Daily Mail front page: Is Theresa May, Nicola Sturgeon ‘Legs-it’ cover peak Daily Fail?

Today’s front page.

This weekend the UK put their clocks forward by an hour for daylight savings. But today they’re waking up to a newspaper front page from the dark ages.

Tuesday's @DailyMailUK #MailFrontPages pic.twitter.com/QepUfSKKYN

— Daily Mail U.K. (@DailyMailUK) March 27, 2017

British Prime Minster Theresa May and Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon held a no-doubt tense meeting at a Glasgow hotel on Monday as May prepares to formally trigger Article 50 later this week and Sturgeon is set to call for a referendum on Tuesday. But the Daily Mail’s headline? ‘Never mind Brexit, who won Legs-it!’

Groan.

We don’t need to explain how denigrating it is to reduce this story to a headline about women’s bodies, but even by the Mail’s ‘standards’, it’s bad.

We see it time and time again from the Mail Online. Like when Sunrise host Sam Armytage went shopping, or as they captioned it “dared to bare with granny panties showing a visible line”. Their lawyers later apologised.

It happened when Game of Thrones star Maisie Williams attended a charity event, also known as “going braless at a ball”. And when “quick-thinking [UK] reality star” Lauren Goodger avoided stepping in a puddle – a classic example of ‘news that’s not news’ – just an excuse to run pictures of her “recent boob job.”

Stories of women doing things – or sometimes doing nothing - are too often pegged around them ‘plunging their assets’ into a certain outfit. It’s all part of the Mail’s ‘find a picture, build a story around it’ approach – the opposite of what proper journalism is.

But this latest sorry attempt was about an important meeting between arguably the two most powerful people – never mind women – in the UK right now.

Don’t for one second think it was a last minute, potentially risqué headline that someone on the paper thought would be ‘a bit of a larf’. The front page is signed off in advance by all the senior staffers – right up to the editor-in-chief. They knew it would get the feminists raging, or anyone with a rational sense of what’s simply not acceptable in 2017.

UK Labor Leader Jeremy Corbyn ignored party politics to condemn the cover today. “This sexism must be consigned to history,” he tweeted.

It's 2017. This sexism must be consigned to history. Shame on the Daily Mail. pic.twitter.com/V3RpFSgfnO

— Jeremy Corbyn MP (@jeremycorbyn) March 27, 2017

What’s more, it’s not even a good pun. ‘Who won legs-it!’ – are their legs leaving the EU?

What about ‘King-pins of Brexit’, ‘Sturgeon wants to leg it’, ‘Number 10 meets legs 11’… We can all put on our misogynist Daily Fail hats for a few seconds and come up with something ‘better’.

The cover reminded me of a recent pub trivia night when the host asked: ‘In a recent survey, men said they preferred which women’s body part: Legs, breasts, or bum?’

If you must know, the answer was legs – maybe they asked a load of Daily Mail readers.

Let’s all start answering ‘brain’ in future.