Labour has never had a female leader. But some of the party’s MPs have alighted on a solution: make Andy Burnham put women in top jobs anyway.
Female Labour MPs are demanding that Burnham gives half of ministerial jobs to women and that 50 per cent of No.10 staff are female. The Parliamentary Labour Party is also calling for Labour’s new leader to commit to appointing a female Deputy Prime Minister.
Perhaps they were spurred on after The Spectator’s political editor Tim Shipman revealed, in last week’s magazine, that one senior Labour figure believes Burnham could be ‘Labour’s first woman prime minister’. The explanation: that Burnham’s interests in health, education and family finances – rather than bombs and budgets – make him ‘a female PM in all but sex’.
It is an incredible quote and has clearly got people worked up. But this next move is almost more infantilising. Can Labour really not just let their female MPs and staff stand on their own two feet and earn jobs on merit?
One female Labour MP said of the quota pitch: ‘It is all fucking nonsense’
