There’s a great bit in an episode of Yes, Minister during which Sir Humphrey Appleby explains to Jim Hacker why women are a minority, despite there being so many of them.
There’s a great bit in an episode of Yes, Minister during which Sir Humphrey Appleby explains to Jim Hacker why women are a minority, despite there being so many of them. It’s because, he says, they share the same sense of victimhood that is the defining characteristic of all minority groups. Like all the best jokes, it’s funny because it’s true. Women behave like a minority, and politicians treat them like one. Given that they’re a minority with half the vote, though, it’s a wonder they don’t throw their weight around a little more.
Where did it come from, this sudden consensus that David Cameron’s Conservatives have a problem with women? Cuts are affecting women, sure, but not because they’re women. There was the ‘calm down, dear’ thrown at one of the Eagles (Bald Eagle or Golden Eagle? I forget), there was the sniggering suggestion that Nadine Dorries might be a bit ‘frustrated’ and … that seems to be it. Both bad, sure, but not in the general scheme of things that bad. Not Dominique Strauss-Kahn. Not even John Prescott. Yet it’s there, and it obviously scares the hell out of them. Female voters used to like Tories more than men did; now they don’t. It can’t just be policy. How many voters even know about policy?
Partly, I suppose, female voters are going off David Cameron because everybody is telling them they are. If you wanted, you could do this with almost anyone. Declare that the party was intolerant of fat people, say. Isolate a couple of quotes, like that Osborne gag the other day about Eric Pickles’s personal trainer, and then go around asking fat people if they’d still be prepared to vote Tory, despite those fat-loathing, fattist bastards hating fat people so much.
Only it’s not quite the same. Because the Conservatives do still have a problem with women, in the same way that everybody still has a problem with women. Indeed, in even using the word ‘everybody’ in this context I’m showing that I have a problem with women, too. My ‘everybody’, you see, is an essentially male ‘everybody’. It has women in it, sure, but I expect them to act like men.
I’ve been worrying about women lately quite a lot. I suppose it’s something to do with having a daughter. Do you remember when Martin Amis got in trouble for admitting that he might be a bit racist? ‘I get little impulses, urges and atavisms now and then,’ he said. I worry that a lot of us are like that with women. Even quite a lot of women, I suspect, are like that with women. It’s not an inherent belief in inferiority, or a hatred, or anything so crass as that. It’s more an unthinking inclination to ask male questions in a male way, so that the only answer that works is a male one.
‘Oh for God’s sake,’ you’re possibly thinking. ‘This is precisely the sort of crap I read The Spectator in order to avoid.’ But I hope it isn’t. I hope it’s a sort of crap which is subtly quite different. Look, it’s difficult, this. It’s like a blind man trying to talk about colours. I, too, have impulses, urges and atavisms. There was a feature in one of the papers a few weeks ago, about why women need to be friends with other women, not just men. ‘Girlfriends let you moan,’ said one of the case studies. ‘Men only want to fix it.’ And you read that, as a chap, and… well, you know. Bloody hell. Your male friends offer solutions to your problems? Oh, poor you. The unthinking bastards. But you snigger like that to women and they’ll just shake their heads at you. And you’ll feel like Martin Amis at a reggae gig. You know?
So we might try, but we don’t get it. We don’t. We do odd things, we men, when we try to make the world better for women. We create immovable cultural bed-blockers like Harriet Harman, who has managed to dominate the Labour party’s ‘do something for women’ niche for a quarter of a century, despite never actually doing anything. And right now Cameron is panicking, and his panic will soon make him reshuffle his Cabinet to include lots of bright young women fresh from the 2010 election, whom we’ll all go on to belittle and despair of, and whom he’ll ultimately sack, and all because for some inexplicable reason they don’t behave in exactly the same sort of way as George Osborne. You’ll see.
•••
Early geek intervention. You know these barcodes everywhere? The new square ones that you can photograph with your smartphones? They’re the new big thing, but they’re not quite mainstream yet. Already they’re going wrong.
The idea is that you see an advert you like the look of in your paper or magazine, you snap the barcode with your phone, and whoosh, off you go to the pertinent offer or deal on the advertiser’s website. Yes? Done properly, it could be brilliant.
Only it never is done properly. Because you take a snap of the barcode on an advert for, say, M&S, and it just takes you to the front page of the website of M&S. Which you could get to anyway. Stop it. Waste of everybody’s time. These could be a brilliant invention, and lazy adverts are rendering them pointless before they even get going. Use them usefully, or not at all.
Hugo Rifkind is a writer for the Times.
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