The prime minister's latest cabinet reshuffle confirms his contempt for female talent. It's time for quotas
Call it a woman's intuition, but I got this amazingly strong feeling that, once he was reproached with humbling his women ministers, David Cameron would find a way of linking this unfortunate-looking turn of events to his overdeveloped feminine side. As soon as anyone asked how an ostentatious episode of female demotion squared with woman-pleasing concerns about "scandalous under-representation", the prime minister would speedily resurrect the version of himself as the bemused-yet-thoroughly committed young father whom we first met washing porridge bowls in those two-Conservatives-in-a-kitchen videos, filmed, if memory serves, by fellow housewives' favourite, Steve Hilton.
Sure enough, here he was on Daybreak: Cameron as a frazzled parent who, neither knowing nor caring about the meaning of "butch", is simply trying to juggle last minute homework and the end of the school holidays – phew! – with his first reshuffle. Haven't we all been there? You see, the prime minister explained to an interviewer, Elwen had this poem to write, before going back to his "state school not far from Downing Street", all about a "furry bear". Bless, bless and bless.
And somehow, deep into this Christopher Robin territory, Dad's got to deal with Spelman, Warsi, Greening, anyway, a load of random old bats, everybody's crying, but in any case he definitely ended up with the same number of cabinet women as before, ie four. Actually, it was five and is now down 20%, to four – but heck, who's counting, when Elwen's got this poem to do and Mum's busy designing stationery?
On a serious note, Dad's planning some fine opportunities for younger women, in line with Mrs Pankhurst's new ideas. "I hope they will be working their way up," Cameron said of his idealistic young intake, "and through it you'll see more women at the top in future. I think they are up to it." Think, mind, let's not be hasty: this is the man who thought Warsi was up to it, and look how that turned out.
While the prime minister leaves us for an urgent date with his rhyming dictionary maybe we should, before reconsidering the case for quotas, respect his argument that, no matter how desperately he might wish to promote them, there are, at present, no women "up to" doing for their country what comes so naturally to their male colleagues.
Could the mistake, for anyone struggling with the concept of no woman being as gifted as Jeremy Hunt, be to look at the wrong skill-set? If you were seeking a candidate of moderate intelligence, rationality and integrity with a rudimentary appreciation of the NHS then, of course, any 17-year-old Abercrombie & Fitch retail assistant selected purely on the basis of her hotness and hairflicking experience might look more promising than the demi-disgraced Hunt. More pertinently, there seems no conceivable reason why Justine Greening would not have made a more impressive and sympathetic corrective to the vandal Lansley.
But what if Cameron were seeking, instead, evidence of slyness, superstition and principles of limitless flexibility, allied to control-freakery on abortion, open cynicism about the NHS and a track record in sucking up to businessmen? Experience in sending inappropriate texts to professional flatterers an advantage? In that case, the appointment of Hunt, with his archive of Frenchified messages to Rupert Murdoch's PR, Fred Michel, might indeed resemble an NHS no-brainer.
Even if there are, genuinely, no women with the unspecified but evidently repugnant talents prized by Cameron and Osborne, the marvel of this reshuffle, which reduced female cabinet representation to 14.8%, is that neither man, nor the chumps they have entrusted with PR, foresaw how it would look to those they need, electorally, to beguile.
Do the party advantages of humiliating Greening and dumping Warsi, Spelman and Gillan, without so much as a compensatory peerage for the redundant commoners, really outweigh the unavoidable impression thus created, that Tory men, or at least ex-Bullers Tory men, are more averse than the City to senior women?And more repelled by middle-aged women, in particular, than the BBC? To the point that, not content with a level of women's representation that puts the UK 57th in the world, with a cabinet gender disparity that would be illegal in least one Nordic country and no female ministers in nine government departments, Cameron is actually moving backwards to some historic sweet spot between the arrival of women's suffrage and the first sighting, after decades of oestrogen damage, of a coffee-buying male minister.
Supposing Cameron's instincts in this case left room for anything so considered, perhaps his tactical error was to anticipate only a backlash from Labour, whose cabinet history under Mr Giant Cojones, Tony Blair, followed by "window dressing" under Brown (to quote Caroline Flint), scarcely put that party in a position to carp. This difficulty could explain why Labour tends still to rage against Cameron's woman shortage not as straightforward discrimination, but as the source of government callousness about women — as if a sizeable cohort of Maria Millers would be compelled by their ovaries to endorse Labour's remedies for female distress. As we know, the newly promoted Miller, now equalities minister and culture secretary, has voted, like Jeremy Hunt, to lower the abortion limit.
But to judge by the ConservativeHome blogger Jill Kirby, even the natural allies of Ms Miller are starting, post-reshuffle, to echo the Fawcett Society. Kirby reports her own "surprise" and "dismay", at Cameron's rearrangements, "particularly given the number of bright and able women now on the Conservative benches". Not to mention the entire kingdom, from which, had any woman been equipped for the honour, Cameron could equally have made his choice by raising her, via a peerage, into the government.
Given that their memories are said to be longer than huskies', Cameron may now regret ever raising women's expectations, between telling them to calm down dear, cracking jokes about their sexual frustration and noting breast development in men who bring hot beverages for others. Not only is there that pledge from his feminist era, to give a third of cabinet posts to women; just months ago he threatened boardrooms with the same fate. "The case is overwhelming that companies are better run if you have men and women working alongside each other," he declared, in full Borgen mode. "So the real nub of the issue is how do we accelerate, how do we fast-forward to having at least 30% of boards made up by women?" Yes, how do we accelerate, Dave? Although, in your case, just not going backwards from 14% would be a start. "If you can't get there in other ways," he said, "then maybe you have to have quotas." But it still took his reshuffle to convince me.