ON 7 June, Theresa May stepped down as Prime Minister of Britain, ending the tenure of the second woman to hold the job.
Her departure brings up two interesting points. First, the Conservative Party – not exactly known for its progressive tendencies – is the only party to have produced a female PM.
Secondly, there were only two women in the running to be voted party leader: former Leader of the House of Commons Andrea Leadsom, and ex-Work and Pensions Secretary Esther McVey. Neither were considered the strongest candidates for the job, but they did stand out from the rest of the overwhelmingly masculine crowd.
But amid all the noise of no-confidence votes before the Johnson party even gets started, bear with me… Just supposing the leadership campaign also went horribly wrong for Gove and Hunt. What if a woman succeeded a woman?
Three years ago, pro-Brexit Leadsom torpedoed her chances of reaching No 10 while campaigning against May, after suggesting motherhood made her more empathetic and gave her a “very real stake in the future of our country”. Whether she will fare better this time around remains to be seen, but she has already pledged to hold a monthly phone-in with the public if she becomes PM, so um, yay?
McVey, likewise, is a tub-thumping Brexiteer, and infamously had to apologise to the Commons for “misleading” comments about a report criticising the Tories’ much-trumpeted Universal Credit scheme (the one McVey eventually admitted would make some families “worse off”). She too has offered a glimpse of the future under her leadership, promising a Brexit-only cabinet until the UK leaves the EU.
I should say now that politically, I’m a left-leaning woolly liberal with green edges, so Leadsom and McVey are appalling prospects for the top job as far as I’m concerned. But what woman could possibly unite a country so divided, and what could be their first act as the third woman to enter No 10?
Casting aside party politics, allow me to make a few suggestions…
I’d start with Labour’s Jess Phillips. I know she’s on record as saying the job of party leader is one she’d least like to have (she also said “you never know”), but she’s as no-nonsense as they come, from passionately defending migration in her Birmingham Yardley constituency, where she was elected in 2015, to confronting the skin-crawling comments of failed UKIP MEP candidate Carl Benjamin. Phillips could be the first PM who actually says what she thinks. Her opening move could be to give MPs who rarely set foot outside Westminster a tour of Birmingham to see how the country really lives.
Caroline Lucas comes as a close second – MP for Brighton Pavilion since 2010 and leader of the Green Party. Her Green New Deal Group, founded a decade ago, was recently copied in the US. Alongside Labour’s Clive Lewis, Lucas brought a bill to Parliament to enact a UK Green New Deal. She’s possibly the only person who can give teenage environmentalist Greta Thunberg a run for her money, and was campaigning tirelessly for the environment long before it was trendy. She also supports a people’s vote over Brexit. I hope her first act as PM would be to get that Green New Deal legislation passed.
Third, is another Labour MP, Yvette Cooper. She was elected MP for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford in 2010, and was behind the private members bill that ruled out a no-deal Brexit, which was fast-tracked into law in April. She came third in the 2015 leadership election won by Jeremy Corbyn, and has been a particularly sharp thorn in the side of government as chair of the Home Affairs Select Committee, notably when quizzing May about paying tariffs post-Brexit. All that AND she’s Mrs Ed Balls.
But what if the PM net was cast a little wider, far beyond the Westminster bubble? Do any other female figures have both the cojones and the nous to cut the mustard on Downing Street? I can think of three – and top of the heap would be actor Emma Thompson.
She’s no stranger to activism and has the same pull-no-punches attitude as Jess Phillips. Thompson may have been branded a hypocrite for flying across the Atlantic to join April’s Extinction Rebellion protests in London, but she’s previously used her clout to stand up for both human and women’s rights – including threatening to quit a film when a co-star was asked to shed a few pounds, not to mention that scathing letter about John Lasseter. While I’d flee in terror if her frightful Years and Years alter ego Viv Rook made it to Downing Street, I’d be chuffed to bits to see Thompson waving from the doorstep. Permanently banning oil drilling in the Arctic could be her opening salvo.
Kick-ass, smart-as-hell comedian Gina Yashere has been lured from UK shores by our American cousins in recent years, but maybe if she was given the keys to No 10, she’d hot-foot it back? She firmly believes comedy can bring people together, no matter where they sit on the political spectrum, so who better to unite the UK population, making us laugh our backsides off all the way? She’d have a great foreign policy too, having toured and travelled all over the world. Her cosmopolitan insights as a lesbian woman of colour would give the old, white duffers in Westminster something to really think about. Banning peeing in lifts (she’s a former elevator engineer) would probably – and quite rightly – be her first move as PM.
Finally, author JK Rowling would be a sterling choice for PM, because who doesn’t love a dusting of magic? She should have no trouble applying her considerable smarts to running the UK, and going from complete anonymity to the heights of international fame proves she can handle pressure. What’s more, anyone who can entice millions of children to keep turning the pages of an actual book knows the meaning of hard graft. Rowling would also bring plenty of compassion – check out her work with her Lumos charity, as well as advocating for LGBTQ rights and single-parent families. Her first order of business could be reopening of libraries up and down the country.
Now, all that remains is getting one of them into No 10…
