NICOLA Sturgeon has told how David Cameron shrugged his shoulders and told her “don’t be silly” after she warned him he might lose the EU referendum.

The First Minister described the exchange at a function with women journalists in Glasgow when she was asked how dealing with Theresa May differed from her predecessor.

“It’s early days, but the biggest difference in dealing with Theresa May and David Cameron is not so much gender as class and background,” she said. “David Cameron was very much the Eton boy. I’ll never forgot the conversation I had with him in January when I dared to say that I thought he might be in danger of losing the EU referendum.

“He literally shrugged his shoulders and said, ‘Don’t be silly, it’ll be fine’. It was the arrogance that came from a belief that he was who he was and that everything would be fine.”

She added: “I don’t think Theresa May is like that. There may be other issues as we go on. I don’t know her that well. She is someone who is very businesslike, is focussed on getting the job done, and that is the kind of approach I like to take to things and I think that is to some extent more the case with women. So perhaps there are gender issues and we can find more common ground. But I suspect our political differences might overshadow some of the common ground that we might find as women.”

The First Minister was the main speaker at the launch of the organisation Women in Journalism in Scotland which is being set up by BBC journalist Shelly Jofre to help improve the position of women in the industry.

Around 80 journalists from Scotland’s newspapers, magazines and broadcasters attended the event in Glasgow on Thursday.

During a question and answer session with Jofre, Sturgeon hit out at the under-representation of women journalists reporting on politics in Scotland, saying she believed this was negative in terms of the profession but also had a detrimental impact on how women in politics were reported on.

“Women don’t feature nearly strongly enough in political journalism. I sit in the chamber of the Scottish Parliament where there are now more women than there used to be, but when I look up to the press gallery it’s still dominated by men.

“There are some exceptions and there are more women reporting on politics in Scotland than any time in my political career, but still a minority and that I think is wrong for its own sake as journalism, like any other walk of life, should have women equally represented in all areas of the profession,” she said.

She then went on to criticise how her meeting with Theresa May in Bute House was first reported on social media.

“There is an impact on politics too because if political journalism is so dominated by men – and in particular white, middle-aged men – then that has an impact on how women in politics, and politics more widely, is reported.

“Women politicians are judged by different standards, are reported in a very different way. One of many examples was when Theresa May came to Edinburgh just after she became Prime Minister to see me in Bute House.

“We were on the steps of Bute House – and whatever your politics, that is quite a powerful photograph for women all over the world – but the version of that photograph on social media afterwards had cut us right off at the knees. We were only shown from the knee down, and what the male journalist was talking about was what shoes we were wearing.

“Now I quite like shoes, but I don’t think I should be defined by shoes and I don’t think the first thing I should read about a meeting of that significance is about the shoes we were wearing. This episode to me illustrates the wider issue that if we have a political press corps dominated by men then that impacts on how politics is portrayed and talked about.”





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