Celebrity Without Pay: MP’s Wives In A Post-Modern Double Bind As Commons Rule Change – Column 7.11.09

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JOYCE MCMILLAN for The Scotsman, 7.11.09
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AS A PIECE OF PERFECTLY-DESIGNED street pageantry. the Remembrance Day service at the Cenotaph in London always seems in a class of its own.  The whole event is striking for its beauty, dignity and restraint; for the bright stillness of the November air, the London trees in their autumn colours, the aching magnificence of the music, as the military bands play their way through Elgar’s Nimrod, Purcell’s Dido, the Last Post.  This year, the event will be charged with a whole new dimension of meaning, for a new generation of British servicemen and women, and their families.  And as part of the national pageant, the leaders of our main UK political parties will be there as usual, alongside the royal family and the leaders of the armed services.  They will stand shoulder to shoulder in a male phalanx, the three men who lead the Labour, Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties; on this occasion, only the Queen will have her family around her.

Yet behind the shoulder of each man, we the public will be able to see, in our minds’ eye, the almost equally familiar face of the woman who shares his life.  We will see Sarah Brown, the high-powered PR woman who gave up her own career to become a classic traditional helpmeet to her husband, and mother to his young sons.  We will see the lovely and aristocratic Samantha Cameron, the woman who works for an upmarket handbag company, as well as dealing gracefully with the pressures of family life and tragedy.  And we will see the glamorous face of  Miriam Durantez, the high-flying Spanish lawyer wife of Nick Clegg, and mother of his three children; less well known than the other two, but probably at least as recognisable as her husband, following the usual round of party conference photo sessions.

For the truth is that in this year 2009, after more than a generation of campaigning for equal opportunities and changed attitudes, the vast majority of politicians are still men, most of those men still have wives, and almost all of them are still judged, at least in part, on their ability to present to the public the kind of happy family image that has become vital in the marketing of candidates.  Sarah Brown, for example, has twice used her media-friendly wifely persona, at party conference time, to try to deflect criticism of her husband.  And when a political wife steps out of line, and refuses to conform to the “helpmeet” model – as Cherie Blair famously did from time to time – she risks a barrage of misogynistic media insult, often combined with blatantly offensive comment on her clothes, weight and appearance.

Which is why I find myself, this weekend, feeling unexpectedly angry on behalf of Britain’s political wives, who have now effectively been told – following the publication of Sir Christopher Kelly’s report into MP’s expenses – that whatever demands their husbands’ public careers may make upon them, in terms of commitment, presentation, loss of family time, invasion of privacy, or sheer hard campaigning work, they can now effectively give up hope of ever being paid a penny for their efforts.  Of course, in theory, we now live in a brave new world where married women are autonomous individuals, with their own careers to run and lives to lead.

But so far as public life is concerned, what has happened in practice is that our growing sense of women as individuals has been trumped and reversed by the steadily increasing demands of a brutal celebrity culture, in which the private lives of well-known people become public property, and in which couples are presented as a package, like Posh and Becks, or Brad and Angelina.  And as a result, the wives of prominent  politicians now find themselves in a miserable double bind.  On one hand, they are expected to be financially and professionally independent of their husbands, for all official and accounting purposes.

Yet on the other, they are still generally expected to be there – smiling, leafletting, answering the telephone and attending the school fete – as if nothing had changed since the 1950’s; particularly if they want to avoid constant rumours that their marriage is on the rocks, and their husband more interested in some bright young thing who is allowed to work with him.   All the Kelly reforms will achieve for many MP’s wives, in other words, is a return to the age when women’s work in support of their husbands was universally taken for granted, undervalued and unpaid; a situation that bears particularly hard on women whose husbands often spend the week at Westminster, leaving them at home to “nurse” the constituency.

And of course, it’s easy enough to see where these reforms will lead.  Well-to-do politicians will be able to shrug off the impact of these changes, keep their wives on the strength, and employ others as well; while many MP’s without private sources of income will find their office arrangements disrupted, their marriages on the line, and their spouses forced out onto a hostile labour market, just to keep the family budget in balance.

What the Kelly reform exposes, in other words, is just how far we still have to go before we achieve the kind of gender equality that would make sense of these proposals, and the kind of wider social equality that would make MP’s of all parties equally resilient to them.  And if there is one thing that is likely to bring home to MP’s just how severely they have damaged themselves, through their long-term failure to reform and modernise the Westminster parliament, it is their self-inflicted powerlessness, now, to prevent this change; a change that will bring genuine unhappiness to many MP’s families, that insults a lifetime of good work by many MPs’ spouses, and that will not – in the real world where we currently live – improve the functioning of democracy in Britain by a single jot.

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~ by joycemcmillan on November 7, 2009.