Boris Johnson part of ‘boy’s club’ pushing parliament ‘backwards,’ says Amber Rudd

Boris Johnson is perpetuating a “boys club” atmosphere in parliament, according to the former Tory home secretary Amber Rudd, who said the prime minister has a “sort of language which he’s quite rightly nervous of using in front of women”.

Ms Rudd, who served under Theresa May before resigning over the Windrush scandal, also said PM was going “backwards” on women being promoted in politics.

The former cabinet minister said she quit Mr Johnson's top team as work and pensions secretary in September 2019 because she did not like his style of government over Brexit.

The comments came as part of a project by the Institute for Government (IfG) aimed at getting ministers to reflect on their time in power.

In the study, former leader of the Commons Andrea Leadsom also revealed that relations with ex-Speaker John Bercow reached such a low that she would not hold regular weekly meetings with him alone.

Ms Rudd expressed concern that the situation regarding the promotion of women was going into reverse.

“There is a kind of boys’ club-type behaviour in parliament because it is still more like a public school or a university club than anywhere else you’ll ever go”, said Ms Rudd.

She added: “I fear that it’s going backwards a bit at the moment because unless you have the leadership really making an effort to ensure that women are promoted as equals, all the time - not just because, oh, let’s promote the women, we forgot about the women - it’s going to be a problem.

“I see that in Boris Johnson, I’m afraid. Even though I don’t dislike him at all. He’s come from that establishment group. And also, he has that sort of language, which he’s - quite rightly - nervous  of using in front of women.”

It is not the first time the ex-minister, who has previously claimed Mr Johnson “is clearly more comfortable with men” in his orbit, has hit out at the prime minister. She said during a debate on the EU referendum in 2016 that he was ”not the man you want driving you home at the end of the evening”.

Last year Sam Smethers, the director of the Fawcett Society  equality charity, said the government had a “gender blind spot” after it was revealed  a number of senior cabinet committees designed to hash out policy were entirely made up of men.

And questions were raised after the a shakeup of the PM’s internal team under former aide Dominic Cummings almost led to an all-male inner circle - prompting a reported briefing war between Mr Cummings and the PM’s fiancé, Carrie Symonds, that ultimately ended in the special adviser’s resignation.

Turning to Brexit, Ms Rudd, said the final straw for her was “Boris Johnson’s style of government, really”.

“It was the way he treated other people and his determination to deliver Brexit, whatever the cost in terms of the economy and, I thought, the consequences to people’s lives," she said.

Ms Leadsom and Mr Bercow regularly clashed when he was Commons Speaker.

Recalling their weekly meetings, she said: "It reached a point where I had to take someone with me, because of the level of vitriol in those meetings.

"And he, likewise, said he needed to have someone there, because apparently I was extraordinarily difficult."

The two had a public spat after Mr Bercow was accused of calling Ms Leadsom a "stupid woman".

Former attorney general Jeremy Wright told the IfG that David Cameron would become more publicly irritated at situations as prime minister than Theresa May did after she succeeded him.

Mr Wright said: "David Cameron let his irritation show more often and more visibly than Theresa ever did, getting the advice that she was being given."

The ex-cabinet minister also insisted the government should have done more to defend judges hearing high-profile Brexit cases from media criticism.

He said: "Where I think we were going wrong... was to allow the sort of abuse to play out in the newspapers, of those who were doing their job as judges and as lawyers."

Former business secretary Greg Clark said some international firms were "alarmed" at how Britain was handling the post-Brexit vote turmoil.

He said: "The further that you go from these shores, the more people were alarmed at what they thought was uncertainty and unpredictability in a country that they had always thought of as a byword for predictability."