Whingeing

We've heard from the Saudi women columnists. So what, by way of contrast, are women columnists in London writing about? Here's Jane Shilling in the Times:

With so many women in Parliament – one in four of Labour MPs – it seemed certain that something extraordinary would happen to the very nature of political discourse. A decade before Sally Wainwright’s drama The Amazing Mrs Pritchard, in which Wainwright imagined a sensible, kind woman bringing these qualities to top-level politics, there seemed real reason to believe that all those prototype Mrs Pritchards could bring to the Commons chamber a kind of moral spring-clean, flinging open the windows to allow the strong, clear light of common sense, the common sense of busy women with rich lives outside Westminster, to illuminate the accretions of masculine dust and junk that had accumulated there over the centuries.

Mrs Pritchard’s story didn’t end well, and nor has that of the Blair Babes. A flick through the mental Rolodex of prominent women MPs brings up Clare Short – stroppy and unpredictable; Patricia Hewitt – insufferably patronising; Tessa Jowell – a Government Minister apparently capable of signing unread documents placed before her by her husband; Ruth Kelly and Diane Abbott – happy to flout Labour education philosophy by sending their own children to fee-paying schools; Hazel Blears – a collection of gimmicks in search of a personality . . .

These human failings apply equally to male politicians, to be sure. But there’s the point. A decade after the largest intake in history of women MPs, it is clear that those who have survived best are those who have learnt to adopt male tactics.

That's neat: any faults which women MPs have are there not because they're fallible people like the rest of us, but because they've "learnt to adopt male tactics". If they'd stayed true to their womanly nature, clearly, they'd have been incapable of error. By these standards we'll see the much-hoped-for change to the "very nature of political discourse" about the same time we arrive in utopia.

Further down she bemoans the refusal of the Houses of Parliament to provide a site for one of Antony Gormley's nude sculptures of himself:

Something that brings out my inner Mrs Pritchard at full strength is the refusal of the Houses of Parliament to provide a site for one of the strange throng of 31 cast-iron figures that form Antony Gormley’s latest installation, Event Horizon. Westminster and Lambeth councils managed to bend bureaucracy to the service of art, but Parliament, which once played host to a 60ft projected image of Gail Porter’s bare bum, apparently couldn’t be doing with Gormley’s naked iron man. In the impoverished intellectual climate of the capital, we must take our culture where we can find it. So next time you happen to be shopping at Selfridges, have a look at your receipt. Drifting in for a lipstick the other day, I did just that and was startled to find, printed in faint capitals below Total Cash £15, these words: “What strange sound went gliding along the banister at whose foot the transparent apple was dreaming.” The author is Robert Desnos, a surrealist poet and member of the French Resistance who died in Terezin, soon after the Liberation. Fifty years on, I suppose he might have been quite pleased to find his poetry alive and well on a Selfridges receipt.

It's not as if parliament has banned the statues (which are, after all, publicising Gormley's forthcoming show on the South Bank). That might be a cause for complaint. They just think it's inappropriate to have one at Westminster. Seems entirely reasonable to me. That this should provide evidence of the "impoverished intellectual climate of the capital" suggests someone who's just searching for a whinge. As indeed does the first part of her column. A talk to her sisters in Saudi Arabia might help.

[And that Robert Desnos line. Good for Selfridges and all that, but really, that surrealist juxtaposition of disparate images, "the banister at whose foot the transparent apple was dreaming" - that's just leaden.]