That is not how things are done in this country -
That is not how things are done in this country – or, at least, not how they have been done these past 150 years. How much worse for Cherie, unelected and unaccountable, to have sought such assistance”Who is he trying to kid? What we have here is an example of something that has been going on for much more than 150 years. A casual inquiry by someone powerful has unleashed a hysterical desire among the minions to curry favour by going over-the-top in their efforts to help.There may be plenty of unfairness in the transaction but it is the unfairness engendered by advantage, privilege and power that we humans have been familiar with since we crawled out of the swamp. There are always plenty of lickspittles around, awaiting the next opportunity to suck up to the boss or his wife or his children. To suggest that this incident comprises a unique betrayal of democracy, rather than a routine one, is simply ludicrous.What is fairly new, is that the transaction, transparently and democratically, has come straight to the public’s attention, via a media ever-hungry for inside-Downing-Street snippets. Homework, acupuncture, hats, babies, drunk teenage sons, weird new-age pendants – these are the sorts of stories the media really want from Mrs Blair.
There has been much discussion over Mrs Blair’s “role” and the contradictions around it, but really that’s a media by-product, a cover for the real meat, which is trivia.Here’s Robert Kilroy, another man in a top job, fulminating away: “One moment, she is the Prime Minister’s wife, traipsing around the country posing for pictures. The next, she’s Mrs Booth QC, too busy making big money to smile. The next? Well, she’s a combination of the deputy prime minister and the minister for women.” Come now Mr Kilroy. Are you really so obtuse that you don’t understand that all of these roles are insignificant compared to what is now her main one? Why fret about these insignificant jobs? The thing about about the Prime Minister’s wife is that she’s a political It girl, famous for being famous, firmly on the A-list.
Mrs Blair is now, first and foremost, a celebrity.In recent weeks alone, we have been informed that she has consulted the diet guru who helped Kate Winslet to lose four stones, that her acupuncturist was patronised by the Princess of Wales, and that she arrives in the Sedgefield constituency with her husband, her personal trainer, and her dresser.We’ve also heard that she and Roger Moore have been the figureheads for a fundraising campaign for homeless charity, the Passage; that she and Martine McCutcheon have been raising awareness of domestic violence; and that she and Mel C have created celebrity dolls for a Barnardo’s auction. (No charity now can raise a cent, it seems, without the endorsement of a couple of celebs, and Mrs Blair is a celeb of seriousness.)All this, we accept as perfectly all right, when in fact it is all this that should be troubling. A woman with a significant, demanding career finds herself in the public eye, thanks to the success of her husband. From the early hours of the first morning of his elevation, she is criticised for not looking good enough, not being media-savvy enough, and distrusted as some sort of sinister “power behind the throne”.In a few short years, the demands of the media, and her own ambition, have turned her into a clothes horse for good works. Her job is to work hard at looking lovely, and then to lend the resulting face and body to charitable efforts. Anything else she does – like straying too far into political life (even by enquiring to a civil servant about homework) or taking on a legal case that might be seen either to contradict or to promote government policy, is frowned upon.In other words, nothing at all, Mr Glover, has changed in the past 150 years. The womenfolk of the men in power have long been expected to do nothing except look nice and do good works.
One would think that the example of Diana, Princess of Wales, would be enough to teach us all that such a role does not make women at all fulfilled. But instead the media and the public carry on demanding it and, like lemmings, women carry on obliging.The Mr Glovers of this world insist that they would make just the same criticisms of Denis Thatcher if he had taken the liberties with his wife’s power that Mrs Blair does with her husband’s. But the truth is that no one was running stories about Denis’s figure, his clothes, or the fact that he actually had a job of his own and a family, in the first place. Mrs Blair has, since schooldays, always worked hard to please.So maybe it’s not surprising that she has thrown herself so wholeheartedly into being the acme of what a female in the public eye is expected to be today.She has escaped one stereotype by refusing to be the behind-every-good-man-figure.