I don’t think the reshuffle really matters (I’ll explain why in a bit) but I am wondering whether it’s such great news that it’s all blokes at the top of the batting order again. A guest on BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour this week pointed out that when a woman messes up — i.e. Liz Truss — folk revert to ancient prejudices against appointing a woman in the first place.
But when a man does — i.e. David Cameron — it’s come back, all is forgiven, have a seat in the Lords and a trophy job with a magnificent listed pile plus lake in Kent attached!
As of this week then, the front bench at PMQs looks pale, male and stale again, apart from Home Secretary James Cleverly and Penny “Stand Up and Fight” Mordaunt. All the top jobs have gone to the boys, for the first time in yonks.
Out are Suella Braverman, Thérèse Coffey (was environment secretary) and Rachel Maclean (was housing minister), and instead we have as incoming queen Esther McVey, who’s had to leave her job swinging her amazing blonde mane on GB News. I’m not sure she’s allowed to even speak in Cabinet and therefore be a sock puppet for Suella, but anyway she’s there to guard against “wokery” in a newly created role of common sense czar.
The Tories ignored female voices when it was more vital to have them heard than ever — the pandemic
This is rather silly — interesting only as an admission that the post-Thatcher Tories completely lacked any common sense before. And also, as an admission that they ignored or excluded female voices when it was more vital there were women in the room than at any other time in modern British history. The pandemic.
Even if we said it at the time — and I did, over and over again on LBC, that I refused to have a “quad” of middle-aged men who’d never changed a nappy or made a white sauce telling me how to wash my hands or whether I could see my mother on her last Christmas on earth — it’s now a matter of record. We have the chilling evidence of the former deputy cabinet secretary Helen MacNamara and her forensic demolition of the macho heroics of No 10 at the time.
Of course, we should say there was (now Dame) Kate Bingham on vaccines, (now Baroness) Dido Harding on track and trace, (now Dame) Professor Jenny Harries on the joint committee on vaccination and immunisation, and (now Dame) Priti Patel was on enforcement.
But apart from them, women in the pandemic were like Victorian children. Barely seen (I think Priti and Jenny gave one or two of those grim daily Covid briefings) and not heard. “Decisions were not being taken by people with ‘broader or real-life’ perspectives,” as MacNamara put it to the Covid inquiry.
As a result, there was no proper pushback against the lockdown zealots. There was nobody important to warn of hidden harms from childcare to social care, nobody powerful to warn of the incalculable human cost that would result: the loneliness, addiction, despair, domestic abuse, obesity, suicide, excess deaths resulting from a Covid-first NHS, learning loss, access to abortion, ghost children, the eight million on the waiting lists… all of it.
Looking back, so much of this was domestic policy. Now, as it happens, women are pretty experienced when it comes to housekeeping and childcare and doing it all i.e. domestic policy. But none were in the room while four male politicians debated whether they should open golf clubs before schools. Honestly, why didn’t the PM just ask a busy woman rather than Michael Gove or Matt Hancock, as men normally do when they want something quite dull yet necessary done?
“The wrong people were in the room,” MacNamara explained, “and therefore the PM was not being given expert policy advice.” She even named two female civil servants who were ignored or not included early enough to make a difference: one who ran the Civil Contingencies Service, and a private secretary in No 10 who tried in vain to flag up domestic violence if you locked people in their homes, but “nobody cared because DV didn’t show up in the data”.
Back to the reshuffle. As we’ve had four PMs, six home secretaries (Braverman twice) in the past four years and seven foreign secretaries in seven, it clearly doesn’t matter who does the top jobs in government an awful lot, male or female.
As the lifespan of a minister is shorter than that of a Johnson family hamster, in fact I’d sack ’em all, and let our excellent civil service run the country until at least the next general election.
