IF there's one thing they're not worried about, it's the optics.
Wall to wall white, middle aged men in suits, the only nod towards diversity being the one fellow who's gone rogue and not put a tie on.
This open-necked rascal is one of 23 chaps in a photograph tweeted by Jake Berry, Cabinet Minister for the Northern Powerhouse to welcome the new #BlueWall of northern Conservative MPs to parliament.
"Working together," he captioned this sea of raw masculinity without any consideration of the subtext, "We’ll hunt like a pack to get a brilliant deal for people across the #NorthernPowerhouse."
If these lads are the hunters, who are their prey? The unemployed? The disabled? Single mums with more than two children? Interns? Can't wait to find out.
And yet a record 220 female MPs have taken their seats in Westminster this week. The House of Commons is still far from a 50/50 gender balance but female MPs now make up 34 per cent of the chamber, the highest portion to date.
Labour takes the lead - for a change - with a record 104 female MPs while the Tories trail behind, hunting like a pack but not leading the pack, with just 87, a quarter of their representation.
The Lib Dems are winning with 64 per cent, although, of course, they have only seven parliamentarians. Only a third of SNP MPs are women.
Back to Labour and the leadership race is underway, awash with female candidates. Eight MPs, six of them women and two of them Keir Starmer and David Lammy, have been touted as candidates for the race.
Now, though, there are suggestions that one of those expected to throw her hat in the ring will now run for deputy leader in order to smooth the path for a friend. In a move described as "sisterly", Angela Raynor is expected to step back to give Rebecca Long-Bailey a leg up.
Should a woman be given the task of steering the Good Ship Labour it will be the first time in the party's 120 year history, bar one brief interim.
As a rival pack to Team BlueWall, the women whose names are being suggested are formidable candidates.
Jess Phillips is charismatic and persuasive; Lisa Nandy seems to have a grip on the distinction between London and the north of England, otherwise lacking in Labour; Long-Bailey is a union favourite; Stella Creasy is dynamic; Emily Thornberry impressed when standing in for Jeremy Corbyn at Prime Minister's Questions.
Should a male party leader be chosen in the face of all this female talent, robust explanations will be required. It's about time the party's glass ceiling was smashed. It's 22 years since the Labour Party brought a landslide 101 female MPs to the House of Commons, doubling the number of women MPs overnight. Let us gloss over the sexist Blair's Babes moniker and move on to the fact the women have been allowed to only go so far.
In the words of Barack Obama, speaking this week at a private event on leadership, women aren't perfect but, if Labour really plans to have a serious spell of introspection, it could start by doing something fresh and new.
After saying that women aren't perfect, Obama added: "What I can say pretty indisputably is that you're better than us [men]."
"I'm absolutely confident," he said, "That for two years if every nation on earth was run by women, you would see a significant improvement across the board on just about everything... living standards and outcomes."
The argument begins to pale a little when you take a glance at two recent examples. Theresa May and Jo Swinson were savaged, neither doing an successful job of leading their respective parties.
There's an unfortunate cliche of women being expected to pick up after men and this extends to politics. It was expected that Theresa May would come in and repair the damage done by David Cameron after he divided the country and scarpered to his £25,000 designer shed to write about the experience.
While Vince Cable did a stand up job of heading the Liberal Democrats, there was still a strong narrative that Jo Swinson, a woman who can't define what a woman is, would be a breath of change, leading the party in a new and fresh direction, a direction towards electoral victory.
The problem women leaders face is that, when they are impressive - German Chancellor Angela Merkel, First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern - their femaleness is praised as a reason why.
Yet when, say, Argentina’s Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner defaults on international loan payments, or Australia’s Julia Gillard is strong armed out by her own party, the fact they are a woman is held against them.
Women are expected to resolve years of inequality almost overnight or be cast as failures.
Fact of the matter is, we don't have enough and consistent examples to say that female rulers would outperform men, or even do things differently from their male counterparts.
But studies show that women approach negotiation and politics in a different way to men. Earlier this year I was in Sierra Leone visiting a project where, to address poverty, financial structures were placed solely in the hands of women because they were shown to use the money for healthcare, housing, education and entrepreneurship.
They focused on the means of lifting the whole village, prioritising the treatment of everyone.
You would hope that putting a woman in charge of the Labour party would lead to the same priority. The one thing we do know, is that the Prime Minister is not good with women.
A female leader of the opposition might be just the thing to unnerve - and eventually unseat - him.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereLast Updated:
Report this comment Cancel