Every Prime Minister,” as Margaret Thatcher famously once said, “needs a Willie.” She was talking about her Home Secretary Willie Whitelaw, rather than, well, anything else, but how we all laughed. Thatcher was mad, of course. She was also a battleaxe. Ask around, read the commentary and you will quickly learn that most women in politics are one or the other. Or they’re useless. Often they’re all three.
“I’m mad,” says Nadine Dorries, the Conservative MP for Mid-Bedfordshire. “We’re all mad. That’s the terminology that men always use when they want to do women down. They do it about Harriet Harman. You’d never hear that terminology used against men. And it’s always men who use it. They’re usually ugly. And often quite obese.”
As you may have read in The Times yesterday, there are now only 17 female Conservative MPs. The men outnumber them by ten to one. There are seven women who attend the Shadow Cabinet, but only four who have proper Shadow Cabinet roles. During the party’s leadership contest in 2005, Theresa May declared that there were fewer women in the Shadow Cabinet than there were men called David. This is no longer true — but only because David Davis resigned.
Bad, all this, but not terribly surprising. In the Commons there are 125 female MPs out of a total of 646, and that is largely the result of all-women shortlists in the Labour Party. Women abound at the grass-roots level of all the major parties and, while they remain a minority in the House of Lords, they are an increasingly active one. In the Commons, though, the female population has stagnated since 1997 and, at the next election, looks likely to decline. Why?
In part, perhaps, not that many women actually want to be MPs. We spoke to a cross-section of female MPs and most agreed. The hours, the scrutiny, the time away from families and the constant need to shout and strut and beat one’s own trumpet. No thanks.
Of the 101 female Labour MPs who followed Tony Blair into power in 1997, fewer than 70 remain. Some died, lost their seats or were elevated to the peerage, 11 quit. One was the MP for Gloucester, Tess Kingham, who left after one term, calling the Commons “weird, pathetic, bizarre and antiquated” and accusing Conservative MPs of “endlessly thrusting their groins around the Chamber in mock combat with Labour Ministers”.
Some commentators have suggested that while all-women shortlists did boost the numbers of women, they did relatively little to provide performers of the calibre of a previous generation, such as Barbara Castle, Shirley Williams or even Thatcher herself. “There’s a sense that women are like bowls of flowers, and when the real decisions come to be made, it’s the boys,” says Abbot. “The consequence is that the boys don’t like women that they find challenging. Then they turn around and say they are underperforming. Well, guess what? That’s what happens if you bring in the unchallenging women.”
It’s easier to slip under the radar, reckons Abbott, if you are a man. “Women are always supposed to be vibrant and dynamic,” she says. “Meanwhile, mediocre men can get quite far.”
The chamber of the House of Commons, with its baying and bellowing, remains a place of men, shaped by men. Often, women give the impression that they are merely visiting. When she stands in at PMQs, even Harriet Harman frequently looks terrified.
“Prime Minister’s Questions is an awful throwback to public school, bullying, loutish behaviour,” says Lynne Featherstone, the LibDem MP for Hornsey and Wood Green. “It’s the adversarial nature, the fact you have to intervene or shout to be heard. That’s not a natural female environment.”
The media, also, is not kind to female MPs. GQ magazine recently put Jacqui Smith in the “men” category in their worst-dressed awards. “What do you mean she isn’t a man?” quipped the magazine. “There’s something about a white blazer and sensible haircut that screams ‘Olympic official’.”
Famously, Smith’s debut performance as the Home Secretary was noted largely for her cleavage. Female pundits can be as savage as any. When Theresa May displayed her own cleavage a few weeks later, Carole Malone of the News of The World advised parking a bike in it. Scrubbing up too well is no escape, either. On the pages of the Spectator, the columnist Rod Liddle has developed a nice line in sexual fantasies about the Europe Minister, Caroline Flint. A few months ago, he suggested using a picture of her as an aid when visiting a sperm bank. Male MPs, meanwhile, rarely raise so much as an eyebrow, even if they look like Charles Clarke.
It’s easier, probably, for women who don’t stand out. “It was for Gwyneth Dunwoody,” agrees Nadine Dorries. “And it probably is for . . . well, the majority of Labour female MPs.” Dorries, who does stand out, was to be faced with suggestions of an affair with a colleague on Damian McBride and Derek Draper’s abortive Red Rag website. She is taking legal advice.
An MP since 2005, Dorries says that, for a woman, it is a very difficult job. “You’re a wife, you’re a mother, you’ve got a constituency of 100,000 people, you’ve got a home in two places,” she says. “It’s almost impossible to combine all these things. It’s a 100-hour- a-week job, and many women want to have other roles in life, which include a social life, and a partner, never mind school plays and buying the kids’ shoes. I’d been an MP for three days, when my daughter rang and asked me where her hockey socks were. I didn’t have a clue.”
She and her husband separated in 2007. “I failed spectacularly at combining all those roles,” she says. “Many women do.” Many, indeed, find it a good deal harder than Nadine Dorries. One thinks of the former “Blair Babe” Fiona Jones, who was found dead two years ago at the age of 49, surrounded by vodka bottles. The detail of her story was one of technical mishap (a conviction for electoral fraud, which was quashed on appeal, before losing her seat in 2001) but the background was one of a woman lost in an alien, unforgiving, male-dominated world. Once, she claimed to have been propositioned by a Cabinet Minister. After her death, her husband said she had been afraid to attend AA meetings, in case she was recognised.
Inside the Commons, stories of miserable female MPs abound. One member tells me about a Labour MP who spends her days crying in her office, because she has a four-month-old baby that she never sees. Another tells me about the children of one senior Labour figure, who can often be seen dozing in their buggies in the member’s lobby at 11pm, while their mother finishes work.
Lynne Featherstone is a single mum with two children. “Being a bearer of children is the toughest thing,” she says. “It’s tough for men too but it’s tougher for women, because of guilt.” A decade ago, the then MP for Swindon, Julia Drown, campaigned for MPs to be allowed to breastfeed in the committee chambers. Plans were blocked by two successive Speakers, and then abandoned.
In her memoirs, House Music, a “Blair Babe” Oona King writes of a whirl of late hours, marital arguments, miscarriage, IVF and frantic insecurity when other female MPs such as Ruth Kelly and Yvette Cooper are promoted ahead of her, yet have children, too. At one point she describes a potentially relationship-ending argument with her husband which takes place on the phone, while John Prescott stands by her desk. At another, she asks for advice from Jack Straw, and says that this leads directly to tabloid rumours that they are having an affair. You can be young and normal and female, she concludes, but you can’t be an MP, too.
“Women are peculiarly vulnerable to the acts of their spouses and their children,” says Diane Abbott, the Labour MP for Hackney. “While men are not. Our children are part and parcel of our political identity.”
In 2003, Abbot faced criticism for her decision to send her son to a private school. “The amount of commentary over my choice of school for my son made his life miserable,” she says. “That’s going to give a lot of women reason to pause.”
So it’s not just the Tories. The Cabinet may have more female faces than its Shadow (ten or so), but Gordon Brown’s inner circle remains about as male as male can be. Witness the resignation of Ruth Kelly to spend more time with her young family, announced in a bar at 3am by Damian McBride, to a beery mob of journalists. With her unusual voice, cultish religion and many, many children, Kelly was another one that everybody thought was “mad”. At worst, though, she’s probably just a bit peculiar. But, then, many MPs are peculiar. Possibly most of them. It’s just that the men get away with it.
