Given the makeup of David Cameron's frontbench, it's little wonder the defence secretary got the names of two Labour women wrong on Question Time
I have a confession to make. It's not just that when someone told me the defence secretary, Philip Hammond, had made a gaffe on Question Time I rushed to my laptop to iPlayer the living daylights out of it. We all do that, don't we? If schadenfreude used to be a guilty pleasure, it's now attained the status of a healthy reflex. Quick! More banana skins! Nobody's fallen on their arse for 10 minutes!
No: my confession is that when I watched Hammond address someone called Liz as Rachel, I didn't immediately think: "Ho! The fool! He thinks that Liz Kendall, the shadow minister for care and older people and MP for Leicester West, is a dead ringer for Rachel Reeves, the shadow work and pensions minister and MP for Leeds West." What I actually thought was: "Wow. She's survived Celebrity Big Brother and now Liz Jones has to put up with this?"
There you have it. I am worse than Philip Hammond. I have not merely confused two shadow cabinet ministers with extremely similar-sounding constituencies – I have turned one of them into a Daily Mail columnist. Aside from middle-aged eyesight, I have one plea of mitigation to offer, your honour: the two Lizzes have awfully similar side-partings, and thus at least my confusion has some basis in material fact. Hammond emerges from all this as a man who doesn't even realise what a difference a fringe makes to a woman's face.
Meanwhile, Liz H says she doesn't mind a bit and Rachel Reeves is presumably simply relieved not to be accused of being boring again. As for Philip, he is on the naughty step at Conservative HQ for compounding David Cameron's so-called "women problem". Can't any of the fellas be trusted not to rile the fillies?
A problem with women, of course, comes from a deeper place than a moment of confusion under the television lights, understood by anyone who glimpsed David Cameron's all-male frontbench at prime minister's questions at the beginning of the month, which might itself have been confused with a meeting of the Masons circa 1982. Better, perhaps, that we focus on that.
Not that it mattered to me. I prefer to read a book than watch slanging matches, either convened by the BBC or the Houses of Parliament, and have spent much of my career writing about them. I therefore tuned into a discussion about women and reviewing on Radio 4's Open Book with interest. The London Review of Books, to which I have previously been a contributor, declined to participate in the discussion, but sent a statement, which, inter alia, drew on its female editor's view that women reviewers can find it hard to "write critically" (I assume they mean negatively) about other women and, at least historically, have had difficulty in writing at the same time as cooking dinner and looking after their children.
This, then, is not part of what Mary Beard recently described, in an LRB lecture, as centuries of women being told to "shut up"; it is women deciding to shut themselves up. Well, I don't find it hard to be critical, I don't have any children and if I haven't finished my work, I generally have dinner later or make some toast.
They must have mistaken me for someone else. Reported by guardian.co.uk 1 day ago.
I have a confession to make. It's not just that when someone told me the defence secretary, Philip Hammond, had made a gaffe on Question Time I rushed to my laptop to iPlayer the living daylights out of it. We all do that, don't we? If schadenfreude used to be a guilty pleasure, it's now attained the status of a healthy reflex. Quick! More banana skins! Nobody's fallen on their arse for 10 minutes!
No: my confession is that when I watched Hammond address someone called Liz as Rachel, I didn't immediately think: "Ho! The fool! He thinks that Liz Kendall, the shadow minister for care and older people and MP for Leicester West, is a dead ringer for Rachel Reeves, the shadow work and pensions minister and MP for Leeds West." What I actually thought was: "Wow. She's survived Celebrity Big Brother and now Liz Jones has to put up with this?"
There you have it. I am worse than Philip Hammond. I have not merely confused two shadow cabinet ministers with extremely similar-sounding constituencies – I have turned one of them into a Daily Mail columnist. Aside from middle-aged eyesight, I have one plea of mitigation to offer, your honour: the two Lizzes have awfully similar side-partings, and thus at least my confusion has some basis in material fact. Hammond emerges from all this as a man who doesn't even realise what a difference a fringe makes to a woman's face.
Meanwhile, Liz H says she doesn't mind a bit and Rachel Reeves is presumably simply relieved not to be accused of being boring again. As for Philip, he is on the naughty step at Conservative HQ for compounding David Cameron's so-called "women problem". Can't any of the fellas be trusted not to rile the fillies?
A problem with women, of course, comes from a deeper place than a moment of confusion under the television lights, understood by anyone who glimpsed David Cameron's all-male frontbench at prime minister's questions at the beginning of the month, which might itself have been confused with a meeting of the Masons circa 1982. Better, perhaps, that we focus on that.
Not that it mattered to me. I prefer to read a book than watch slanging matches, either convened by the BBC or the Houses of Parliament, and have spent much of my career writing about them. I therefore tuned into a discussion about women and reviewing on Radio 4's Open Book with interest. The London Review of Books, to which I have previously been a contributor, declined to participate in the discussion, but sent a statement, which, inter alia, drew on its female editor's view that women reviewers can find it hard to "write critically" (I assume they mean negatively) about other women and, at least historically, have had difficulty in writing at the same time as cooking dinner and looking after their children.
This, then, is not part of what Mary Beard recently described, in an LRB lecture, as centuries of women being told to "shut up"; it is women deciding to shut themselves up. Well, I don't find it hard to be critical, I don't have any children and if I haven't finished my work, I generally have dinner later or make some toast.
They must have mistaken me for someone else. Reported by guardian.co.uk 1 day ago.