Johnson ‘plans to promote more women to Cabinet’

BORIS JOHNSON is set to use a Cabinet reshuffle to boost the proportion of women in his top team, a senior aide has suggested.

The Prime Minister would “like to improve how representative his Cabinet is of the population at large”, his press secretary Allegra Stratton said. She confirmed he described himself as a feminist and had used the term in a meeting with female MPS last autumn.

At present there are only five women out of 23 full members of Cabinet. A reshuffle has long been tipped for July.

There are a “great number of talented women” in Government, Ms Stratton added, highlighting the work done by Vicky Ford, the children’s minister, and Helen Whately, the care minister.

Mr Johnson met virtually with nine female business leaders in an event to mark International Women’s Day. Ms Stratton said: “He listened to the recommendations they made about childcare cover and whether there’s enough of it. He also listened to their hope that we can have a push on getting young women into [science, technology, engineering and maths] subjects.

“He was also interested to hear what they have to say about whether enough dads take time off to look after their children.”

♦ Chart-topping songs are rarely written by women, a study has found. Researchers from the University of Southern California found men wrote 87 per cent of the top 100 songs each year from 2012-2020.