It’s been a bad week for women in politics. Within the space of a few days, Home Secretary Jacqui Smith and Communities Secretary Hazel Blears have resigned from the Cabinet.
The former health secretary, Patricia Hewitt, has said she will not stand at the next general election, and children’s minister Beverley Hughes has also said she is going. It is hard not to see a conspiracy. One source said there has been disquiet about the laddish culture in Downing Street.
OK, I hold my hands up. I am six weeks away from giving birth to my first child so I have not had the practical experience of juggling a demanding career with family life.
What I do know is, despite the years of feminist struggle, it remains an unequal world, full of glass
ceilings, disparities in pay rates and inflexible working. And I have a great deal of sympathy with the women MPs who have long complained that the House of Commons is a glorified gentlemen’s club.
Indeed, it is obvious that it has not kept pace with some sectors of society, where legislation and the sheer pressure of a feminised workforce has meant that standards and behaviour have had to become more acceptable to the women in that workplace.
And, truly, some of the stories that have come out of the hallowed walls of the Palace of Westminster are appalling. It is said that when women MPs got up to speak, their male colleagues would put their hands on their chests, wiggle them around and go ‘melons’. This is Parliament, for goodness sake, not a playground.
Or take the tale from one MP who said that when she rose to discuss strip-searching, a male MP, of course, audibly muttered: ‘I’d strip search you any day, love.’ Hardly Noel Coward. More Bernard Manning.
All this is done with the collusion of large sections of the media who have taken delight in discussing Jacqui Smith’s cleavage, Harriet Harman and Hazel Blears’ handbags and Theresa May’s shoes. Ann Widdecombe has said in the past that women who have complained are being too sensitive and that former Tory chancellor Ken Clarke does not object when the focus of attention is on his Hush Puppies.
But Widdecombe misses the point. The joshing about Hush Puppies is always with good humour and even admiration while the focus on Smith’s breasts was an attack on her ability as a secretary of state and was specifically designed to demean her. The saddest thing was she was at the despatch box that day — just one day into being home secretary — following the terrorist attack at Glasgow Airport.
I sympathise, too, when women MPs have complained that Parliament is not family-friendly. In 2005, when late-night sittings were reintroduced on Mondays and Tuesdays, Harriet Harman, who has, more than any other in Parliament, carried the equality banner, said she felt ‘absolutely bitter’ with her Labour colleagues for depriving her and other MPs of evenings with their families.
Therefore if one good thing has come out of the expenses scandal , it is the opening up of the debate about how women MPs, specifically those with families, are treated.
Sadly, that debate did not get off to a good start in the past week. The Tory MP Julie Kirkbride has outraged both the Left and the Right by using her childcare arrangements to try to justify her expenses claims, including a £50,000 extension to her property. Instead of admitting that her claims did not fit in with the spirit of the rules, she said that it would deter other mothers from becoming MPs.
Now Kirkbride is not one of life’s natural feminists so perhaps she just did not know any better. But she used, as one commentator put it, a pseudo-feminist defence and that really sticks in one’s craw. Is she saying that it is only possible to be a mother and an MP if you charge the taxpayer for everything you possibly can?
That will not go down well with most other mothers in society, who have to arrange childcare, domestic support and work at the same time without resort to public money.
Equally, Margaret Moran, who does strike me as a good feminist and who has done much to encourage women into Parliament, spectacularly missed the point when she tried to justify spending £22,500 on dry rot on a property more than 100 miles from her constituency and nowhere near Westminster. She said it was because she could not make her partner ‘come to Luton all the time’ and that she had to ‘have a proper family life’.
When she became an MP, surely she discussed the compromises required with her partner? Could they not have worked out a solution that allowed them to see each other without charging exorbitant amounts to the taxpayer?
So far, the most reasoned argument has come from Labour MP Natascha Engel. She says it is no fun being an MP and a mother and now is the time to have a rational debate about what kind of Parliament we want and, within that, a discussion about lifestyle and expectations.
Once that debate starts, there can be some workable solutions that suit women, mothers and the public in general.
Victoria Macdonald is political correspondent for Channel 4 News
