‘Tiz” and Liz. Elena Ferrante’s Lenù and Lila transplanted to Downham Market. It came as news to a lot of us that Truss’s premiership is also the latest chapter in her long friendship with Thérèse Coffey, whom she has just made deputy prime minister and health secretary.
Last week, their joint struggle – via marital drama, constituency revolt and other colourful setbacks – to escape the stultifying culture of student politics and seek fulfilment at the very top of the Conservative party culminated in a joyful series of interviews by the loyal deputy.
Tiz (Coffey) said it was hard, given their closeness, to remember to call her friend the prime minister. There were pictures of the pair cuddling piglets, seemingly the replacement for dolls in the Tory version of Ferrante. The homelier Tiz was said to have “chaperoned” Liz at leadership campaign events. For her part, Liz had “coached” Tiz for selection interviews, then supported her accession to a ministry. “I was delighted to attend my first Cabinet meeting with my mate @trussliz showing me the ropes,” Coffey tweeted in 2019, under a picture of them in Downing Street. Truss needed Coffey, someone said, for her “social skills”, though “they are both jolly women who enjoy a drink”.
Although it’s not clear yet which woman in this richly involving tale of female friendship is meant to be the brilliant one, I’m inclined to think it might be, as in Ferrante, the less obviously achieving of the two. Even if Coffey had not been unhelpfully photographed when deploying her celebrated social skills – that is, dishevelled, with a cigar and champagne, some spillage of the latter down her front – her views on abortion, since they are evidently accompanied by a willingness to impose them on other women, would probably have ruled out any serious attempt on the leadership.
As it is, the new deputy prime minister has acquired by preferment, and that via a coronation, a position where she can perpetuate her party’s conviction that women’s reproductive organs are its political responsibility, even if it officially deplores the overturning of Roe v Wade. Meaning that a man like her colleague Jacob Rees-Mogg, who opposes abortion even as a consequence of rape or incest, is still licensed as an MP to dabble, like a special constable, in occasional womb policing. In recent years, for instance, he did his best to stop women in Northern Ireland having the same access to abortion to his female constituents in Somerset, voting against it at every turn.
“Why does she think it is that all three female prime ministers have been Conservative?” Theresa May twinkled at Truss’s first PMQs. By way of one answer, Rees-Mogg was still sitting on the frontbench. There, by way of another, was Nadhim Zahawi, the Tories’ new women’s minister (now subsumed into the less committed title, “equalities”), whose thoughts on the menopause are eagerly awaited. Truss’s new cabinet is composed, should further explanation be required, of 15 men and eight women. Of those eight, six recently ignored the advice of key medical bodies (including the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, the Royal College of Midwives and the BMA) and opposed, in a free vote, the continuation of abortions at home. The measure had been introduced in lockdown, after which a majority of women, as well as clinicians, wanted it to continue, as it did for Scottish and Welsh women.
None of that impressed most of Truss’s new cabinet, of which only three members actively supported at-home provision. In effect, a majority signalled, like Coffey, that it was fine for abortion to return to being more difficult – the more so since none of them had supported efforts to stop women being monstered outside clinics by “pro-life” campaigners. Clare Murphy of the BPAS (British Pregnancy Advisory Service) told the BBC that such protests are escalating, “with women and clinic staff facing intimidation while seeking to access and provide an NHS-funded service”. The vote was finally won, despite substantial Tory opposition, by 212 votes to 184.
Of the various ways in which the incoming cabinet differs from the general population, its members’ views on reproductive rights are among the most extreme. At the same time this particular disparity seems to be widely viewed – unlike its superfluity of men and of the privately educated – as politically unremarkable. Public support for abortion increased from 70% in 2017 to 90% of adults in 2020. Truss, going in a different direction, thought the aftermath of Roe v Wade a good time, as foreign secretary, to remove the words “bodily autonomy” from an international statement on women and girls’ rights.
As health minister, her best friend has now become the focus of concern for campaigners for reproductive choice. They fear, probably with good reason, that Coffey will put her own preference on abortions – for women not to have them – before clinical guidance. True, Coffey says abortion law will not change, but she has done plenty as an MP to indicate that she would gladly complicate access. During her tenure, complete decriminalisation will certainly be impossible.
She had only recently been elected when, in 2010, she sponsored an early day motion calling for women wanting abortions – already requiring the agreement of two doctors – to be subject also to “mental health assessment” and, if ordained, professional counselling. Happily, when this failed, Truss would already have been around to commiserate over a drink on poor Tiz’s frustrated dream of tormenting thousands of anxious strangers and encourage her friend to never give up – one day she might be able to block reproductive rights to all the women in Northern Ireland!
If that didn’t work out, it is one of the fruits of this long female friendship that Truss could finally gift her actively anti-abortion confidante authority over all the abortion services in England.
Sometimes, a scented candle just isn’t enough.
• Catherine Bennett is an Observer columnist
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