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mybrainhurts said:
Blank screen...that worked well.
What's an ariticle......?
Works ok for me
but if not:
Desperate Tory wives who can no longer stand by their men
By Stefanie Marsh
The women who were once the party’s backbone express their frustration at its state of disarray
“IF THEY listened to their wives more maybe we wouldn’t be in the deep poo we’re in now,” said an exasperated Anne Jenkin, the outspoken and formidable wife of the Tory MP Bernard Jenkin.
In the past fortnight her gloom has been compounded by the defection to Labour of the Tory MP Robert Jackson; the resignation of the Conservative candidate Amanda Harding amid claims that activists wanted her to canvass in mini-skirts; and the deselection of another, Sue Catling, who said that she was forced out by a conspiracy of sexist dinosaurs.
Mr Jackson said in an interview that the final straw came when a colleague asked during a despairing conversation about the future of the party: “I wonder if any of our wives would vote Conservative if they were not our wives.”
The wives of Tory MPs past, present and future have traditionally been the engine room of the party. Now Mrs Jenkin, a key behind-the-scenes operator in the party, is beside herself with frustration at the party’s failure to make a breakthrough so close to a general election. “The Government is quite obviously incompetent, lazy and sleazy. We should be making progress,” she said.
Unlike the Tory wives who hovered dutifully at their husband’s elbows in the 1980s and 1990s, Mrs Jenkin sometimes holds very different views from her spouse and is willing to speak out about them. Her opinions — that the party is old-fashioned, the grass roots out of touch and the selection process hopelessly inadequate — may be resented or ignored by the 151 men on the Tory benches but are privately backed by many of their wives.
The Conservative Party, as described by the women who form most of its invisible backbone, is in disarray, incapable of exploiting Labour’s inadequecies and arrogant, many of them told The Times this week. Michael Howard is well liked but is felt to lack the lightness of touch that would enable him to compete more effectively with Tony Blair.
His perceived problem, a failure to simplify complex policies for public consumption, is thought to be typical. “Sometimes you watch your husband on television and you think, ‘You are using such aggressive language, do you know what you sound like?’ ” one wife of a Tory frontbencher said.
The majority of the women who spoke to The Times complained most bitterly about the lack of female MPs, 14 to Labour’s 94, blaming the fusty, pious, backward grass roots. “It is very frustrating,” Mrs Jenkin said. “Where are our Ruth Kellys? I know where they are; they are not getting selected because our membership does not think outside the box.”
One young wife who married into the party likened it to an emotional cripple. She said: “It is like a person who cannot get it together to form a long-term relationship. It has very little self-knowledge. To put it in psychobabble, the party is in denial. It needs serious analysis.”
Mrs Jenkin said: “We quite often say how stupidly our husbands are behaving, they can be so blinkered. The wives certainly do talk about the state of the party and, it is true, we could probably knock some heads together.
“I know there are people who will say that this (speaking out) is very unhelpful at this stage of the electoral cycle but to make progress things have got to change and I have got a duty to be part of that effort.”
Most of the women interviewed by this paper described themselves as instinctively Conservative and ambivalent about Mr Blair. The wife of a minister who served under John Major described the Prime Minister as “quite, quite shocking. An empty person.” Another conceded: “The things we sneer about — the guitar, the jeans, they make him an all-rounder. That is what we lack.”
If a decade ago the Tory wife was imbued with the ethos of Stand By Your Man, the modern-day version is more independent and, annoyingly for some MPs, more critical. “The new generation are active and involved in politics and the world of business and culture,” Lady Baker of Dorking, the wife of the former Home Secretary, Kenneth Baker, said.
Vanessa Hannam, a novelist and the wife of Sir John Hannam, the former Tory MP for Exeter, once famously accused her counterparts of acting like Stepford Wives. Now, she said, ministerial spouses no longer follow their husbands around like little dogs. She said: “We (the wives) are all very concerned about what is happening with the party. I would have hoped that the Tory party would have changed their image quite significantly since they crashed so spectacularly but that has not happened. We needed a new face.”
Sylvia Green, the former wife of 30 years of John Greenway, MP for Ryedale, feels that the party is still distrusted by the public. “The Tory party is in disarray, I cannot think of anything good to say about it,” she said. “First we are the caring party, next thing you know we have moved further right.
“I think there is a big feeling in the constituencies against women and there is not enough emphasis on the basics: crime, the NHS, education. A lot of Tories blame the media when they should be blaming the party. I think our only hope is with people like David Cameron and that age group. Anything before that is a has-been. I’m sure some of them are just waiting for their pensions.”
Mrs Green, whose husband separated from her after he had an affair, added: “I think a lot of people associate the Tories with sleaze and arrogance. A lot of them (Tory ministers) cannot keep their flies zipped up and that does not do us a lot of good.”
Mrs Hannam, by contrast, mourns the loss of charismatic would-be leaders such as Michael Portillo and Boris Johnson, blaming the squeamishness of the grass roots. She said: “I would never trust a man who tells the complete truth about his private life.” She predicts that William Hague will make a comeback, while others tipped moderates such as Damian Green. Nick Herbert, director of the think-tank Reform, Oliver Letwin and David Willets, the Shadow Pensions Secretary, were also praised.
“Every single person I know who is married to a Tory MP is exasperated by the general pickeldness,” the wife of one young hopeful said. “The truth is most of us are really normal people but you have got these old farts in the associations and it is very hard to fight the tide. Our husbands are working extremely hard and a lot of them are really frustrated at how the party operates, at the amount of office politics.
“You have these conversations where you are saying, ‘Oh God, what should we do with this bunch of weirdos mourning the passing of Thatcher? We’ve got to get rid of them.’ ”
Mrs Jenkin feels that the right candidates are failing to come to the fore. She said: “We all feel very disappointed and let down by the activists in these constituencies who do not seem to realise how much damage they are doing.
“Our parliamentary party is not representative. They are not selecting the very best and that is because our membership are not qualified to do the selection process. They have probably never interviewed anyone in their lives.”
“There are a lot of great candidates out there but they are not getting through.”
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