At last! Theresa gives a speech – and noone talks about her shoes

TELL you what I liked most about Theresa May’s speech to the Police Federation last week. It wasn’t how the Home Secretary stood up to the silent sneers of the force, and subjected them to a withering lecture about corruption and cover-ups – it was how afterwards, nobody commented on her shoes.

In fact, it was a rare instance of a woman in the public eye, with a role to play, being judged exclusively on how well or badly she had carried out her job and nothing else.

And for this I say, well done, Mrs May. You pulled it off. You did us proud.

For, apart from you on this notable occasion, we were reminded last week at every turn how hard it is for a woman to reach the top of her profession and not invite ball-by-ball commentary on her weight, looks, age, clothes, even her sexual desirability.

In an abject interview with the Radio Times last week, John Inverdale – who’s just lost his gig as the BBC’s Radio 5 Live Wimbledon presenter to Clare Balding – blamed his comments in the wake of Marion Bartoli’s Wimbledon win last year on… an attack of hay fever.

Inverdale had mused aloud whether the player’s father had ever said to her: ‘Listen, you’re never going to be a looker. You’re never going to be somebody like Sharapova…’ not forgetting to mention Sharapova’s endless golden legs.

Mmm. Moving on, Jeremy Paxman interviewed Silvio Berlusconi on Newsnight, and he point-blank asked the embalmed Italian politician whether he’d ever described Angela Merkel as an ‘un****able lard arse,’ an offensive question, to both the German Chancellor and the former Italian premier, that the BBC used to trail the programme all day.

AND then the week ended with the fat lady singing at Glyndebourne, or so you would believe if you only read the reviews of the house’s production of Der Rosenkavalier. high-toned claque of opera critics dismissed the performance of a gifted, garlanded Irish mezzo-soprano playing Octavian with a succession of put-downs based entirely on her looks.

Rupert Christiansen, in The Telegraph, said Tara Erraught was ‘dumpy’, and her costume made her look like a cross between ‘Heidi and Just William’; Rupert Morrison in The Times said her ‘Octavian is unbelievable, unsightly and unappealing both as boy and girl’, and the FT called her a ‘chubby bundle of puppy fat’. What made all this worse, in my view, was that some of the critics only reviewed Miss Erraught’s appearance (and for the record she is, as her father proudly says, both ‘beautiful’ and ‘a young woman of substance’) and not her performance.

So, apart from the Home Secretary’s address to the Police Fed, all last week was distinguished – for want of a better word – by white, middle-aged men, often no oil paintings themselves, critiquing highprofile women of all ages purely in terms of appearance and never in terms of ability.

I KNOW that there was a picture of Jeremy Clarkson, 54, with a pot belly on a beach in Barbados, too, and there have been jibes about Michael ‘Moob-lé’, but it’s not the same for blokes. They’re allowed to be fat, hairy, grizzled and old and – most of the time – no comment.

For women, the wearying message is, whether you make it to Glyndebourne in a lead role, to the Chancellery of Germany, to the Centre Court at Wimbledon, you will still be judged on your looks.

And unless you are thin, and pretty, and young, or Theresa May, you will be judged wanting – and above all you will be fat-shamed.

So we’ve come a long way, baby, haven’t we?

Only in the wrong direction.