When we used to think of Tory marriages, we mostly thought of when they went horribly wrong – when the Honourable Member was caught with his trousers down, as when, in 1992, David Mellor was found ‘in flagrante’ with a resting ‘actress’ who saw fit to sell her story to a tabloid newspaper. The ghastly Mellor made not just his poor wife and children, but his poor wife’s poor parents all line up grinning like chimps by a five-bar gate to prove how solid his marriage was. (‘A five-bar-gate moment’ is still press slang for displays of fake domestic bliss by shameless politicians, while the ceaseless self-serving confessions of the hilarious Little Britain character Sir Norman Fry – though gayer in his extra-marital inclinations – were obviously influenced by this ‘iconic’ shot.) Mrs Mellor surely went above and beyond the call of marital duty when she defended him: ‘I am just very, very sad that someone with such ability is not able to serve his country in the way he can do best,’ she told reporters on the day of his resignation. But within two years, the unlikely Lothario hit the front pages again after he was rumbled having it off with the spouse of a friend, whom he subsequently left his own loyal wife for.
Something sexily subversive was stirring in the Shires
Mellor wasn’t the only one carrying on; his colleague Tim Yeo, the environment minister, was outed in 1994 as having fathered a child outside of his marriage, while denouncing unmarried mothers – and, it soon transpired, having had a previous child with yet another woman. The transport minister Steven Norris admitted to having five mistresses. The wife of the Tory MP David Ashby accused him of leaving her for a man, with whom he shared a bed on holiday (Ashby said he did so to save money).
The cherry on top of this sumptuous sundae of sleaze was, of course, that their boss, John ‘Back to Basics’ Major, turned out to have been having a torrid old time of it with his colleague Edwina Currie, with whom he conducted a four-year affair before becoming Prime Minister. When Currie wrote about it, none other than that model of propriety David Mellor popped up fuming that ‘she sold John Major down the river for cash, like a cheap trollop’, showing that the double sex standard was alive and kicking in the party which the late Alan Clark once described as ‘an old whore that’s been around for 400 years’.
The very public adoration displayed by the Blairs (it was always amusing to see a sharp-shooting lawyer like Cherie goggling up at Tony on the conference platform like a cross between Bambi looking at his mother and a groupie looking at a rock star) and, to a more discreet degree, the Browns seemed designed to rub in the fact that Labour were the Good Guys in every way imaginable, including conjugally. But something sexily subversive was stirring in the Shires. David Cameron’s marriage was obviously the real deal – and, apart from handing us our lovely Brexit on a plate, the only thing of any merit about him. Dave was obviously nuts about his wife, to the degree that it didn’t look like a political marriage at all. Samantha Cameron – with her gap-year tattoo and her genuine affection for her puffed-up pink princeling – was proof that Tory women had changed.
But it was Mrs Thatcher who shifted the shape of the Tory marriage, as she changed so much. Without going into details, it’s reasonable to accept that she had a very ‘compatible’ relationship with Denis. Never a breath of adulterous scandal emanated from either. There’s a lovely bit in The Crown when Mrs T is shocked to discover that she and Denis have been allotted separate rooms on their first visit to Balmoral: ‘Two bedrooms? Are we allowed to sleep in one bed?’ Though The Crown had a left-wing bias, the Thatcher marriage was shown in delightful contrast to the dire dysfunction of the Royal unions, and Mr Thatcher as a thoroughly modern man who had no problem surrendering the spotlight to his more ambitious wife.
Which brings us to the Badenochs. I find many things about Mrs. B appealing; a secondary one must be her marriage to the charming Hamish, who wrote a gorgeous piece about her in this very magazine:
‘My political ambitions ended when I was booted off the candidates list – by Kemi. She was a vice-chair of the party and wanted to avoid a conflict of interests. I am pleased she did: being an MP is a gruelling business. After Kemi won her seat in the 2017 election, Philip May convened a meeting of the “Denis Club” (husbands of female MPs). Being an MP’s spouse, he told us, was the best of both worlds: 10 per cent of the pressure, 90 per cent of the fun.’
Looking at the sheer glee on Mr Badenoch’s face when his wife won, the absolute delight with which she smiled at him, their utterly unfeigned embrace (she patted him on the back in a gesture of ineffable tenderness, as if comforting him in advance for the outrageous slings and arrows which will inevitably come their way) and the striking lack of a lip-lock which seemed splendidly self-possessed at a time when political PDAs often seem mandatory, I couldn’t help comparing this scene from a felicitous marriage with the weirdness of the Starmer Kiss. Or rather, the almost-kiss, which looked like something which would happen if a robot was faced with a beautiful woman and told that it should show spouse-appropriate affection towards her.
There’s an amusing episode of the old television show Red Dwarf in which the android Kryten briefly achieves his dream of becoming human; he discovers that his new eyes don’t have a zoom function, that his nipples no longer pick up radio transmissions – and that his new penis is sexually attracted by super deluxe vacuum cleaners. That’s what the Starmer Kiss made me think of. Still, Sir Keir has unashamedly positioned himself as the most uxorious PM since Cameron; ‘Our love gets stronger every day,’ he told the Daily Mail shortly before his election. ‘It sounds naff, but we’re made for each other…she makes me complete.’
Look at the sheer glee on Mr Badenoch’s face when his wife won
Bless! But nevertheless, with such a happily married woman as Mrs Badenoch becoming the fourth female leader of the Conservative Party, the rather grim optics of Labour’s relationship with women won’t go away – on any level. Already Angela Rayner and Rachel Reeves look like world-weary backing singers (think the girls from the Human League with the weight of the world on their shoulders and sharing a spiteful hairdresser) as they sullenly eye the shining new star across the way. Kemi’s very existence mocks their humble idea of a glass ceiling, from their unenvied position flanking their shop-worn showroom dummy soloist, wondering disloyally if he really can’t make his Vocoder sound a bit more, well, human?
I’m old enough to remember how many Labour MPs mocked Mrs Thatcher’s election as leader by alluding smuttily to the desire of Tories to be Punished By Matron, rather than express admiration that a shopkeeper’s daughter could make such a breakthrough in a party steeped in snobbery. They couldn’t keep this one stacking up with the election of Teresa May (too shy to give you a decent spanking) or Liz Truss (too impatient). Now with the election of Mrs Badenoch we can see that they haven’t made an awful lot of progress in organising their own party along strictly meritocratic lines, especially when one considers the nepotistic Red Prince syndrome which has pushed fortunate spawn like the embarrassingly inept Hamish Falconer to the front.
Kemi’s very existence mocks their humble idea of a glass ceiling
Jess Phillips once told me: ‘It’s a massive, massive, massive disappointment that we’ve somehow allowed all the other parties to run away with this. It’s like people on the left are champions of equality until they see that some of their power is being taken away from them – whereas the Tories willingly gave it over.’
Phillips also said she was interested in being the leader of the Labour Party; nearly a decade on, I last saw her, clearly shaken, making an election night speech about how she had been harassed and menaced by bully-boy Labour activists who found her stance on Gaza insufficiently partisan, to such a degree that she thanked West Midlands Police for taking ‘constant’ phone calls from her.
Add the courting of the pro-Gaza vote by Labour to the persistent pressure for female MPs to be ‘transmaids’ if they are not to be isolated, bullied and eventually driven out, as the excellent Rosie Duffield was, and we have the perfect misogynist storm. It illustrates all too clearly that the ‘Boy’s Club’, which Starmer was accused of running with the sacking of Sue Gray, still has spiritual ties to the early days of the party, which once refused Mrs Pankhurst membership solely on the grounds of her sex.
It seems likely that Mrs Badenoch will proceed to show up Starmer in quite a few ways; as well as making him look like a glitchy robot at PMQs, her enviable marriage is not only a major asset to the Tories but casts an unfortunate spotlight on Labour’s wider woman trouble.
At some point down the rocky road they are travelling, Labour will have to define, once and for all, what a woman is. In the meantime, Sir Keir might look to the very model of a modern marriage, as demonstrated so attractively by the Leader of His Majesty’s Opposition, for a few handy hints on how we humans, at our best, do these things.
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