Ed Miliband certainly won prime minister’s questions today by focusing on the Tories’ ‘women problem’. It is the political equivalent of kicking the Tories in the crotch – much worse for men than for women.
David Cameron tried his old trick of reeling off statistics to refute the accusation, but he couldn’t escape the reality that was before him. As Miliband pointed out ‘a picture tells 1,000 words.’ And this time it did: the government front bench was stuffed with serried rows of suits with not a single woman to be seen.
‘I guess they didn’t let women into the Bullingdon Club,’ said Miliband with glee. And he had his own statistic – ‘In his cabinet there are as many men who went to Eton and Westminster as there are women.’
Women were remarkably absent on all the Tory benches today. One in 10 Tory women MPs are standing down at the next election – and as there are only 48 of them that’s quite a lot. Many of the others are fed up, so fed up indeed that the Tory whips couldn’t even rustle up one of them to speak and it was left to Jessica Lee, elected for Erewash in 2010 and who is standing down for personal reasons, to put a question to Cameron on apprenticeships.
Cameron’s only defence on women is that 24 per cent of Tories in the full cabinet are women and that the aspiration is a third. Not really good enough if you are female.
Miliband came back quoting an article by Bernard Jenkin, the Conservative MP for Harwich and North Essex, who is married to the formidable Lady Jenkin. She has the unenviable task of trying to get more women MPs for the Tories, a task which is proving more difficult by the day. Anyway, Jenkin had written an article revealing that Cameron had greeted a leading high-profile businesswoman at a reception recently by asking ‘Where’s your husband?’
It was a very rowdy session today – in part because Miliband had Cameron on the run. Things are bad when the speaker has to rebuke a minister, particularly as, on this occasion, it was the education secretary, Michael Gove, who was shouting during one of Cameron’s boring homilies. The putdown had been practised. ‘Mr Gove, you really are a very over-excitable individual. You need to write out 1,000 times, “I will behave myself at prime minister’s questions”.’
The other big subject was flooding which Miliband had asked his first questions about. Cameron again had lots of statistics about how the government was helping with the floods and pumping £100m into aid. He was very keen to talk about the Bellwin scheme about which no one seemed very interested.
It might have been impressive had it not been followed by the real anger from his own benches about the very inadequate response of the government to the recent floods – the unresponsiveness of services and the failure to spend money on flood defences.
Ben Bradshaw (Exeter) picked up the question for Labour, asking about the flooding of the line at Dawlish which had delivered a devastating blow to the economies of Devon and Cornwall. Was the government going to put more investment into the railway infrastructure?
Cameron is at his worst when people are really angry. And Cobra is not good enough when faced with this sort of question: Cameron appears more eel than snake and glossy polish didn’t allow him to wriggle away. The blabla of this sort of politics is enough to put off more normal people. No wonder women MPs are leaving the Tory benches in droves.
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Sally Gimson is a journalist, a Labour councillor, and reviews PMQs on Progress. She tweets @SallyGimson