Although tonight we are promised the exciting spectacle of democracy in full vigour, throwing off the fever of the last few weeks, we must admit the campaign itself has been rather unhealthy. Nonsense has been spouted. Policy has been under-discussed. Sir Ed Davey has felt obliged to court attention by jumping off things and into things and up and down on things.
There is one healthy habit, though, that we seem to have at last acquired. The Wheeling Out of the Wives — the compulsory role of the party leader’s spouse throughout the campaign — is, I think, over. This election marks its end. When, as we expect, Victoria Starmer accompanies her husband into 10 Downing Street tomorrow, many people will not have seen her before.
She has not been Sir Keir’s “secret weapon”. She has not been recruited to “humanise” him. She has not been unwittingly enrolled in fashion battles with other political wives. (Excerpt from an article on Samantha Cameron in 2010: “It was as if she had been dressed to appeal to all ages and levels of the electorate”).
Instead she has avoided the campaign trail to the point of extensive comment. “Why don’t we see more of her?” asked Nick Ferrari, as Starmer explained she had a job, and their son had been doing his GCSEs.
In 2015 Samantha Cameron appeared more than any female Tory politician
This did not quell speculation. The Daily Telegraph noted she had kept a “remarkably low profile throughout the general election campaign”. A tabloid nicknamed her “Sir Keir Starmer’s reluctant First Lady”. “Where is Lady Vic?” asked Guido Fawkes, suggesting she would add some “much needed glam” to the proceedings.
An irate Daily Mail was at last forced to put it plainly: “Why is Sir Keir Starmer’s wife not accompanying him on the campaign trail?”
Akshata Murty, Rishi Sunak’s wife, has been active — going to a few events — but only by comparison. We are a long way from the days of Lady Cameron, who in 2015 made more media appearances than any female Conservative politician. (In 2010 the party leaders’ spouses received a higher proportion of newspaper coverage than female politicians combined.)
In any case, Murty has only recently been deployed to assist in public appearances. During the Conservative leadership contest, the New European ran an article entitled “The curious case of the absent wife on the campaign trail”, noting that both Liz Truss and Sunak “chose to more or less pass themselves off as singletons”.
Davey’s wife, we must imagine, will be breathing sighs of relief that she wasn’t required to be by his side — in rollercoasters and doing bungee jumps throughout.
This is all a very good thing, for two reasons. First because it makes the process of selecting party leaders, and prime ministers, that smidge more meritocratic — widening the candidate pool to singles, and those with less presentable spouses. The idea of a leadership “package” — one half of it unelected — should trouble anyone interested in democracy. But second, of course, is that it is a symptom of a more gender-equal country. We have in the past eight years had two female prime ministers. We no longer need to pretend that media coverage of female spouses substitutes for that of female politicians. Nor that sleeping with a party leader constitutes some sort of female empowerment.
The second is a pretence that we after all only dropped rather recently. In 2020 a Tatler article noted that when she married Boris Johnson, Carrie Symonds would have to “presumably, step down from her job as a senior adviser to the marine charity Oceana”. But in the next sentence: “Carrie remains an innately political creature who is set to marry a notoriously sex-mad prime minister. That makes her just about the most influential woman in Britain.”
The idea seems to be that in giving up her actual job — a fairly powerful one — and becoming dependent on the career of her husband, restricted to the sort of pillow talk “influence” that attracts wide condemnation when it is so much as suspected, Symonds had somehow done wonders for her CV. You don’t need to switch the genders around — imagine if we said this about the male spouse of a female prime minister — to see how absurd this is.
There is, after all, perhaps something to be said for the latest roster of Tory leaders. They have helped us shake off the political wife. Johnson through his various less conventional set-ups; Theresa May and Liz Truss by having husbands, and therefore providing a span in which we could break the habit.
Now, let’s see if we can maintain it.
