Cabinet reshuffle: back to big willy politics

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/sep/04/cabinet-reshuffle-big-willy-politics

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Governing in hard times reveals basic instincts. David Cameron, who in the honeyed days of opposition sounded as if he really believed that having women in his cabinet was about something more important than PR, has, under pressure, apparently decided he feels more at home among the boys. Demoting or sacking four women and promoting only two seems to confirm that it was all for show. Political culture will be the worse for it, and it won't help the coalition either.

Smart companies like the management gurus McKinsey know that there is a value in women in the boardroom quite apart from the self-evident demand of democratic politics for fair representation. Women bring different experiences, perspectives and style. They broaden the collective understanding, and they challenge group thinking. If all of this sounds like a rather sensible way of running a government, in particular at a time of potentially catastrophic economic and social pressures, it plainly doesn't to Cameron.

The way women have come out of what is probably the only reshuffle of substance in this parliament demonstrates beyond doubt that the brief Cameron dalliance with a different way of doing politics is over. The word around Westminster is that the duopoly – Cameron and his chancellor George Osborne – decided they needed to spread the burden: that is, they wanted more big hitters around them, men with loud voices who'd see off the opposition in the Commons without straining their vocal cords, and then go out and stand up to Jeremy Paxman and Adam Boulton in the TV studios at night. This is politics as conflict, and it is a potentially disastrous way to go.

Less than a year ago, Downing Street was sounding deeply worried about the collapse in support among female voters. The graph mirrored the progress of welfare cuts and the sharp rise in female unemployment. It was reported that an analyst was to be brought in to advise on women-friendly policies, and women MPs were to be asked to approve initiatives. But it was all window dressing.

Having women in this cabinet may only make a difference to policy at the margins: they are, after all, Conservative politicians, and the capacity of any minister running his or her own department to be well-enough briefed on another department's agenda to argue effectively on the details is severely limited. But the different experiences women bring to such discussions, as companies increasingly confirm, can strengthen and steady decision making.

The irony is that few Tory women will be complaining about the reshuffle and the reneging on a commitment to have a cabinet that is a third female by the next election. They argue that targets reduce women to a single dimension. They bitterly resent looking like the beneficiaries of tokenism. They are right: it is time commentators talked in terms of reducing the number of incompetent men, the ones in government because they are close to a defeated leadership candidate or because they represent one of the wilder factions of the Conservative party's broad church. Yes, men are tokens too. That's what representative democracy is about.

David Cameron knows that. That's why, in order to overhaul the party image, he instituted the A list and used it to bring in to parliament young, able people, often women, sometimes black and minority ethnic, people the white, elderly constituency parties wouldn't consider (which is why the smart and feisty Sayeeda Warsi was a brave but doomed appointment as party chair). Some of these will get their toes on the rungs of power in the next 24 hours as the junior ministerial roles are filled. But the lurch back to traditional big willy politics that the reshuffle augurs may send more of them back out into the real world. And it won't reassure a single female voter either.