Off the top of my head, what “only connects” Ghislaine Maxwell, Liz Truss, Dame Alison Rose, and Paula Vennells? Let’s go through them.
Ghislaine Maxwell stands convicted of procuring teenage girls and is rotting in a US jail for a cool 20 years unless her appeal succeeds. Twenty years.
The average life sentence in the UK for a murderer is 15 to 20 years. Yet consider this: not one of the paedophile Jeffrey Epstein’s many household-name mates, who helped themselves to the all-day free buffet of slave girls in “Little St Jeff” (as they called his private island, Little St James) and elsewhere, has suffered any legal sanction save some unsavoury publicity and loss of status.
Truss beat Rishi Sunak in a leadership contest, cooked up a hot mess of a mini-Budget, and fell on her sword after only 49 days as PM.
Dame Alison was the first woman to lead a major UK lender — ironically after leading a government report into the low level of women in top jobs — but resigned as chief executive of NatWest, where she’d started as a trainee. She confessed to a “serious error of judgement” when it came to that snarky effort by NatWest/Coutts to debank Nigel Farage, the board then scrapped a planned schedule of payouts to the former boss of £7.6 million (!) but she so far remains a dame as per the 2023 birthday honours.
Not so Vennells. After a mass pile-on and petition that quickly topped a million signatures, the former chief executive of the Post Office has stripped herself of her CBE.
Not satisfied, NOW GIVE BACK YOUR MILLIONS, the Mail front page screamed. “As shamed ex-Post Office boss returns her CBE, victims say: what about her vast bonuses and pension?”
Yes, there is much talk of mass quashings and new laws and reparations, but the only concrete action we’ve had after ITV aired Mr Bates v The Post Office is… a woman has handed back her gong.
Now, I must tread carefully here as the last time I expressed any solidarity with a fallen woman I was publicly shamed myself. I wrote a Spectator diary in which I said I had a “batsqueak of sympathy” for Maxwell because she’d spent 500 days in solitary confinement before she’d been convicted. It was only a few words but I stand by them.
Madam Maxwell — still the only one alive doing time, as Epstein died in jail — was innocent until proven guilty. Yet she was treated as guilty until proven innocent. Although she was convicted, it’s not far from the same crack in the tectonic plate that has triggered the tidal wave of feelings of injustice that has gripped us all for the sub-postmasters, framed by Fujitsu’s faulty software and then convicted by British judges who preferred to believe in the infallibility of coders than the bona fides of pillars of the community.
What connects all these women, then, is this. They took the hit, the rap, for a bunch of men, mainly.
Yes, it’s deeply annoying that Truss has close protection and a salary and how royally Vennells was remunerated, but compare the behaviour of those on my list to Donald Trump, say (he didn’t accept he lost, he encouraged insurrection, he still believes he is president and will be again); or Lib Dem leader Sir Ed Davey, who was Post Office minister during the coalition, dismissed repeated requests from Mr (Alan) Bates for urgent meetings about the scandal and has blamed his officials for ignoring him and is going nowhere.
Women have to overcome more hurdles in their careers. They think therefore they have a smaller chance to succeed and often suffer greater imposter syndrome then men
I loathe gender-based generalities but my inescapable conclusion from these four loosely connected cases is this: as Dame Alison Rose herself reported, women have to overcome more hurdles (the usual gamut of misogyny, sexism, glass ceilings, combining jobs with childcare and other caring and domestic responsibilities) in their careers. They think therefore they have a smaller chance to succeed and often suffer greater imposter syndrome then men.
Unlike the many high rollers in the Epstein files who have ways and means to make problems go away, I can’t think of a woman who thinks she is just too big to be prosecuted and too scary not to get away with everything.
The bottom line is women don’t feel entitled to the top jobs. Not in the same way as men do. That must be why they seem to give them up more quickly.
I hold no brief for Maxwell, so don’t troll me. But when heads have to roll, or someone go to chokey — it’s cherchez les femmes.
Rachel Johnson is a contributing editor of the Evening Standard
