Murnaghan 2.02.14 Tory women debate with Baroness Trumpington, Rebecca Pow & Isabel Hardman

ANY QUOTES USED MUST BE ATTRIBUTED TO MURNAGHAN, SKY NEWS

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Well now, does the Conservative party have a problem with attracting women? Well one MP seems to think so, this is the Labour MP Barry Gardiner speaking during Prime Minister’s Questions on Wednesday.

BARRY GARDINER: If we’re to have a parliament that reflects the people that it serves, the Prime Minister must be disappointed that one in ten of his women MPs who came in in 2010 have indicated they will not restand. In fact one of his most senior women chairs of committee is now facing deselection. What is the Tory party’s problem with women?

DM: Which we’ll be discussing, what is the Tory party’s problem with women as Mr Gardiner says and does it even have a problem? Well in a moment I’ll speak to my three guests, from Somerset the Conservative candidate for Taunton Dean, Rebecca Pow and in the studio, the Conservative peer Baroness Trumpington who once tried, unsuccessfully, to become an MP back in the 1970s and we’ve also got the Assistant Editor with the Spectator, Isabel Hardman. Very good to see you all but first let’s take a look at the actual numbers, let’s get the statistics out here of women MPs and how the major parties compare. Well this is how it stands at the moment, 650 MPs currently sitting in the House of Commons, just 147 of them are female, so how does that break down to the three main parties? Well 34% of Labour MPs are women, that compares to 16% of Conservative MPs and, get this, just 12% for the Liberal Democrats. And in senior positions, well the Labour front bench is 43% female while around the Cabinet table at Number Ten there are just five women, that amounts to a mere 15% of those posts. Well let’s discuss it and I want to talk to you, and very good to see you Baroness Trumpington, do you accept, I posed that question, that your party does have a problem with female representatives?

BARONESS TRUMPINGTON: Absolutely not, how can you say that when we’ve just had a female Prime Minister who was a Conservative?

DM: Well in percentage terms you heard what I just read out there, very few sitting around the Cabinet table and in terms of the overall number of MPs, just 16%.

BARONESS TRUMPINGTON: My theory is that is nothing really to do with politics, if you’ve got it you’ll get it.

DM: So it doesn’t matter about gender. Tell me about when you went for selection in the 1970s, did you get selected, did you stand, what happened?

BARONESS TRUMPINGTON: I was against Clement Freud, somewhere in the marshes.

DM: The East Anglia marshes.

BARONESS TRUMPINGTON: Yes and they didn’t get my name right which was very tiresome. My name at that time was Mrs Barker and they called me Baker all the way through, so at the end when they said why there are so few Conservative MPs, I said because committees like you get names wrong. And I burst into tears and walked out.

DM: So it was about the name, not the gender. Isabel, what do you think, looking at it from the sidelines? Does the Conservative party have a problem with the perception? We’ve got, as Barry Gardiner mentioned there, quite a few of the 2010 intake are not standing again, does that then feed through to the female electorate who say we don’t really think you take women very seriously?

ISABEL HARDMAN: Yes, I think there probably is a perception problem in that it doesn’t look good that so many of the 2010 intake who are women are standing down but the problem is that actually the reality is that in each circumstance they are very personal reasons for standing down. It’s not as if they suddenly came into parliament and suddenly realised this is a dreadfully sexist place and that the Conservative party hates women, actually if you look at those MPs who are standing down they have each got very specific reasons and it is nothing to do with their gender, but in terms of the wider perception it is a problem.

DM: Let’s talk to a candidate then, somebody who wants to get into parliament, there she is, Rebecca Pow there with all those flooding problems going on in Somerset. We’re not talking about them or maybe you will but tell me about you getting selected, how difficult was that? Do you think your gender had anything to do with the difficulties or indeed the ease with which you were selected?

REBECCA POW: Well first of all I would like to say good morning to everybody from the Somerset Levels, the heart of my constituency and with all its issues. One of the main reasons that I’m standing is I want to represent my local area right here in Somerset and I’ve already been out and about talking to people about the floods, raising the issue weeks ago in fact and I’m not actually the MP, I’m just a candidate but I’ve been doing my bit to get the word through and eventually the press got here, eventually the politicians took it on board and that’s exactly what I want to do when I become an MP. So my initial motivation wasn’t really because I was a woman, that’s kind of by the by, it was really encouraged by the fact that I want to go and do a good job in terms of doing my bit to govern the country but from the grassroots level, because I actually think we need a lot more people with knowledge of where they come from going to parliament. A greater proportion that is, not all but we need a good proportion. My second reason was because I think we actually need more people who have had a working career before they’ve gone to parliament and by the by, yes, I turn out to be a woman. You did ask me about my selection process, well it is quite daunting and I was encouraged in the first place by a few key local people going, well Rebecca why don’t you give it a shot because perhaps a woman is what we need with all your different credentials – and that’s not to big myself up but I though okay, I’ll give it a shot. I have actually, it was a steep learning curve for me initially because I didn’t go into politics straight from university so I had to do a bit of taking a politics degree by myself just to get up to speed but I had the other credentials and I then had to go through the Association selection, as everybody else did and that was quite gruelling but men and women applied equally, actually I think more men applied than women. They then chose three people to go through to an open primary, two men and myself, to excellent male candidates and that’s where I really take my hat off to the local Association. This was quite a contemporary idea for Taunton but they realised that in order to get the sort of real life person that ought to be going into politics, they should hold an open primary and 250 people came to that event and it was really scary and they weren’t members of political parties and …

DM: Well I can see you doing well if you do get to the House of Commons, you’ll do well in the debates. I want to bring in Baroness Trumpington here, does that prove it to you listening to Rebecca Pow’s experience. It doesn’t matter what gender you are, it’s how good you are?

BARONESS TRUMPINGTON: Well it certainly proves to me that that candidate is not lacking in words.

DM: She certainly isn’t but do accept what Isabel Hardman said there, that…

BARONESS TRUMPINGTON: Actually I would have liked to have said to her, I feel terribly sorry for those people, I really, really do and I’m sure you do too. It would have been nice to have said it while she is still on.

DM: No, no, we are going back to Rebecca Pow, don’t worry, Baroness Trumpington and she can still hear us so she has got the message but tell me this, do you feel it would improve the party? Okay, it’s got to be based on whatever gender they are, however good the candidate is, but would it help with the perception of the Conservative party if there were more women in senior positions?

BARONESS TRUMPINGTON: How do I know? If there are women equally as good as men, why not? It is entirely a question of ability. What I’ve said is if you’ve got it, you get it. Now I sit, and I’m jolly lucky, I sit in the House of Lords and my companions there, my female companions are all people who have achieved something and their contribution to this country’s welfare is enormous and I have the greatest admiration for my colleagues and friends.

DM: Rebecca Pow, you heard her sending you her best with the flood problems there but come back to us with a comment about the number of women in your party, Rebecca Pow.

REBECCA POW: Yes, it is quite difficult to hear actually but yes, I would like to say something about that. Obviously it would be brilliant to have more women and they are coming through. I have been hugely heartened by the other female candidates I’ve met along the way, there are some fantastic people coming through and also, yes, it would help but we need more role models which is one of the reasons why people like me and others should really try and get to parliament and once we get there and we get more, then it will be self-generating. Of course balance is good, men have fantastic attributes but so do women, they bring something different to the table and in business, I’ve always worked with a team of men and women mixed and if you can have a mixture and a balance, that’s absolutely what we need for the best governing of this country. I have to say, having been selected, 52% of the population are women and I’ve got a great response from the women in my constituency saying excellent, how lovely to have another woman and I feel I understand their issues. Also I must just add that since being selected a lot of other women have come out of the woodwork to support me and these are women who have had their children, brought up their families but also women who are running their own businesses and many of them have been apolitical and they’ve seen me being chosen and they’ve come out of the woodwork and said Rebecca I would like to support you and to work with you, so I truly am utterly positive about women in politics particularly through the Conservative party.

DM: We’ve got the message … time is a little bit limited and I think you’ve had your say. Just back to you Baroness Trumpington and role models, you mentioned Mrs Thatcher, she became the first female, and only so far, female Prime Minister, as a role model it didn’t really break through the glass ceiling though did it?

BARONESS TRUMPINGTON: No, it didn’t and that’s why I say, and I mean it, if you’ve got it, you get it. Now we have at the moment a female Home Secretary, that must be one of the most difficult jobs to do out of any government job and she a) does it admirably well and has done it for a long time, thereby proving that she is successful at that job.

DM: Do you think Baroness Trumpington that politics might be different if there were more women in senior positions, that things wouldn’t have happened for instance … or Prime Minister’s Questions might be slightly more of a discussion than a shouting match?

BARONESS TRUMPINGTON: Oh I think they’re great fun. No I’m all for having a bit of a shouting match.

DM: Isabel, I want to get the journalists take and you can tell us about your own, it’s a bit of a dog eat dog and a bit of a boy’s club in your world as well but it’s even more acute in politics isn’t it?

ISABEL HARDMAN: I think just the point about Prime Minister’s Questions, anyone who has visited a girls school or had the mixed pleasure of going to one knows that actually they are no more civilised than a group of men together.

BARONESS TRUMPINGTON: Hear, hear.

ISABEL HARDMAN: But I think the point about women in senior positions, the point that Baroness Trumpington made is a really important lesson for the Prime Minister as he seeks to try and resolve the Conservative party’s women’s problem which is don’t promote women just because they’re women. I think he has made some choices in the past where he’s been looking through his list of MPs and though, ah-ha, a woman, I must promote her and not given her the right job.

DM: He did fairly well with promoting women in the last reshuffle.

ISABEL HARDMAN: He has but he made some choices, for example Chloe Smith who was billed as a rising star in the party, was given what most people would accept was the wrong job, at the Treasury, too early and that damaged her career I think. She was much happier once she moved to the Cabinet Office but if the Prime Minister had sat down and thought about what her strengths were rather than ‘we need a woman in the Treasury’, that could have played out completely differently.

DM: Let me narrow it down, you mentioned the Prime Minister, what about, does Dave, as one of the articles I’ve been reading in the Economist, does he have a problem with women? One thinks in particular about ‘calm down dear’ to Angela Eagle, he got that wrong didn’t he in terms of perception?

ISABEL HARDMAN: Yes, I don't think that turned out very well, partly because it was a joke where no one understood the context.

DM: It was in the context of an insurance ad wasn’t it?

ISABEL HARDMAN: Tory MPs are very good at moaning and I’ve never heard them moan about Dave’s women problem, I’ve never got the impression he has a personal problem with women. He’s got lots of other problems in terms of communicating with this back benchers but that’s not specific to women, to a certain extent actually it’s the middle aged men who he has the biggest problem with because he doesn’t know what to say to them a lot of the time.

BARONESS TRUMPINGTON: I entirely agree with you.

DM: So what about the policies then, Baroness Trumpington? I think we’ve narrowed it down to that, it’s the policies that speak and there are some policies that women say they are particularly interested in when it comes to child care and things like that, does the Conservative party have the right raft of policies?

BARONESS TRUMPINGTON: I think they are trying very hard … I’m so sorry.

DM: We’ll get you a glass of water, if our floor manager can get you a glass of water. Isabel, you just come in on that, is it the policies and not the personalities? If David Cameron comes up with the so-called, and I hate the phrase, female-friendly policy, it doesn’t matter whether Theresa May or David Cameron does that, it resonates or not with women voters?

ISABEL HARDMAN: Yes, I think there is a problem with making policies that women like because we are quite a big and diverse group and for instance I’m not particularly interested in childcare policies because I don’t have children and so that’s not the sort of silver bullet that’s going to solve the women’s …

DM: But some of them do think it is, don’t they?

ISABEL HARDMAN: Oh I think they do and there was that ridiculous suggestion by Andy Coulson a few months ago that David Cameron appoint his wife to advise him on what women voters want as though they could sort of wheel her into Cabinet and William Hague could say, ‘Sam, what do women think about Palestine?’ as though she could speak for all of us.

DM: It’s demeaning isn’t it?

ISABEL HARDMAN: Well it just looks a little bit like they’re panicked.

DM: Do you think that, Baroness Trumpington, you were about to tell us about the policies rather than the people?

BARONESS TRUMPINGTON: Well I think there must be a mixture of both really, you can’t have one without the other and it’s the way the cookie crumbles in a way. From the Prime Minister’s point of view I think it must be perfectly hideous to have to decide between two really excellent people both of whom are doing their best for this country. There’s very little selfishness in politics, it is for the general good that people go in to politics and also try and do their best for a) the people who they represent in their constituency but equally as a whole you are trying to make things better. Sometimes you fail, sometimes you win and hurray for the winners.

DM: What a great note to end it on. Thank you very much indeed, Baroness Trumpington, thank you very much indeed for coming on the programme, it’s great to see you, we’d love to have you back and our thanks to Isabel Hardman and Rebecca Pow in Somerset.

BARONESS TRUMPINGTON: Am I allowed to say one thing? I wanted to be on one of these things and I was rather sucking up to the Liberal MP who was next to me and I said to him, may I call you David? And the Chairman said, ‘By all means do, but his name is Wilfred’.

DM: And I just heard you saying ‘Thank you Eamonn’ to me and my name’s Dermot! No, you didn’t! Baroness Trumpington, thank you very much indeed, great to see you.