The formidable female politicians of the year

Audits of the last year are a blessing to journalists: a postmortem of the gainers and losers of 2012 are a useful means of covering for the fact that there’s next to nothing happening on the political front, nobody’s at work and the only actual news is hinged on that annual festival of recrimination, the New Year’s Honours List.

But the lists are good for sparking off debate, at least among the politically interested, and one of them, the Telegraph’s summary of the top five political women of the last year had at least the merit of getting me worked up. To cut to the chase, the women who matter by this reckoning are Theresa May, Harriet Harman – fair enough – Hillary Clinton, fine, Nadine Dorries (yes, yes) and Louise Mensch. That’s right, she who lost a parliamentary seat for the Conservatives, she who cut her parliamentary career short in order to decamp to the US, she who single-handedly discredited the entire notion of the A-list.