If you are a Tory politician, why not be fat and sexist?
Female Labour and Liberal Democrat MPs, while out of the Speaker’s earshot, have been caught making personal remarks about the Conservative MP Nicholas Soames. Mr Soames was going about his lawful business, for which he was duly elected, of making ‘sexist’ remarks about them, though he denies it.
A new book, Sexism in Parliament, quotes the Labour backbencher Barbara Follett as saying that some of her colleagues retaliated against Mr Soames by, as the Daily Mail put it, ‘referring to a claim by a former girlfriend that making love to Mr Soames was “like having a wardrobe fall on you with the key still in it”.’ Such remarks about Mr Soames could undoubtedly impede his career. In this day and age, an MP is being prevented from realising his full potential by sheer fatism. Mr Soames’s girth has caused him to hit a glass ceiling. He is just as able as Miss Jackie Ballard or Mrs Follett; some say even more so. Yet it is almost impossible for a fat man to reach his eminence. We are being denied the services of an enormous weight of experience because of fatists such as Mrs Follett.
But there is a matter here which is, as it were, still broader. It is that there is little point in being a One Nation Tory, as Mr Soames sometimes says he is. The liberal Left, when it suits it, is just as cruel about One Nation Tories as it is about Thatcherites. Kenneth Clarke, another One Nationer, is learning this. I mentioned in the Daily Telegraph last week that, now that he is in with a chance of becoming leader, the liberal Left prints are mentioning something which they would have mentioned all the time had he been a right-winger: his services to corporate tobacco. In the past, this aspect of his character was suppressed, the better to depict him as the decent, approachable Tory, as compared with, say, Michael Howard. Since I wrote that, references in the high-minded press to Mr Clarke’s business interests come in at about one a day. He is no longer Ken Bloke, but Ken Smoke, or the Smoke Next Door.
A similar fate awaits David Cameron if he becomes a serious contender either in this leadership election or a future one. At present he is written up — by journalists who would never vote Tory no matter who was leader — as another of those few good Conservatives in touch with ordinary peo ple. Yet apparently he is a member of White’s, and used to ride to hounds. Good luck to him, I say — but I am not of the abovementioned journalistic type. White’s and hunting would be much mentioned if he truly looked like becoming leader or prime minister. So Tory politicians might as well be fat, sexist, in the pay of a notorious corporation, a hunter or a member of a St James’s club that excludes women members. For a balanced constitution, lib-Labs should be lib-Lab, and Tories should be at least one, and ideally all, of the above, if they can get in on it.
Leafing through Massif Central magazine in France this August, I spotted that the tourist office at Vichy had a new guided tour: the main sites from when it was capital of the French state (1940–44). It is now 60 years — to the summer — since the president of the High Court in Paris began proceedings with, ‘The accused will rise, and state his surname, first name and rank’, and the accused rose and replied: ‘Pétain, Philippe, Marshal of France.’ Sixty summers later, that man is a tourist attraction. I and a friend drove up from the south to join the tour.
The Germans having occupied Paris, and having allowed the French a non-occupied zone mainly comprising central France and the south, Vichy became the capital partly because, being a spa, it had plenty of hotel rooms for civil servants. So gentility became, to the British and the Gaullists, notoriety. It is as if Britain had been occupied, a comparable capital had quickly to be found, and all these years later we still asked the question of famous British public figures, ‘Yes, but what did he really do under Cheltenham [or Bath, or Tunbridge Wells].’ There were about 20 of us on the tour mainly middle-aged, but including two females who looked the French equivalents of chavs: mother and daughter, perhaps, or sister and older sister. The older looked uncomprehendingly bored, but wore a strained look as if she was irritated at herself at not understanding what the guide was talking about. The younger made no pretence at wanting to know, and kicked the earth and pebbles in her boredom. Some of the older ones looked old enough to remember. When the guide began to utter the regime’s three-word slogan, replacing Liberté, Egalité and Fraternité, a couple of elderly women joined in: Patrie, Famille, Travail.
In a fine rich voice, the male guide told the story plain and well — referring formally to the main characters of the summer of 1940: le Président de la République, M. Albert Lebrun; le Président du Conseil, M. Paul Reynaud; and above all Le Maréchal. He led us up and down a strip of green, bordered by plane trees, and enclosed by an elegant wrought-iron canopy from the Second Empire when the town’s potential was established. Around it were the biggest hotels; above all the Hotel du Parc. Now a block of flats; then the Foreign Office, and the Marshal’s bureau — the latter now empty, not open to visitors, but maintained, as Massif Central wrote, by ‘a rather obscure association of the extreme Right’.
Around us, Vichy the place, rather than Vichy the idea, lived on. Elderly couples waltzed to a band, playing old Trenet and Brel tunes, at a tea dance in a Second Empire pavilion by the green. Pétain was found guilty of treason in 1944, dying in prison aged 94 in 1951. He would have said that he saved those dancing old people from what would have been a far worse German occupation had he not risked the opprobrium of collaboration. Most Britons jeer at him for saying that. A few of us — certainly I — have never been so sure. Whatever the truth, it should not be denied that a man who was once his country’s most admired soldier, but who died in prison a convicted traitor, is the stuff of tragedy. But that is what so many people, most Britons, and now perhaps most French, do deny, which makes him more tragic still.
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