Men are better ...at flouncing around in a petulant strop
HASN’T anyone else noticed? It’s just a few short weeks since a new female PM took over, and the country is facing the biggest challenges since the Second World War – with Brexit, the migrant crisis, Islamic terrorism all crowded on the plate. Yet many of the men who used to straddle public life (and we will come to Boris’s man-spreading anon) have left the building, either literally or metaphorically.
Ed Balls is doing Strictly, preferring shiny floors and smiley partner Katya to the unpalatable, unpopular alternative: which is to use his heft and fancy footwork to help make Labour into a proper Opposition again.
David Cameron is, as of last week, now an ex-MP as well as an ex-PM. And it happens just as he hits his own Five-Oh next month. His pals deny it was a flounce occasioned by Mrs May’s brutal purge of his pet policies and his personal pets, but as one ‘friend’ observed last week: ‘Quitting now as MP is like the little boy who says, “If I can’t be captain I am taking the ball home.”’
Over on the good ship Labour, Blairite Alastair Campbell and Corbynite John McDonnell turned last week’s Question Time into a pub brawl, wagging their fingers and denouncing each other over an unperturbed Tory, Anna Soubry, who followed Napoleon’s advice, which was ‘never interrupt your enemy while he is making a mistake’.
Now, I can’t decide whether the multiple male strop-outs – just as a busy woman with a new broom takes over – is coincidence, petulance, or self-indulgence, or all of the above. What I do know is that, when it comes to their midlife crises, men commit.
ROMAN Abramovich last week took his £8.5 million collection of super-cars to a racetrack in Germany for a spin; Hugh Grant happily tells interviewers that his new obsession, after golf, is also cars. ‘I go on motor racing trips. I get taught how to drive, and now go to bed and read my iPad all about how crankshafts work or disc brakes. It’s a midlife crisis. That’s exactly what’s happening to me.’
Do you know a single woman to whom something similar has ‘happened’? No.
As far as I can see, only two prominent men last week made any effort to demonstrate that they were not in full male midlife-crisis mode. One was the Foreign Secretary, who was photographed (above) with his knees wide apart, hands on thighs, in a pose that one wag read as ‘Boris is open for business even if Britain isn’t’ (how I laughed).
The other was George Osborne, who gave a 16-minute interview to the Today programme that can be summed up in Arnie’s threeword threat: ‘I’ll be back.’
GO said he wasn’t going to write his memoirs as he didn’t ‘know how the story ends’. But we know how he wants it to end, as he declared himself the champion of the ‘liberal mainstream – ie the former Chancellor, 45, is clearly hoping that the ‘Osborne Supremacy’ is still ahead, rather than The ‘Osborne Legacy’ behind him. On a personal note, my husband’s midlife crisis was already in full swing when I met him in 1990 and, now aged 63, he says he is embarking on an ‘old age crisis’, and I’m rather envious, to be honest.
When do we ever get to have ours? As Ed ‘Glitter’ Balls admits, his wife Yvette ‘didn’t have time’ to have one. ‘She thinks it’s a bit indulgent. When we were in Parliament, she thought it was easier for me to have a midlife crisis than her. Politics and family were allconsuming, and she thought it was indulgent for me to be going off doing marathons.’
So, in answer to my own question, which is why oh why do men have proper full-blown midlife crises and women don’t?
I fear they do it for the same reason, of course, that dogs lick their testicles – because they can!