‘Sleaze, sleaze, sleaze!’ exclaimed Sir Keir Starmer in Prime Minister’s Questions last week, hoping that a triple serving might stick. He meant to suggest financial corruption, though his language came from the hospitable semantic field that also corrals sexual meanings.
The sexually dirty also overlaps constantly with the literally dirty. In 2013 Ukip’s Godfrey Bloom remarked that women who didn’t clean behind the fridge were ‘sluts’. This annoyed women who didn’t clean anywhere (but paid foreigners minimal rates to do it) and women who said that his was a sexual accusation. Already, the linguistic battlefield had been churned up by ‘Slut Walks’, in which women donned stereotypical underwear and fishnet stockings as if to prove all men guilty of a rape culture.
Sir Keir was not organising a Sleaze Walk. He was interested in who paid for the Prime Minister’s wallpaper.
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