One of the rules of modern leadership contests is that at some point there is an almighty row about whether one of the candidates is just better than the other because she happens to have had children of her own. Labour reached that stage on 6 July 2015 when Helen Goodman wrote a piece saying she was supporting Yvette Cooper because she was a mother, which the Liz Kendall camp took exception to. The Tories reached it almost exactly a year later when Andrea Leadsom gave an interview to the Times in which she said she had a ‘real stake in the future of our country’ because she has children.
One of the effects that comments like this has is to provoke childless women in politics to argue, furiously, that they too care about the next generation and that the candidate’s good luck in having a family has the same sort of impact on their political judgement as any life experience. It’s tempting to write that piece again, but I’ve got such a packed day of decadent childless selfishness ahead of me that I’ll refer you to the one I wrote a year ago.
What’s more interesting is the political impact of this culture war that Leadsom’s comments have unleashed. Firstly, Leadsom claimed as soon as the interview was published that she had said the ‘exact opposite’, attacking Rachel Sylvester for ‘the worst gutter journalism I’ve ever seen’. Sylvester is one of the most respected journalists in Westminster, and coolly produced the audio and transcript of the interview, which showed her asking Leadsom if she felt ‘like a mum in politics’, given she had repeatedly referred to her motherhood in the referendum debates. Leadsom replied:
‘Yes. I am sure Theresa will be really sad she doesn’t have children so I don’t want this to be ‘Andrea has children, Theresa hasn’t’ because I think that would be really horrible but genuinely I feel that being a mum means you have a very real stake in the future of our country, a tangible stake. She possibly has nieces, nephews, lots of people, but I have children who are going to have children who will directly be a part of what happens next.’
Why has Leadsom chosen to attack the Times for quoting her accurately? It could be because she is naive about how interviews work, which is that a journalist invites you to walk down a certain route with them using a question, and you can choose to go down that route with your answer, or block that route off. It’s generally only a good idea to accuse a journalist of gutter tactics if they have misquoted you, rather than if they’ve had the temerity to print your quotes. If Leadsom is this naive about interviews, she is going to have a steep learning curve on being elected Tory leader and Prime Minister.
But there is a still a political benefit to Leadsom in this row. She has been attacked for talking about her family values in the press. If the Conservative leadership contest is to follow the same lines of the Labour leadership contest now that it has reached the Childlessness Debate, a sense that the Establishment is attacking you and trying to keep you out of the top job is pretty helpful in appealing to grassroots members. Leadsom has been attacked by many papers for her views and her CV, and her supporter Penny Mordaunt has just told the Today programme that the contest as a whole has been ‘really poor’, with people trying to keep the candidate off the ballot paper. There is a clear attempt here to set up a victim narrative, something that has helped Jeremy Corbyn stay in place because his grassroots supporters have sympathy with him. This interview will have a big impact on the leadership contest, but perhaps not in the way we might expect.
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