Many things were going through my mind as I walked up a sunny Downing Street at 7am last Thursday to interview the prime minister. It was her first sit-down broadcast exchange since the general election on June 8. My visit also marked a year almost to the day since she had assumed office and made her “red Tory” speech outside the famous front door, where I was now posing (alongside a lackadaisical Larry the cat) for a quick Instagram shot. In the intervening 12 months, talk of “ordinary working-class families” had quickly given way to a torrent of soundbites about Brexit and coalitions of chaos.
As the door to No 10 silently swung open, I was running through my questions and considering my small-talk options (Larry wasn’t going to cut it). But the one question I couldn’t get out of my head was how it must have felt at 10pm on June 8 when the exit poll became public and revealed Mrs May was unlikely to have increased her government’s majority. What went through her mind?
So that’s where we began our conversation in Mrs May’s personal office, with its impressive backdrop of tall royal-blue and gold doors leading to the Cabinet Room.
Usually known for her reserve and her safe responses, Mrs May revealed that her husband, Philip, had told her the exit poll was predicting a hung parliament and had then given her a hug. She used the words “shocked” and “devastated” to describe her reaction.
It was at that point that I decided to ask whether she had cried. Contrary to the views expressed in some emails, texts and tweets I received after the interview went out on my BBC Radio 5 Live programme, I did not ask that question because she was a woman.
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Quite the opposite. And that’s why I’m determined to see off the bogus accusations of sexism that have been laid at my door.
One email, from a woman, went like this: “Hi. I am really irritated that you should ask TM if she shed a tear. Would you have asked Boris Johnson the same question? Or Jeremy Corbyn?
“I’m not a fan of TM, indeed quite the opposite, but treating female politicians differently is unacceptable.”
What a load of tosh. Of course I would ask a male politician whether he had cried if an unexpected and dramatic general election result had not gone his way — especially if he had used the word “devastated”, which denotes “severe and overwhelming shock or grief”, to describe his response.
It’s the natural next question, regardless of the interviewee’s sex. In fact, I would argue that anybody who thinks it’s sexist to ask a high-profile woman if she cried after a “devastating” event is themselves sexist. The point of sexual equality is that you don’t behave differently or modify the way you speak to someone based on their sex. Women don’t need or deserve protecting from fair and normal questions, especially if they have become prime minister.
“Women don’t need protecting, especially if they have become prime minister
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As if to prove my point, my next political interviewee, just a few hours later, was the outgoing leader of the Liberal Democrats, Tim Farron, who welled up in my studio.
He had decided to break his silence about his difficult decision to resign because of the constant scrutiny of his Christian faith. I asked whether it had been an emotional choice, and he told me, with tears in his eyes, that he hadn’t cried until he received a lovely text from one of his children telling him how proud they were of him after he went public.
But back to my conversation with the prime minister. Despite the other matters covered in our 24-minute interview, it was inevitable that the admission by the leader of the country that she had shed a tear, albeit a “small” one, as Mrs May put it, would be the headline. Just as it would have been if Tony Blair, David Cameron or Gordon Brown had admitted as much.
However, what would have been starkly different is the public’s judgment. I am generalising, but a woman crying is still viewed as evidence that she is weak or not up to the job. And a man? Brave, humane and honest. One wins respect; the other doesn’t.
Those entrenched views and unconscious biases will take a long time to change, and could have even fed into Mrs May’s discomfort about admitting any weakness over the general election result.
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Or perhaps not. I am not a mind-reader, after all. My job is simply to try to get as close to the truth as possible through questions designed to provoke and hold people to account — regardless of sex.
Emma Barnett presents BBC Radio 5 Live’s morning programme and writes The Sunday Times Magazine’s Tough Love column. Sarah Baxter returns next week