THE NEW IRON LADY OF NO. 10

Melanie Phillips suggests that the Prime Minister's dithering is

explained by pressure from his intellectually formidable and ideologically rigid wife

CHERIE Booth, QC is an object of deep fascination. No doubt this is extremely unfair. If she were not the wife of the Prime Minister, she would attract no more atten- tion than any other successful employment barrister helping to set up a fashionable new human-rights chambers. She, and we, would probably be spared the endless commentary on her clothes, the significance of her facial expressions, or how she juggles the demands of her career with those of three teenage children and a new baby.

Yet the fact that she is also Cherie Blair means that what she thinks about the issues of the day is a matter of legitimate public inter- est. Since she is widely supposed to be more intellectually formidable than her husband, it is reasonable to imagine that her views have some influence on him. This is particularly so since, thanks to the leaked private ruminations of his polling guru Philip Gould, we now know that the Prime Minister sadly lacks `the inner core of strong convic- tions that would enable him to make a confident choice in a morally complex issue'.

Given such apparent ambiva- lence and suggestibility in the mind of Tony Blair, the views of the person who is even closer to him than Alastair Campbell assume no little impor- tance. On the rare occasions when she has spoken, it has been to legal audiences. She gave a lecture last March at King's College, London and last week spoke on a panel at the American Bar Association's London conference.

Maybe she assumed that her chosen topic on both occasions, the need to com- bat discrimination, would be uncon- tentious. After all, surely no reasonable person could possibly endorse discrimina- tion against women, black people, homo- sexuals and the working classes. Very true; but unfortunately the notion of what is genuinely discriminatory has been turned on its head by an ideology to which Cherie, through her remarks on these occasions, revealed she was a committed subscriber.

She got her retaliation in first when she told the ABA that the charge of political correctness was the first refuge of those against change. Those dreadful forces of conservatism again, no doubt. Now, it would cheer everyone up no end if we could all agree that her opinions were insightful, orig- inal and well informed: the sort of thing we expect from a top barrister. Yet reading them, it's hard to see a reflection of anything other than the most depressingly slavish politically correct agenda. So much of what she said was highly ideological: tendentious, selective, contradictory or just plain wrong.

What she was promoting was nothing other than the victim culture and its public manifestation: the politics of resentment. This entails measuring in the crudest way the achievements of self-designated victim groups against others, paying scant atten- tion to significant differences in circum- stances or behaviour, and representing any resulting variations in outcomes entirely as proof of prejudice by the oppressor class. In this view of the world, people are not agents of their own destiny but are merely forced to submit to outside and hostile forces, being rescued only by human-rights banisters on white chargers.

Thus Cherie told the ABA that the rea- son there were no black judges and few women on the bench was direct or indirect prejudice. By whom, exactly? She chose not to say; but the person responsible for selecting the judges happens to be none other than her old pupilmaster, the Lord Chancellor, Lord Irvine of Lairg.

But why? This didn't follow at all. Far from wanting to favour white middle-class men, the Lord Chancellor's department bends over backwards to appoint women or black people to any- thing and everything, whenever it can. Lord Irvine is hoarse from urging black people and women: `Don't be shy; apply!' But even he can't conjure black or women judges out of thin air.

Even so, he isn't doing badly. Assistant recorders, the lowest kind of judge, are being appointed from banisters with an average of 22 years' experience. Only 3.9 per cent of banisters with more than 20 years' experience are from ethnic minori- ties, and only 11.6 per cent with that expe- rience are women. Yet 4.2 per cent of new assistant recorders are from ethnic minori- ties, and nearly 27 per cent are women. So where's the discrimination?

Indeed, it appears to be going the other way. Despite Cherie's pious disclaimer about preferential treatment, at least one very senior judge has remarked that there are some women now in judicial positions who would never have been appointed had they been men. Yet Cherie appears to sub- scribe to the feminist belief that the only reason women aren't in the workplace in equal numbers is because they are being kept out. The notion that other factors may apply doesn't seem to come into it at all.

In her King's College lecture, she claimed that women's lives had been made difficult and on occasion intolerable by dis- crimination at work. Part of her evidence for this oppression was drawn from a report published by the government's Women's Unit earlier this year. Cherie quoted its headline claim that women paid a hefty forfeit in the workplace just because they were female. A middle-skilled woman such as a secretary, she said, earned £240,000 less over her lifetime than her male equivalent. If she was a mother, she would lose an additional £140,000.

The whole notion of 'equivalent' jobs is highly dubious because so many subjective factors come into play. But, in any event, the Women's Unit report suggests that half of this 'female forfeit' is due to the fact that married, childless women work fewer hours over their lifetime than equivalent men. The other half of the forfeit is due to the difference in the hourly pay rates of men and women.

The reasons behind these differences are Complex, and paint a very different picture from that of the victimisation of women. Discrimination may play a small part, but most of the gap is explained by the fact that women and men work in very different ways and that low pay is ultimately due in the main to the choices women themselves make freely. If Cherie had consulted other research, she would have discovered that, when like is really compared with like, there is no pay gap between single men and women who are either single or married with no chil- dren. Men, however, particularly married men, work harder than women. Indeed, the more women enter the workforce, the fewer hours they seem to work. While 29.8 per cent of female workers worked fewer than 16 hours per week in 1979, by 1990 this figure had risen to 43.7 per cent. Children, or the prospect of having them, account for a great deal of the differences in working behaviour between men and women. The hourly-pay gap results in large measure from the fact that women are heavily concentrated in sectors where the workforce is predominantly female and the pay generally low. This is the outcome not of discrimination but of the economic law of supply and demand. Women choose jobs that will fit in with the domestic responsi- bilities which they themselves think take precedence.

Like the government, Cherie seems to think that the solution to the conflict between family and work is for employers to promote 'family-friendly policies' of increased parental leave and automatic claims to part-time working. Of course, it's in employers' interests to go some way down this road to attract and keep good staff. But how far should they be expected to subsidise women who are pulled in two often irreconcilable directions?

Surveys show that most working mothers would give up work immediately if they could afford to do so, and not just because of absurdly long working hours. For most women, nursing a job and a family is incredibly stressful because they want to be in two different places at the same time. Most working women think full-time work hurts their children and puts their mar- riages under strain, with the resulting risk of much greater harm to the children from family breakdown.

For men, by contrast, marriage and chil- dren are a spur to work even harder. That's an important reason for the pay gap. Women are less likely to get promoted than men. But that is not because their employers are necessarily prejudiced. It is because women choose not to put in the long hours required for promotion. This is because they have other, higher priorities in life, or because they just recoil from the competitive ethos that drives most men and a few women ever higher up the promotional ladder.

None of this figured in Cherie's remarks, which were both contradictory and dismay- ingly dismissive of men. For while she por- trayed women as the victims of workplace discrimination, she simultaneously present- ed them as rulers of the new workplace universe. She appeared to believe that only women could operate the new 'knowledge- based economy', as only women possessed the expertise in project management, the development and sharing of knowledge, interpersonal skills and high standards of customer service.

Despite the fact that the 'knowledge economy' has become a Blairite mantra, there is absolutely nothing new about an economy based on knowledge. Anyway, why can't men learn all these mysterious new skills? And what chance of success does an economy have without the old masculine attributes of competition or leadership? Why does Cherie appear to want to write men out of the employment script altogether?

But then she doesn't appear to have much time for men's traditional role in family life either. A significant part of her lecture was devoted to her desire to pro- mote gay rights. She wanted Parliament to take its cue from various recent court cases and give homosexual partners the same sta- tus as married couples. She presented this as the need to combat discrimination against homosexuals, but again she appeared to have missed the point. It is perfectly possible to find abhorrent dis- crimination and prejudice against homo- sexuals, while upholding the uniqueness of the married family.

The privileges associated with marriage are not rights denied to others by a bigoted society. They are rather a recognition both of the sacrifices made by spouses who com- mit themselves to be faithful to each other for life, and of the importance to society of the socialisation of children. If unmarried partnerships, including same-sex partner- ships, are made legally and morally equiva- lent to married couples, then the unique status of marriage will be destroyed by the belief that all relationships are the same. The gay-rights agenda is thus a direct attack on the status of the married family.

Cherie told the ABA that she wanted to remove discrimination in the legal profes- sion against 'people whose profile does not comply with the perceived norm'. Well, it so happens that the European Union is dis- playing precisely such discrimination in its new employment and race directive. This not only reverses the burden of proof in race discrimination cases. It also threatens a major assault on the human rights of reli- gious bodies. Its terms mean, for example, that a hospice can no longer refuse to employ a doctor who believed in euthana- sia; or a Christian school refuse to employ an atheist teacher; or an evangelical com- munity group refuse to employ a promiscu- ous homosexual youth worker.

So will Cherie Booth, QC, champion of those oppressed by discrimination, leap to the defence of such groups? On the con- trary. In her lecture, she hailed the EU directive thus: 'If it is adopted, no court will be able to deny the unlawfulness of any kind of discrimination, This would repre- sent a great leap forward and the promise of a real sense of equality for ALL.' To those who believe that discrimination of any kind is wrong, it follows that all the cases above would be examples not of vic- timisation but of prejudice.

In his famous leaked memo, Philip Gould bemoaned the fact that the govern- ment appeared to be politically correct and not pro-family. With the Daily Mail on one side and Cherie on the other, is it any won- der that the Prime Minister is unable to make a confident moral choice?

Melanie Phillips is a Sunday Times columnist.