Stella Tsantekidou column: ‘Sisters! Do it for yourselves!’

If you’re tempted to hire me to fill a gender quota, don’t bother. Hire me because you know I’ll run rings around your lads – or get out of my face.

I am not against quotas in all contexts. People hire after their own image, and to move history on, you can’t wait for bigoted senior managers to die. Sometimes you have to make it their job to do better.

But Labour’s women problem is not the number of women we have around. Have you been to any right-wing events? It’s a miracle they still manage to reproduce.

The Labour Party going from 46% of women MPs to 50% is not, in fact, going to change the fortunes of women, barring the handful of new women MPs who’ll have a slightly easier time getting selected in their local constituency. I am not fussed about speeding that up any more than I lose sleep over how many female corporate Directors make it to the CEO role.

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In the Times last week, Janice Turner argued that in Margaret Thatcher the Tories have an archetype for female leaders. One that is regal and autocratic, as befits the right more generally, which prefers a Presidential system of leadership.

Why does Labour lack an archetype for female leadership?

The left more generally, and Labour especially, is over-formed by institutions, while the right is underformed by them. In the Labour Party, we expect our leaders to be representative. By definition, that will look like a middle-aged white man who is willing to read whatever safe space policy/trigger warning his more colourful young staffers put in front of him. In short, a robot, like who-he-must-not-be-named.

The Blair mythos legacy of technocratic discipline is hundreds of Labour men angling for the Oxbridge-SpAd-Minister pipeline. But Blair was not the only star of the show, despite our shallow memories.

The Northern Ireland agreement is often name-dropped as one of his finest achievements, but it was Dr Marjorie “Mo” Mowlam, the vivacious Northern Ireland Secretary, who brought Sinn Féin to the table. It was a herculean feat which nonetheless did not protect her from being replaced by, can you believe it, Peter Mandelson. Her predecessors were described by one Irish nationalist politician as ‘grey men in grey suits, coming and doing a grey job’. Her methods were unorthodox. She was described as ‘mad or brave’ when she met with paramilitaries face-to-face at a time when British politicians were the targets of their violence; she told Ian Paisley to f*ck off, and when Blair’s team started sidelining her, she turned to President Clinton during a meeting and said: “Didn’t you know? I’m the new tea lady around here”.

But now the tables have turned. The Peter Mandelson formula to success has been debunked, and Labour is stroking its chin, wondering where it might find those populist figurines it heard were going down a treat with cynical voters: scrappy women showing up as their authentic selves, with their accents, massive gobs, and big emotions on full display. Hell, some of them can even crack a joke!

Labour’s sisterhood is good for getting you through the door, but not for sharp-elbowing a clear path for leaders. It can also be just as judgmental as the men, but the men will put their personal grievances aside if it means winning. Women will judge other women defensively, out of fear, when their weaknesses most remind them of themselves.

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Rather than fighting for status and resources within existing power structures, the women’s PLP, Fabian Women and Labour Women’s Network created extra-institutional groups aimed at nurturing female political careers. Their mistake is continuing to expect ‘sisterhood’ based purely on our common gender. Men do not build productive fraternities between themselves out of gender solidarity. They come together because they want to be winners; because they share the same goals.

The systemic pressures obviously should be highlighted: not needing to check out during the most productive years of their lives to perpetuate the species is an advantage for men. As does not being scrutinised for their personal lives or personality quirks to the same degree. Also, politics takes money, and women are poorer; we just are, and I don’t need to spell out why. A single mom is destined to stay stagnant in her career; a freshly divorced dad may just get a promotion. More of our headspace is taken over by our ageing parents, our troubled siblings, our needy kids.

But in the end, Labour women, it is the timidity of our own ambitions that harms us as well.

Men will be working on their leadership campaigns for years behind the scenes. They will have staff on retainer, donors invested for the long haul. How often do you see women ‘briefing themselves’ into a role? Only those with male staffers with ambitions of their own. Women will wait for the knock on their door, for someone else to ask them, ‘Are you ready?’ I see this on the staff level as well. The boys will brazenly ask for jobs, pitch themselves, slide into the DMs of people far more senior than themselves, their resumes bloated with exaggerated titles and fantastical achievements re-imagined in the first person.

In the Labour Party, we either love our women (our Ange, our Emily, our Lou) or we respect them (Mahmood, Reeves, Cooper). Never shall the two collide. I don’t want fake roles for women. I want women to be allowed to be real, not just by men, but by other women too, and most importantly: by themselves. 

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