I’ll be your ‘blossom’ or ‘petal’, but don’t you dare call me girl!

ICAN take petal, I love a bit of blossom, and if the ticket inspector calls me ‘Miss’ rather than ‘Madam’ I can feel faint with pleasure. I glow, and feel prettier, nicer, and yes, whole decades younger. But last week I had the uncomfortable sensation of being far away and long ago as I listened to an MP I’d never heard of called Sir Roger Gale (never trust a man called Roger) talk on the ‘wireless’ about his wife and female employees in his constituency office.

His wife Suzy started work at 7am most mornings, he was saying in defence of the right of MPs to employ their nearest and dearest on the public payroll. Sometimes, she was still slaving away at her desk at 3am.

Suzy (Roger’s third wife) earned £35,000 as his office manager and was ‘utterly dedicated’ to her job, he went on, ‘as were indeed the other girls in his office’.

She’d go and visit constituents in distress, and then he repeated, as if we hadn’t screamed at the radio on the first mention, ‘as indeed will the other girls’.

Cringe. I know he’s 73 but to talk of his wife and team as girls makes them sound like the pit crew who change the tyres on the racing car that is the MP for North Thanet, with ‘responsibilities not just in the UK but in Europe as well’. It wound the clock back in my head to his parents’ generation when, if you were born female, you had the choice of four careers, apart from wife and mother. Nurse. Secretary. Governess/teacher. And worst of all: lady’s maid.

This isn’t me having a hissy fit or sense-of-humour failure, male readers. It’s about context. Time and place. We can all have a girls’ night out. A lads’ holiday. Eva Herzigova can put on a push-up Wonderbra and say ‘Hello boys’ and nobody has yet, so far as I know, complained. But if you’re an MP and a boss and a man, you have to watch your language a bit.

If you’re an older white male in the mother of parliaments, having benefited from thousands of years of uninterrupted male supremacy, it behoves you to treat women – who historically haven’t had half your advantages – with respect, at least on national radio.

Even if they’re married to or work for you – or in the case of the desk/bedroom slave Suzy, both – and think you’re marvellous. There’s a principle at stake.

Which is this. I’m afraid that even in 2017, when an employer – especially an MP – refers to his wife or other female staff as ‘girls’, it reinforces the antique assumptions that the boss is a man, he’s the big dog, and his wife and all other trailing women come as part of the package, two for the price of one, in a closet BOGOF deal.

AND the end result of this is that men with wives continue to get selected as MPs much more often than women (with or without husbands) do. Of course, the wife may then be paid – anything from nothing to £40,000 – but her wage is rolled into their joint household income, and is predicated and dependent on his job.

If you go down the list of the 150 MPs who employ ‘connected staff’, it’s overwhelmingly men employing wives. Many more presumably expect them to work unpaid, and off the books, out of duty. Meanwhile, there are only 13 women MPs who employ their husbands.

Making your wife your secretary, admitting to working her like a dog, and then calling her ‘girl’ on national radio, like the headmistress at St Trinian’s… Really, Sir Roger! You seem like a nice enough old buffer but if life was fairer – and we know it’s not – Suzy would be the MP for Thanet North and not you. After all – you’ve made it all too clear that she and the girls do all the work anyway.