There’s NO shame in being a Mrs!
As Miriam goes nuclear over being called Mrs Clegg ...
WELL, I hate to say this, but Miriam Clegg might be a bit overly sensitive. The wife of our former Deputy Prime Minister has gone off the deep end on social media after being invited to an event to mark International Women’s Day — in her married name.
The lawyer, known professionally as Miriam Gonzalez Durantez, posted on Instagram the offending missive with its handwritten ‘Dear Mrs Clegg’, and added a withering caption bemoaning the ‘irony’ that the event was a celebration of ‘women’s success’.
It was clearly a mistake on the part of the organisers, but did she need to be so cross and make such a fuss?
Here we have a successful 48- year- old glamorous mother of three boys with a fulfilling, lucrative career in commercial law, and a happy marriage. So why the grandstanding and public humiliation of the event organisers over what was, in all likelihood, an error made by some unpaid intern?
She’s not the only feminist making a fuss about the ‘insult’ of being referred to by her husband’s surname this week. Labour Shadow Foreign Secretary, Emily Thornberry, complained to the Speaker when the Prime Minister referred to her in a Commons debate as Lady Nugee, which is her married name as the wife of High Court judge Sir Christopher Nugee. Mrs May was forced to apologise.
In this latest case, I’d say the one who needs to apologise is Miriam Clegg.
Instead of dealing privately with a clerical error, in a letter which said the organisers would be ‘honoured’ if she took part, she chose to act with breathtaking rudeness. She must have been at a feminist boot camp when they handed out good manners.
She claims to be independent, and made noises when her husband was in office about being too busy to accompany him on official engagements.
Then last year she published her cookbook, Made In Spain, in which, incidentally, she was photographed on the front cover resplendent in Liberal Democrat yellow.
It was a clear case of wanting her paella and eating it too. No publisher would have been remotely interested in her book if she hadn’t been able to mix a sprinkling of spice in with her recipes, slagging off Samantha Cameron for putting Hellman’s on the table rather making her own mayonnaise and revealing how she refused to cook for George Osborne when he came to dinner. The only reason she was able to meet SamCam and the former Chancellor was through her husband.
Whether she likes it or not, it was their marriage that gave her professional profile a boost.
Are we supposed to believe that International Women’s Day would have been interested in Miriam Gonzalez Durantez if she wasn’t also Miriam Clegg?
There are hordes of clever, very successful female commercial lawyers in City of London firms like hers. I know because I was once a lawyer, too, a criminal barrister.
While never in Miriam’s league, I’ve met plenty of women who are. I doubt any of them get the same invitations and opportunities that she does.
Feminists used to campaign under the slogan that women were entitled to ‘ have it all’. Miriam Clegg wants to have it both ways — as the wife of a powerful man when it suits her, but her own woman when dealing with fellow feminists. And I do wonder why it is such an unforgivable crime to take your husband’s surname? I did, though I never think of Perrins as my husband’s name. For me it is now our name – as a family unit that includes our three children. If there was any loss for me in becoming Perrins, it was losing my identity as a single woman and gaining an identity as a married woman, which I was happy to do. In our wedding vows, my husband pledged to protect and provide for me. It didn’t seem like a lot to ask me in return to take the name Perrins. Another lawyer, Amal Alamuddin, had no problem in taking her husband’s surname when they married — but then he is George Clooney. Now, the once little known human rights lawyer is feted around the world.
The kind of aggressive feminism displayed by Miriam Clegg and Lady Nugee does them no favours.
Instead of making them appear stronger, it turns them into victims; women who are so brittle they mistake even the smallest slight for an outrageous attack.
Take Emily Thornberry, again. ‘I have never been a Lady and it will take a great deal more than me being married to a Knight of the Realm to make me one,’ she complained to the Speaker on Monday after the Prime Minister had ‘insulted’ her and she demanded an apology.
This minor infringement of parliamentary rules led to an absurd spectacle, in which the most powerful politician in Britain, a woman who has risen to the top in spite of having taken her husband’s name 36 years ago, was compelled to say sorry to someone who was throwing her toys out of the pram.
Perhaps if Miriam, Emily and their ilk weren’t wasting so much energy feeling outraged at perceived slights, then they might one day aspire to the heights of Mrs May, and a certain Margaret Thatcher ( nee Roberts) before her.
Their agenda is entirely selfserving. In the real world, the rest of us are too busy getting on with it to care.