Cheery Miss McVey has been through the mangle...

WHEN Theresa May today makes her speech marking the women’s suffrage centenary, and deplores the ‘intimidation and aggression’ prevalent on social media, she should pause to toot brief salute to Esther McVey.

Miss McVey, who was recently promoted to Work and Pensions Secretary, has had to endure horrible abuse over the years. She has put on a front of cheerfulness but inside I bet she has been through the mangle.

Labour activists have called her all sorts of names, far worse than anything any parliamentary sketchwriter would use. Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell even spoke about lynching her.

The (successful) campaign to oust Miss McVey from her marginal Merseyside seat at the 2015 general election was almost unhinged, it became so personal. All that from the party that accuses Righties of being intolerant and anti-women!

In all that time, Miss McVey never lost her composure in public. She had no husband or children to comfort her but she did have her old dad. I met him once. Good bloke. The only other man in her life is Philip Davies (Con, Shipley), with whom she shares digs.

Miss McVey, who returned to the Commons as MP for Tatton (George Osborne’s neglected seat) in 2017, was at the despatch box yesterday for her first departmental Questions. Sweetly, Mr Davies asked two helpful questions.

She is a small figure, not much taller than the late Barbara Castle and these days terribly thin. She wore her blonde hair up at the back. It had been fixed by either a pencil or a single chopstick.

Much of the session saw her defending Universal Credit, the monthly payment the Government is slowly introducing for benefit recipients.

This single payment, simpler but blunter than its predecessors, has been opposed persistently by the Left. Wetter Tories have also had their doubts, worried that it makes them look unkind to poor people.

Miss McVey is a good political fit for this issue. As a woman, she cannot be written off as the nasty Tory man of cliche.

Second, she is a Liverpudlian – ergo, not a member of the Bullingdon Club – and she has a Scouse accent.

HAVING once worked in telly, she also happens to be photogenic and an easy communicator. Darn it, say Labour, she shouldn’t be a Tory!

That is to miss the point of aspirational Conservatism. Miss McVey, with her background, sees that abuse in the welfare system hurts no one more than lower-paid workers who are trying to look after themselves. Why should their taxes be wasted on an inefficient social security system?

Labour MPs yesterday cackled and went ‘oh!’ and shook their heads with ostentatious sorrow yesterday as Miss McVey insisted that Universal Credit was ‘groundbreaking’. She was able to add that the vast numbers of jobs created since Labour left office meant children would be a lot better off, even in families which were illpaid. Why? Because, she argued, children in workless households invariably did worse at school and were less successful in life. Cue more derision from Labour. Miss McVey just cast them a cold look.

Her official shadow was Debbie Abrahams, so smoothly spoken that lazy caricature might suggest she was the Tory in this battle. Such are these topsy- turvy times: Labour increasingly sound posher than the Tories.

Mrs Abrahams asked about pensions regulation.

Miss McVey pirouetted out of that undesirable subject (tricky given the Carillion collapse) and attacked Labour’s alleged misuse of official data.

She claimed that official statisticians had written to complain about the way Mrs Abrahams was ‘scaremongering’.

Any other Tory minister resorting to such blatant evasion would have been brought rudely to order by John Bercow. But the Squeaker let Miss McVey get away with it. Why? Because he sees that she has had to put up with low abuse over the years? Or, because he is secretly a little scared of Esther? He would not be the only one. Labour must be terrified of her authenticity.