Miriam González Durántez: the Michelle Obama of the coalition
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Version 0 of 1. The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge finish their tour of New Zealand and Australia on Friday, a successful off-West End run for reinventing monarchy, the show. David and Samantha Cameron have done the obligatory holiday snaps on their Easter break in Lanzarote, exposing their choice of destination and footwear to a judgemental nation. Last month, Ed Miliband and Justine Thornton did the couple thing in Israel. But on Wednesday, Miriam González Durántez marked herself out as different, again, when she took over a press conference to challenge her husband, Nick Clegg, to stand up for men who take time out for parenting. González Durántez, a partner in the European law firm Dechert LLP, is also champion of the Inspiring Women campaign which she launched last October to encourage school girls to aim high. These are unusual women. Very few people choose a life partner knowing where it will land them, but each of these women married in the knowledge that they were committing themselves – if their partners' plans came off – to a life as part of a public couple. So the way they do their job is not some ad hoc response to an unexpected event. They are not rabbits caught in the headlights. Unavoidably, the way they live is a kind of parable of how to be a 21st-century wife, which for some of them turns out to be the same as being a 20th-century wife, with better household aids. Take Kate. She is, it is well recognised, the symbol of a monarchy that is ready to modernise. She is aspirational. She shops on the high street. She is unusually comfortable with herself, and this more than anything fits her well to do another important part of her job, which is not being Diana, Princess of Wales. This past fortnight tracing the doomed footsteps of William's parents' antipodean tour 30 years ago is a way of substituting young royals 2.0 for the memory of that old, tarnished model. In its way, it was as slick an operation as if the late Apple founder Steve Jobs himself had designed it. But if she is a symbol of the monarchy, the living part of the constitution, then the message the monarchy is sending out about the way women live sits oddly with a business whose boss is female. The duchess, as Hilary Mantel has brilliantly argued, looks as if she has been formulated from some secret substance for this particular brand of public life, perfect wife and perfect mother. Leave out the fashion and she would not seem out of place in 1954. Even the way she challenges William – by being better than him at sport – is unthreatening. In the company of Kate and George, Prince William can fulfil a role everyone can recognise and many identify with: he is husband and father, as well as future king. And that is what Kate is for. It is her job, the one she first tried out for all those years ago at St Andrew's, to lend a patina of normalcy to what might otherwise come to seem absurd. The former Tory MP Louise Mensch, who fled the Commons to be with her family in the US, got it all wrong when she tweeted on Thursday: "Kate Middleton's top 500 outfits <slideshow> Kate Middleton's top 10 speeches: 1. "I do." 2-10.... er.....". The duchess is not there to speak. Political wives have to do something similar. Only consider the dilemma of Sally Bercow, married to the Speaker, John Bercow, a woman whose wilder judgement calls (the wrapped-in-a-sheet photocall) have sent middle England into shock. If she did not exist, she would have to be invented, as a kind of tester of the boundaries between the personal and the public that an official wife should observe. Small surprise that Samantha Cameron, the businesswoman and mother who once looked as if she might be an upmarket role model for everyone trying to combine career and children, has now subsided into the role of silent support and photo-shoot prop. Nor can any woman who marries a politician overlook the media monstering of Cherie Booth. Her public battle to be a feminist as well as a public wife seemed to be taken as a personal challenge to those sections of the media that think women should generally be seen but not heard. Almost everything she tried to do was undermined by their relentless hostility and their willingness to hunt down every private misjudgement. No wonder Sarah Brown chose less contentious causes and pursued them almost silently. But there is another way, and González Durántez might be it. She is the Michelle Obama of the coalition, the woman with a sense of purpose bold enough to ignore the constraints of convention. She has harnessed her husband's prominence to promote a cause. She has challenged him as an equal. And what is scandalous is that almost all the public women in Britain at the moment owe their public role to their husbands. |