I don’t understand the Union sometimes. Deathly dull debate on Afghanistan with only one speaker, and the chamber’s packed, standing room only. Potentially brilliant debate on women, that perennial Oxford topic, and there’s maybe sixty people in the audience. Was it because there was another debate the next day? Anyway, all those absent audience members missed some great speeches. So did I, for that matter, because I arrived twenty minutes late (I’m just that devoted a journalist), and so missed Alex Worsnip’s opening speech, which is a shame because Alex is always a fantastic speaker. What I did notice is that he has a new beard, which makes him look alternately like a youthful Lord Palmerston (Google him, all you non-historians) and like a peculiarly well-groomed paedophile. The first speech I did get to see was by Sharon Hodgson, continuing the proposition that ‘This House supports all-women shortlists.’ I say continuing the proposition, but really Hodgson, elected on an all-women shortlist herself, made the case for the opposition simply by turning up – she was dire. Her entire speech was a succession of trite clichés and sanctimonious drivel about male MPs not understanding women’s issues. According to Hodgson, ‘Male MPs sit drinking on the Terrace of the House of Commons while their secretaries answer the phone.’ Isn’t that what secretaries are for? ‘If you want something said, ask a man,’ she advised us, ‘but if you want something done, ask a woman.’ Well, maybe, (although, at the risk of coming over all OUCA-ey, a man would of course never get away with saying the reverse), but it would be nice if our legislators could make a decent speech too.
To be honest, though, the next opposition speaker was hardly any better, despite having been selected as Tory Prospective Parliamentary Candidate for somewhere dreary by the usual methods. This was Annesley Abercorn, Chairman of that creepy assembly of right-wing teenagers the Bow Group. He made all the usual anti-AWS arguments, including the predictable and almost ritualistic obeisance to Margaret Thatcher (‘she didn’t need any all-women shortlists to become the greatest prime minister in living memory etc’). There was one good joke: ‘some people say this was because she wasn’t a woman. I can confirm this is true: she was, in actual fact, a lady.’ But then, just as he was beginning to do well, he screwed the whole thing up by claiming, as if it lend him some kind of credibility, that ‘I have been talking to lots of women recently…’ Well bully for you, Annesley – I do hope you’re proud. Then Madeleine Moon, another Labour MP, though one selected on an open shortlist, who was mostly quite good apart from her dire opening line: ‘I’m sure there are many people here who would make the same type of speech as was made in the House of Commons Debate on Women’s enfranchisement – ‘ “women are too frail and stupid to vote.”’ Darling, if you want to win over an audience, best not to start by accusing them of being chauvinist pigs. Also, apparently Pakistan’s old military dictatorship was more democratic than neighbouring India, because, while the Indian people saw fit to only elect women to 9% of parliamentary seats, the Pakistani Generals were enlightened enough to choose women to fill 24% of the seats in the token parliament. This makes military dictatorship better than democracy, apparently. If only someone had leaked that to the nationals.
James Gray, tall, military-bearing, ex-Christ Church, came across as a typical upper class Tory, and made the decent argument that AWS were patronising and condescending to women, by virtue of their implicit acceptance that women wouldn’t get selected by the normal method. Then Edwina Currie rose and blew them all out of the water. ‘We strive against discrimination, so we should hesitate before discriminating in turn,’ she argued passionately. It was wonderful stuff: Currie was a brilliant refutation both of the bigots who claim women don’t make good politicians, still sadly prevalent in some parts of the western world as well as much of the non-western, and simultaneously of the argument that women need a special leg-up if they’re to stand any chance of competing against a cruel political patriarchy. Smiles all round then, especially on the face of Stuart Cullen, who was told by Currie that he could one day rise to become leader of the free world. And isn’t that a happy thought.
