Women

Thursday

Martin Vander Weyer

Is full employment just another of George Osborne’s political stunts?

‘Full employment’ usually means the lowest achievable rate of unemployment — somewhere south of 5 per cent compared with 7.2 per cent today, or to put it in numbers, fewer than 1.5 million compared with 2.3 million last month. You might think it ought to be a target of every Chancellor of the Exchequer. Only Norman Lamont ever said otherwise in public, telling the House of Commons in 1991 that ‘rising unemployment and the recession have been the price that we have had to pay to get inflation down. That price is well worth paying.’ Now George Osborne has embraced the full employment target, taking a little more wind out of

Friday

David Blackburn

George Osborne’s last chance: 40p…or childcare?

Next week’s Budget is the last chance for George Osborne to make a ‘game-changing reform’. Backbench Tories have been clamouring for Osborne to reduce the number of people paying the 40p rate – in the hope that this will secure middle class votes. Lords Lawson and Lamont have added their august voices to that camp. And UKIP joined the fray this afternoon by pledging, according to the Telegraph, to raise the 40p threshold to £45,000. Without denying that the 40p rate has become a serious issue (our own Melanie McDonagh takes a dim view of the government for having lowered the threshold), The Spectator proposes a simpler and politically more inclusive reform

Thursday

Martin Vander Weyer

Any other business: Turn down those token directorships, girls, and tell them you want to be chairman

Last Saturday was International Women’s Day, but we celebrated early in Helmsley when my Yorkshire home town was featured in national news last month as a beacon of recession-beating female entrepreneurship: 60 per cent of our new ventures have female owners. This is shaping up to be a good year for women in business generally, what with Vince Cable voicing support for all-women shortlists for directorships of FTSE 100 companies with a view to achieving 25 per cent representation by 2015, up from 20 per cent today. The Business Secretary has been busy behind the scenes, too. ‘We had a letter from Vince telling us we should appoint a female

Sunday

Radhika Kapila

New play forgets that rape is not just an Indian problem

A play about the 2012 Delhi rape was never going to be easy viewing and unsurprisingly Yael Farber’s Nirbhaya is painful to watch. It’s easy to close a newspaper when details are too graphic or flick a TV channel when the news becomes unbearable. But this performance is painful because it confronts the most difficult of truths in the most gritty detail. And we, as the audience in the stifling intimacy of the Southbank’s Purcell Room, were unable to look away. Conceived by Indian actress Poorna Jagannathan and scripted by South African playwright Yael Farber, Nirbhaya is currently being performed in London as part of the Women of the Word festival at

Thursday

Lara Prendergast

The dream pill may not always be worth it

A couple of years ago, I was put on the third-generation contraceptive pill Yasmin. ‘It’s good for your skin and stabilises your weight,’ the doctor said. And it’s true. I’ve found it to be wonderful. Most of my friends are on similar types of third–gen pill, like Femodene and Marvelon; many swear by them. Out of the 3.5 million women in the UK using the combined contraceptive pill, 1 million are on third–gen versions. But things aren’t all rosy. In the past week, all British GPs have been ordered to warn anyone taking these popular pills that they are at risk of developing potentially fatal blood clots. The statistics make for

Sunday

Isabel Hardman

How does the Tory party solve its ‘women problem’?

It’s a week since Harriet Harman claimed it was ‘raining men’ in the Tory party, and yet the debate still rages about whether the Conservatives have a ‘women problem’. Tory backbencher Tracey Crouch has written a forceful piece for the Mail on Sunday on why she felt Ed Miliband’s intervention at Prime Minister’s Questions on Wednesday was patronising. It’s worth a read, not least because she tries to dispel the myth that women are being turned off Parliament just because it’s rowdy: ‘Some of the loudest and, in some cases, most effective hecklers in Parliament today are women MPs. Even the most unruly Labour men think twice before taking on

Monday

Steerpike

Tories and Labour both losing 8% of their female MPs

Another day, another female MP decides to quit politics. Ann Clwyd has announced that, after 30 years in the Commons, she will not be standing in 2015. Female MPs have been in the news of late – either because they are retiring or fighting de-selection. On yesterday’s edition of the Andrew Marr Show, Harriet Harman said: ‘My concern is that we’re having a sort of cull of senior, authoritative women and they’re all being replaced by men’. She then went on to use this as evidence that the Tories have a ‘women problem’. The numbers, though, tell a slightly different story. There were 48 female Tory MPs in 2010. Lorraine

Friday

Isabel Hardman

Thirsk and Malton Tories boot out Anne McIntosh

So the Constituent Spring continues. Thirsk and Malton Conservatives have just announced that they have voted to not re-adopt their MP Anne McIntosh. The party has announced that selection for a candidate will open shortly, but McIntosh has vowed to fight on. She said: ‘I’d like to thank all those who supported me throughout, from both Vale of York and Thirsk and Malton. ‘It is my intention to stand for Thirsk, Malton and Filey constituency at the next General Election. ‘Meanwhile I remain committed to the Conservative Party locally and nationally and shall continue with my constituency and parliamentary duties with my customary passion. ‘In the coming year I will

Thursday

Lloyd Evans

Sam Mendes’s King Lear is a must-see for masochists

Directors appear to have two design options when approaching a Shakespeare tragedy. Woodstock or jackboot. Woodstock means papal robes, shoulder-length hair and silver Excaliburs gleaming from jewelled belts. Jackboot means pistols, berets, holsters and submachine-guns. Sam Mendes sticks the jackboot into King Lear in an attempt to find ‘a modern understanding of the story’, as he puts it. What this ‘modern understanding’ reveals is that Shakespeare’s opening scene allows the dramatic focus to move between the personal and the political with invisible fluency. Mendes destroys this asset by laying on a televised show trial. Lear’s daughters, surrounded by scowling commandos, are arraigned at miked-up tables as if accused of treason.

Tuesday

Steerpike

Dave’s model candidate

Mr S was in the bath thinking ‘My word, isn’t nature wonderful?’ when he heard the pleasing sound of an email hitting his inbox. It contained the photograph above. The man in the picture is none other than Richard Royal, who is on the Conservatives’ candidates list for the 2015 general election. RR is what we euphemistically call a “political consultant”, and he is also a former male model. Mr S hears that RR is a bit of hit with the ladies. Is this broody, Heathcliffe-esque figure the answer to Young Dave’s seemingly insoluble woman problem?

Thursday

Anne Chisholm

Breakdowns, suicide attempts — and four great novels

Among the clever young Australians who came over here in the 1960s to find themselves and make their mark, a number, as we all know, never went back. A few became household names — Germaine Greer, Barry Humphries, Clive James — and British cultural life owes them a great deal. Madeleine St John, the novelist and semi-reclusive eccentric who smoked herself to an early death in London in 2006, was one of them; but although eventually she made a  minor literary reputation for herself, writing four novels in her middle age of which the third, The Essence of the Thing, made the Booker shortlist in 1997, she has remained largely

Thursday

Ruby Stockham

The Navigators

Tehran does not welcome pedestrians. It is eight o’clock on a July evening and the sun has plunged out of the air with alarming speed; the sky is the colour of wine, and the air is thick with the scent of heat and petrol. I have long forgotten where we are going. Dust-coloured buildings spill out to the horizon, many of them protected by barbed-wire gates. In this part of town it is so unusual for people to walk on the streets at night — I am told that only fools and prostitutes do so — that the pavements are unlit, and we rely on the rippling glow of the

Thursday

Rod Liddle

My views on breast-feeding in public are politically indecent

The Daily Mail has got itself into a bit of a lather over a “young mum” who was asked not to breast feed her baby at a swimming pool in Ashford, Kent. The story is here. As you can see, she apparently got her fecund baps out in the pool itself, before being censured by the pool manager. I think I’m sort of with the pool authorities on this, which perhaps just underlines my lack of modernity and general reactionary nature. Truth be told, I’m not terribly happy about seeing an infant breastfed in a café either. But I suppose the women are right when they reply well, we don’t

Thursday

James Delingpole

James Delingpole: I don’t automatically support Piers Morgan. So why should women automatically support Julia Gillard?

I’ve been racking my brains to think what I might have in common with Kim Jong Un and Piers Morgan. But apart from owning a spectacularly tiny penis, I simply cannot think. Certainly, when Kim is getting it in the neck for having one of his ex-girlfriends executed by firing squad to please his wife, or whenever Morgan is being criticised for being just the worst thing ever, I never find myself seized with some sudden hormonal urge to rush to their defence on account of the fact that we’re all part of the Brotherhood. Maybe, though, we’re missing a trick. Maybe we chaps of the world could enjoy so

Tuesday

Melanie McDonagh

Britain’s abortion laws are inherently absurd

The Director of Public Prosecutions, Keir Starmer, yesterday declared that it was right not to prosecute doctors who authorised abortions which, according to a Telegraph investigation, were requested because of the gender of the foetus. It seems that the women mentioned more than one reason for the abortions so it wasn’t possible to isolate the gender selection element from the other factors. ‘The only basis for a prosecution would be that although we could not prove these doctors authorised a gender-specific abortion, they did not carry out a sufficiently robust assessment of the risks,’ he said. And just what might a ‘robust’ assessment of risk amount to? As Mr Starmer made clear it’s

Tuesday

Steerpike

Godfrey Bloom’s feminine touch

Mr Steerpike has obtained an exclusive extract of everyone’s favourite Ukip MEP Godfrey Bloom’s new book A Guinea A Minute, which comes out later this week. His response to accusations of misogyny is worth reproducing in full, not least for the chatter it might start: ‘I was asked by a journalist what I would be doing on that committee. He was such an earnest young man, I could not resist the sport. I intend to get women to clean behind the fridge I told him with equal earnestness. Well it was one of those “no news days”. Someone shoved a camera in my face “what else?” they called sensing a story where none had been. “Well,”

Friday

Melanie McDonagh

The row about Stuart Wheeler shows Britain has turned into a giant version of Woman’s Hour

The hunt, since you ask, is on for one of Stuart Wheeler’s three very pretty daughters – Jacquetta is a well-known model – to opine about their father’s off-message remarks about women being ‘nowhere near as good as men’ at chess, bridge and poker. This was in response to a question about why there are so very few women on company boards. Stuart Wheeler, UKIP treasurer and Douglas Hurd lookalike, went on to explain that both sexes are good at different things and ‘you don’t necessarily want to impose a minimum of either sex at the top of any profession or at the top of any board’. Here Wheeler showed

The Spectator

The week in books – a 19th century career woman, the courtesan of the camellias, Vasily Grossman and why France is turning into the USA

The forecast is bad. Football is back. Gloom strikes. Cure the malaise by reading the book reviews in this week’s Spectator. Here’s a selection: Richard Davenport-Hines introduces the celebrated American novelist and businesswoman Willa Cather to a British audience: ‘Cather was a pioneering career woman who in the late 1890s supported herself as a magazine editor and then as newseditor at the Pittsburgh Leader — an unprecedented post for a woman. She was later a successful managing director ofMcClure’s Magazine. With her gumption and vitality, she was a stalwart among women facing the ‘rough-and-tumble’ of competitive work. It is regrettable that her book Office Wives — a collection of stories about women in business —

Thursday

Rod Liddle

The sad story of Oprah, the handbag and the shop assistant

Listen, this story is moving so quickly stuff will almost certainly have happened in between me writing it and you reading it. I hate the idea that you might be left behind the curve, but I just don’t know how to get around that. An outrage occurs and of course we try faithfully to report it, so that you can be outraged vicariously, but time moves on; the outrage spreads out, like a fast-moving conflagration, and begins to affects us all and we all of us feel unclean and traduced. Already, with the outrage I’m about to describe, the Guardian has decided it was not one outrage but two conjoined

Monday

Ed West

Why do people write abuse on the internet? Because they can

I was away last week, filled with joy and love following the birth of our child, but just occasionally I’d check the multi-character psychodrama that is Twitter to stop myself getting too soppy. I sort of agree with Caitlin Moran’s stance in principle; if people are behaving appallingly on Twitter, Twitter should kick them out. If I ran a pub and people were driving away women with foul language, I needn’t call the police, but I’d have every right to bar them. What is problematic is that the organisers of Trolliday do not see this as a question of manners, but of misogyny – hate crime, in other words. Considering