Please remember my life is in your hands
The tragic news that “Wacky” Jacqui Smith is to “stand down” from the Government in this/next week’s Cabinet reshuffle led me to think about just how irredeemably bad the women who have made it into Cabinet have been since Bliar was surrounded by his 101 ‘babes’ in May 1997.
If I’ve got this correct, there have been 13 or 14 female Cabinet members over the past 12 years (discounting peers). Those women are:
Hilary Armstrong
Margaret Beckett
Hazel Blears
Yvette Cooper
Harriet Harman
Patricia Hewitt
Tessa Jowell
Ruth Kelly
Helen Liddell*
Estelle Morris
Mo Mowlem
Clare Short
Jacqui Smith
Ann Taylor
(* I am uncertain whether or not the post of Secretary of State for Scotland was a Cabinet-level job between 2001 and 2003, when Helen Liddell was in the role.)
Now, with the best will in the world, I can’t recall a single thing of substance about Armstrong, Liddell and Taylor.
Morris admitted she was a poor Education Secretary and genuinely jumped before she was pushed, thereby actually enhancing her credibility.
Short was a good minister who discredited herself in 2003 by supporting the bombing back to the Dark Ages of Little Brown People to the extent that she ruined her entire career and reputation.
The Harman-Jowell-Hewitt axis was useless; nannying, hectoring, condescending, divorced from reality in their middle-class bubble, and utterly bereft of gravitas. And don’t even get me started on Harman’s and Jowell’s husbands.
Blears inherited their mantle – anybody who smiles that much when four bucketsful of shit are dripping off their head must just be fucking mental.
Ruth Kelly was simply scary, not least because of Opus Dei. In her opposition to abortion and gay rights she would have been more at home on the right wing of the Tory Party.
Smith was off with the cuckoos, having drunk deep from the Kool-Aid Well of Intolerance and Knee-Jerk Reactionism that poisons all Labour Home Secretaries the minute they are appointed. And, frankly, she’s never going to be remembered for anything other than supposedly bunking down in her sister’s spare room while her husbands’ kecks were round his ankles back home in front of some publicly-funded fruity flicks.
Yvette Cooper has been in Cabinet for 18 months now and has done precisely jack and shit, though the role of Chief Secretary of the Treasury is not exactly conducive to extrovert showmanship. Perhaps we have to reserve judgement on her for now.
Mo Mowlem was a lovable person but not exactly a successful Secretary of State. It wasn’t until after she left the Cabinet that she found a voice for her conscience, a role that lasted too short a time.
That leaves Margaret Beckett as the most successful female Cabinet minister since 1997. And she’s fucking shit, a professional chair-filler who was so laughably out of her depth as Foreign Secretary that even she told Bliar to fuck off when he appointed her.
I’m not saying that many of the men have been any better – Jack Cunningham, Ron Davies, Derry Irvine, Stephen Byers, Andrew Smith, Alan Milburn, Geoff Hoon… – but it’s striking and depressing just how little has been achieved by female politicians in Britain since That Bloody Woman was kicked into touch.
And if you look at the next generation of ministers you find the farcial Beverley Hughes and Caroline Flint, while the Shadow Cabinet contains such intellectual heavyweights as Theresa May, Theresa Villiers, TheresaCheryl Gillan and Caroline “Nannygate” Spelman. Slim pickings.
More white, middleupper-class, middle-aged men it is, then. Great.