cancel Brexit without a second referendum. After all, if Johnson can crash us out with no deal, why couldn’t we argue the opposite?

Nolan scoffed, “Well, fine, but there’s 16 million Remainers, right? Why is it looking like they didn’t vote for Jo Swinson?”

Don’t get me wrong: my issue is not with Nolan. Both he and Dr. Honeyman were insightful and polite throughout. We were all there to do a job and I was giving as good as I got.

But things got a whole lot harder for me when, just a few moments later, I got a text from a colleague informing me that Swinson’s own East Dunbartonshire seat was now in doubt.

“As your leader, I have been true to myself,” an emotional Swinson began her resignation the next morning.

“Always being myself,” her voice struggles, “whether people attacked my vision or my voice, my ideas or my earrings. One of the realities of smashing glass ceilings is a lot of broken glass comes down on your head.”

She lets out a short quavering laugh, bows her head, takes a breath, and continues, “So I’m proud to have been the first woman to lead the Liberal Democrats, but I’m even more proud that I will not be the last.”

“Next week is the shortest day but we will see more light in the future. Join us for that journey. Let’s explore the way together, with hope in our hearts.”

And just like that, the five-month tenure of the first woman leader of the Liberal Democrats came to an end.

You could be forgiven for missing it, but the Liberal Democrats have moved on in the last seven months. We commissioned a mammoth 25,000-word review of our campaign and have since elected Ed Davey as our fifth leader in as many years.

So why all the fuss about Swinson now? Well, partly because tabloids will be tabloids, but also because just a few weeks ago, new data on Google searches during the election campaign point to a broader, “quite scary” issue that was the crux of my frustrations during the grilling.

Wired reported that in the last month of the election campaign, the most searched phrases featuring ‘Jo Swinson’ included “boobs”, “hot”, “sexy”, “body”, “measurements”, “nipples”, “bikini”, “cleavage” and “stockings”.

20 of the top 100 Google searches featuring Swinson used sexist terms, with a further 28 related to her appearance or personal life, such as “teeth”, “husband” and “accent”.

Google image searches were not much better. Tap in “jo swinson”, and you’re also served, “weight loss”, “big”, “measurement”, “beautiful”, “attractive” and “chest”.

Our election review also revealed that Swinson’s appeal, even to women, plummeted during the campaign and warned of misogyny and sexism taking over.

“For any leader to be successful takes time,” the review says. “And — while sex is, of course, no barrier to being able to do the job successfully — there is a growing body of research on the challenges of being a female political leader which imply that time for preparation is even more valuable. Time not just for themselves and their party, but also for people to ‘get’ someone different from the ‘norm.’”

On the other side of the Atlantic, Hillary Clinton faced identical challenges in 2016: a clip of the first woman ever nominated for president went viral after an aide asked if she was “really going to wear those shoes on stage?”

“Really? I mean, honest to god,” Clinton wearily responded. “You really think anyone talked to Bernie Sanders about his shoes?”

Her campaign went on to be dogged by accusations that she wasn’t fit enough, or too cold and yet also too emotional to lead, whilst her gross opponent romped to victory after bragging about sexually assaulting women.

Back in the UK, it’s the morning after the 2019 General Election and I am strategically planning a way to crawl out of bed, which I had only fallen into about three hours earlier, in a way that avoids plummeting to the floor face-first.

I inch closer to my phone, which is lying on the stairs in the hallway for some reason, to read a text from my Labour friend: “Thank f*ck that’s over.”

But I struggle to share her relief. Boris Johnson is in Downing Street with the largest majority since 1987, and the only female leader of a national party has been thrown out in anger and misogyny.

Yes, it’s ‘over’ but where does that leave us now? It sure doesn’t feel like a better place.

So, was showing Jo Swinson’s shoes on TV how we ended up here? No, of course not.

But it is unfair to dismiss my defence as the frantic text-book spin any advisor would churn out when their party has just faced a public pummelling for the third time in a row.

Because what the 2019 General Election did reveal is a deeply unsettling truth about how we treat ambitious women seeking the same position we don’t think twice at men obtaining — often through nefarious means.

Consider this: what if my point is less about Swinson and more that when women have a much shorter — and far tougher — period in which to establish themselves as a ‘credible’ leader, wasting valuable time talking about their personal appearance or relationships can be cataclysmic for a political campaign?

And of course, time was the one thing we did not have.

The country was hurtling towards a high-speed motorway pile-up which posed an irreversible threat to the values we were desperate to protect at any cost, and for far too many voters, Jo Swinson was just roadkill.