Singular life
What about the women?
Petronella Wyatt
Last week I made one of my forays into public speaking. It is a brave person who invites me to give a speech. I never know what to do with my notes, you see. If there is no lectern I just drop the discarded pages on the floor. Once, making some awards to
a wine society, the air-conditioning blew the pages on to the head of the venerable chairman, bestowing upon him an asymmetric Ascot hat.
This time the subject concerned how the Labour party has let down women. As the audience was made up mainly of Tories this went down rather well. Or perhaps the sounds of approbation were really lumps of gravy travelling down the gullet like Scrooge's ghost. They particularly liked it when I said that the setting up of a Women's Unit had made women feel part of an oppressed minority as opposed to the really oppressive majority of the population which we are.
But then I thought I had been too lenient — on the Tories, that is. I began thinking about the Conservatives and women. In some ways the Tories are prowomen. Hague's proposal to restore a semblance of the Married Couples' Allowance can be greeted only with cheers, while his refusal to insist like the Prime Minister that women should fight on the front line is an example of logic triumphing over the temptation to play the gender card.
Mr Hague, essentially, intends to leave women alone which is fine by me, since Tory philosophy is in any case about as little interference as possible in people's lives. But there is a huge discrepancy, even a hypocrisy concealed behind all this. The Tory party may have sensible policies on women as a whole but their polices towards women in their party remain suicidal.
Why are there still so few female Tory MPs? Why are there so few women on the candidates list? Conservative Central Office, to be fair, has been trying to rectify this by encouraging bright females to stand for Parliament. They may even give them preferential treatment, jumping the queue for interviews at Smith Square, for instance. But all their efforts are coming to nothing. This is because of the local associations.
I know several personable women — far more so than their male counterparts — who are time and again turned down at local constituency interviews for no good reason. One female acquaintance, who is nice looking and intelligent to boot, is already the veteran of 13 interviews.
Funnily enough it is not the men who, with antediluvian prejudice, throw out female candidates. It is the women. Tory women have a psychological problem with women MPs. It is not that they dislike women. If you are running a fête and all your tea cakes have been eaten by giant ants they will come to the rescue, if need be spending all night baking new ones. But these are their parameters. A woman's place is still outside Parliament. After all, if it wasn't, they themselves, as talented as any of their sex, would be MPs.
Furthermore a woman MP is no use to them. She cannot be married to their daughters or flirted with. She might ,however, be a danger to the probity of their husbands. Heaven forbid if she is glamorous. I have known attractive women in the media to be rejected as guest speakers by local associations because the women running them look askance. I, modest as I am, make no claims for my own looks.
The Tories will never really come of age until their associations change. What is required is some modern equivalent of Benjamin Disraeli's wonder-man J.E. Gorst, to help ensure that the party at local level is singing from the same song sheet as the party on the national level. If, as those surveys claim, women have more little grey cells that all of Britain's jails put together, the Tories dearth of both might lead it to become the Stupid Party once more. It is already on its way. Looking at the Shadow Front Bench it is hard to escape the conclusion that, academically swottish as some of them apparently are, they resemble nothing more than adolescent fumblers — the sort of men you pushed away in the back of the taxi when you were in your late teens.
It is time for the Tories to bring their associations to high heel on the subject of women. If only Ffion had gone into Parliament instead of her husband, the Conservative party might not be looking at another heavy election defeat.
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