The dangers of forcing all women to be ‘sassy’

Well, International Women’s Day has passed. The idea was invented by Communists a long time ago, but seems to have crept up on the rest of us more recently. Now it has become part of that compulsory public culture that none of us voted for but all of us must defer to. The BBC spent last week talking about little else. Philip Hammond’s accidentally controversial Budget also contained various little dabs of government money as burnt offerings to the goddess of feminism.

Nothing wrong with celebrating women, of course, though I was sorry that it put World Kidney Day – which immediately followed International Women’s Day – in the shade. After all, only half of us (roughly) are women, whereas almost all of us have kidneys.

But what worried me was the sort of women we were invited to admire. The type idolised is summed up in the word “sassy”. As somebody on the BBC refined it, “a hands-on-hips, sassy, strong girl”.

Nothing wrong with such a girl, either. I would not have spent the past 20 years working on the biography of Margaret Thatcher if I were not a fan of powerful women. The trouble is that if we promote the sassy alone, we depreciate the value of all the other female contributions to human flourishing. “Hands on hips” are all very well, but what about the comforting arm round the shoulder, kiss on the cheek, etc, without which life can be bleak?

Let us also celebrate the fact that, even after all this assertive propaganda, fewer women are showoffs than men. There is much to be said for my sex, but the clash of our egos can be exhausting: it is the less boastful inner strength of so many women that makes the world work. For 65 years, we have had a total non-show-off on the throne: it is not a coincidence that she is a woman.

I worry that in an age when sassiness is considered the prime female virtue, men become more grotesquely pseudo-macho in frightened reaction. Hence the current popularity of Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump. I hope that next year’s International Women’s Day will advance the diversity – to use the current buzzword – of women, instead of trying to force them all to stick their hands on their hips. It may not be a fashionable cause, but I quite often feel sorry for Tony Blair. When he turned up last week at the ceremony in Whitehall to honour those who had served in Afghanistan and Iraq, he was criticised by some of the families of the fallen for attending. “Somebody else should have had Blair’s ticket, like one of the parents,” said one.

This is unfair. By turning up, Mr Blair was showing respect for those who served and those who died. Whatever his faults in the conduct of policy, it was the right thing to do.

Besides, one can be absolutely certain that if he had not turned up, he would have been attacked for that instead. Guy Verhofstadt, who is the European Parliament’s chief Brexit negotiator, thinks that British citizens should be able to remain EU citizens individually if they wish to do so. He would allow them to travel freely and vote in European elections. Jean-Claude Juncker, the president of the European Commission, says he hopes that “the day will come when the British will re-enter the boat”.

Such remarks are intended, fairly obviously, to divide and rule. Both men would like it if millions of Britons were to petition for individual EU rights. It would be a clever stunt just now if hundreds of thousands of Scots, in particular, were to do so, so I expect Nicola Sturgeon to suggest it. Mr Verhofstadt’s idea of allowing British-resident Britons to vote in European elections would create a community of what he might call expatriate Europeans who would live here but declare their allegiance to a foreign power.

I think the way for Mrs May’s Government to dampen any enthusiasm for this would be insist on double taxation for those making this choice. Alternatively, Mr Verhofstadt’s wheeze could be turned back on him. If he thinks it right that individuals should be free to decide whether or not they are EU citizens, he should extend that freedom to all citizens of the remaining 27 EU member states, so they could opt out as well as in. He might find, even in his beloved, federalist Belgium, that large numbers of people would be happy to abandon EU membership in return for not being subject to European directives and regulations. Dear old Bill Giles has stuck up for the idea that the weather forecast should usually work on the assumption of “Keep calm and carry on”, rather than “Mayday! Mayday!”. He is right: 99 per cent of British weather does no serious harm to anyone, and it is silly to try to frighten people. It is also trivialising. Just as annoying as the hysteria is the jocularity: “Don’t forget that brolly!”; “A great night for that barbecue!”.

I never tire of repeating my sister’s perceptive line about people on the telly, which is: “Everyone is laughing, but no one has a sense of humour.” There is a sad, desperate need to treat information like a pill that needs sugaring, although often information is all one wants.

Think of the shipping forecast. Its purpose is serious, and its sole virtues should be to be accurate and audible. No one would dream of interlarding it with quips about brollies.