Calm down, Dave. Your real problem is that women can spot a phoney a mile away 3rd October 2011 David Cameron is exceedingly mortified. Indeed, it appears to be hard to overstate the full extent of the prime ministerial chagrin. On the eve of a party’s annual conference, it is customary for the leader of that party to give a lengthy interview to a Sunday newspaper so that he can cement into the public mind certain key ideas with which he wants to define his leadership. Yesterday, however, Mr Cameron chose to use such an interview to flail himself over remarks he had made to two female MPs. In the first, he had told Labour MP Angela Eagle to ‘calm down, dear’. Mr. Cameron's interview with a Sunday paper came on the eve of the beginning of the Tory party conference in Manchester In the second, he had appeared to join in the mirth when lewd jeers in the Commons chamber followed his suggestion that Tory MP Nadine Dorries was ‘extremely frustrated’, forcing him to abandon the rest of his sentence sympathising with her over his refusal to back her abortion law campaign. In his interview, Mr Cameron’s abject contrition got the better of his habitual fluency. Tying himself into verbal knots, he stammered and stuttered that he had made a ‘terrible mistake’ by using words that could have been interpreted as sexist, that it was all his fault, that he had to do better, and that he had been knocked off course by the horrible bear-pit of Prime Minister’s Questions. The answer lies in his party’s opinion polling which reveals that Tory support among women voters is far lower than among men. And he needs women’s votes if he is to win the next General Election. Humiliation: Nadine Dorries MP was left mortified after David Cameron mentioned she seemed 'very frustrated'. The reason he is so mortified is that he has strenuously tried to show that he is not, as he said, ‘one of the lads’. Indeed, he has gone overboard to show what a thoroughly feminised New Man he is, changing nappies at home and supporting equal rights for women at work. But much of this merely demonstrates a tin ear when it comes to analysing what women want. For identifying ‘women’s issues’ treats them like a minority rather than as half the human race. Which in itself turns women off even further. The reason so many women are so disillusioned with the Government surely lies rather deeper than a couple of questionable remarks. It is more likely that, grounded as they are in the gritty reality of home and family, women tend to have an unerring nose for phoniness and posturing. They will have been the first to spot the yawning gap between the Government’s words and deeds. Take the summer riots, for example. Women are very concerned about what the future holds for their children, and so security and order are of the first importance to them. They will have, therefore, taken an extremely dim view of the fact that, for all the staunch declarations by the Prime Minister after the riots that he would get a grip on this broken society, barely a month later these assurances had faded away. Similarly, their fury over the crippling student fees that are preventing their children from going to university is fuelled by their perception that so much money is being wasted on international aid. David Cameron told Labour MP Angela Eagle to 'calm down, dear' In other words, women have similar reactions to men, but rather more so. Yet the Government’s approach is to toss them the pink-beribboned bone of ‘women’s issues’ — which many women find deeply patronising. These issues also tend to be misjudged. The authors of a recently leaked discussion document drawn up by officials in No 10 on how to reverse the slide in female support appear to have found a check-list marked ‘women’s concerns’ and ticked them off almost at random. Which is hardly surprising, considering that this panic derives from the painting-by-numbers approach of policy-by-focus-group. But the result is incoherence. The dominant concern of that discussion document was with women in paid employment. Thus it proposed holding a No 10 summit for women in business, rejigging child benefit to help parents struggling with childcare and lost earnings, and even cutting the school summer holiday. But what so many mothers want is to be helped through the tax system to stay at home with their children rather than have to go out to work. The absurdity is that it’s principally low-skilled women whose votes are being lost. That surely means they are likely to have become disillusioned with the Coalition because it’s not conservative enough. Well, just how many women are sitting at home muttering crossly to themselves, ‘Drat! I’d never have voted Tory had I known I couldn’t become a mayor/elected police commissioner/belong to a local enterprise partnership’? This obsession with women voters is related to a wider anxiety that the Tories still have not ‘sealed the deal’ with the public, and remain out of touch with the lives of ordinary people. Leading Tories believe that this is because they have not yet sufficiently ‘detoxified’ the Tory brand. But the reason many voters feel the Tories are not on their side is precisely because of that ‘detoxification’ strategy. For this has meant embracing a Left-wing agenda which reflects not the lives and preoccupations of ordinary people, but of the metropolitan intelligentsia, who are hermetically sealed from ordinary people. Issues like climate change, international aid, community-based sentences rather than prison, and the race, sex and gender rights agenda either leave voters cold or actively turn them off. Indeed, there is fury over green taxes and rises in international aid, which people rightly perceive often goes into the pockets of tyrants and kleptocrats, when public spending at home is being cut. Even worse is the impression that the Prime Minister tries to play to every interest group just to gain votes. So one minute he’s ‘detoxifying the brand’ by buttering up working women; the next he’s appealing to traditional Conservatives by buttering up stay-at-home mothers. George Osborne made an unprintably crude remark at a dinner held by GQ magazine. So voters conclude the Tories are the same old duplicitous and opportunistic, snake-oil salesmen, who are also out of touch with how ordinary people live. And the more the Tory Party dances to the pollsters’ tune, the more it digs itself into that particular hole. Arguably it is this perception that Mr Cameron will say anything to gain power that is the most devastating voter verdict, and once it has taken hold is the hardest to shift. On top of all this, the Prime Minister sniggers at his MPs’ vulgarity towards Nadine Dorries and the Chancellor makes an unprintably crude remark at a dinner held by GQ magazine, for all the world like two smutty schoolboys. This will have confirmed many women in their belief that those running the Government are callow youths who aren’t cutting the mustard. In other words, women voters are being turned off because they are making a devastating political judgment about the Government’s competence. And the fact that it doesn’t seem to occur to Tory strategists that women voters might want more than a politically correct ‘New Man’ as Prime Minister says more about their real attitude to women than they might care to admit.
Patronising
Obsession
More from Melanie Phillips...
Duplicitous
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2044494/David-Camerons-real-problem-women-spot-phoney-mile-away.html#ixzz1ZnFRQJer
Tuesday, 4 October 2011
To which one can only say: ‘Prime Minister! Calm down, dear!’
For one might wonder why on earth he is choosing to make quite such a meal of this.
Yet this discussion document treated them as if they were all Guardian readers, with the preoccupations of the metropolitan chattering class.
It proposed ensuring that there were more female candidates for mayoral posts, elected police commissions and local enterprise partnerships.
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