It’s still so hard to be a woman in politics

SOMETIMES, sang Tammy Wynette, it’s hard to be a woman. Oh, Tammy. Try being a British female prime minister in December 2018. For who in their right mind would be Theresa May today? Or tomorrow, for that matter. Never mind Wednesday, when she fought off an audacious vote of no confidence initiated by the same odious bunch who got us all into this mess in the first place.

‘I thought she was going to be another Maggie Thatcher,’ declared one chap on the news the other night, a statement that puzzled me. Why not another David Cameron? Another John Major? Heck, another Tony Blair? Why must Mrs May be compared to the only other woman ever to have held the job?

Besides, I can’t see Mrs Thatcher having done the job much differently to Mrs May. Even Winston Churchill on his best day in his best suit with his very bestest cigar wouldn’t have been able to see his way out of this one.

But I do think that some of the stick Mrs May receives is because she’s, well, not a man. Her appearance is constantly commented upon. Some of the sexist abuse she receives on Twitter is appalling. Back in March, during an ITV interview, she was asked, while attempting to set out new legislation regarding harsher sentences for domestic abuse offenders, how she would ‘let her hair down with a couple of girlfriends’.

At the other end of the scale, some Tory activists and even the odd MP refer to her (and you may want to have the sick bucket ready for this one) as ‘Mummy’.

Even though Mrs May’s gender shouldn’t matter in all this, I suspect it still does. As momentum against her built on Tuesday, following the delayed vote, there was a feeling that the old girl might just cave. Give in to the pressure. Call it a day. Lack the sticking power of those stiff upper lip Tory boys. But boy they thought wrong. There’s a reason Ruth Davidson interrupted her maternity leave to describe Mrs May as a woman with ‘cojones of steel’. Well, it takes one to know one.

Perhaps it is unsurprising that on Thursday, Angela Merkel, another female leader who knows exactly what it’s like to be on the sharp end, was one of the first to praise her resilience.

Someone declared Wednesday’s events a ‘chaotic detour’, which sounds spot on to me. A wrong-headed entirely selfish decision by a group of buccaneering Brexiteers trapped inside the Westminster bubble, with no idea of how the wider world operates. A ND I don’t know about you, but I’m exhausted by it all. The squabbling, the infighting, the jostling and jockeying and the utter inability to come to a decision is a national embarrassment on the international stage. So if we’re tired, Mrs May must be utterly shattered. Sometimes it’s hard to be a prime minister. Especially a female one.

Last weekend Mrs May confessed that in times of stress, she has been known to eat peanut butter straight from the jar. Quite right, too. Bring her pallets of the stuff. Bring her all the peanut butter in the land.

Because in these turbulent times, even the most resilient of women need all the support they can get.