When Angela Rayner told the FT about her ‘boob job’, she was telling the rightwing press to bring it on | Zoe Williams

No disclosure goes unpunished by the tabloids if you are a Labour politician - and the typical defence is to say nothing. The deputy leader has a different strategy

Angela Rayner says she had a “boob job” when she was 30 because her breasts looked like “two boiled eggs in socks”, or “basset hound ears”. There’s a lot to chew on here: are those visual images better or worse than my previous favourite: “sideways bananas in a Waitrose bag”? And what conversational conditions could produce this disclosure, in an interview with the Financial Times?

On the subject of cosmetic surgery, I am agnostic. I just will not have one more conversation about whether internalising social expectations of the female body-shape is empowerment or enslavement. “Do what thou wilt” is the whole of my law, at least with regards to thine own body. On the subject of the media, however, I have opinions – more than opinions, dark prognostications. That the minute that was published in the FT, it would appear in the tabloids. The initial reporting would be played colourless and straight, with the odd marmalade-dropper adjective (“remarkably candid,” say). The drive-by assassination attempts will come later, and they’ll never, ever stop. One day, she’ll crop up in some whither-equality diatribe, “when even supposed ‘feminists’ must mutilate themselves without wondering why”; the next, it’ll be a hit job on her vanity, or her financial acuity, or her out-of-touchness.

Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist

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