FALLING OUT of love is rarely a smooth process. Quite often, the love morphs straight into hate. And, however much the object of hatred protests “can’t we at least be friends?”, the answer is that only time can help to heal the sense of betrayal, to allow the passion to dissipate and friendship to take its place.
Does Tony Blair have enough time? The next election may be as little as seven months away and a sizeable section of the population, many of them women, have fallen out of love with the Labour leader. By no means all of them hate him now, but feelings are running high. In a recent series of focus groups conducted for the Tories, not a single positive thing was said about Blair by the floating voters in 25 hours of conversation.
When Blair became leader, many women turned to him because they liked him as a person as well as a politician. They appreciated his devotion to his wife and children, his charm, his optimism. In other words, they became emotionally involved.
This was not the normal transactional relationship between a voter and politician. It was an emotional investment, which, when it bore fruit on May 1, 1997, was rewarded with not a little joy. Women in particular saw the 101 female MPs surrounding the new Prime Minister and trusted that at last politics would change.
To some extent, it has. This Government has put far more emphasis on health, education and childcare than the last one: all three are issues that women consider extremely important. It has lengthened maternity leave, brought in paternity leave and introduced the right to ask for more flexible working hours: a measure that was initially derided as weak, but which has proved surprisingly effective.
And yet, and yet ... female voters still look at the Labour Government and see a bunch of belligerent men who, when they are not starting wars in other countries, are acting out their aggression on each other. You don’t read of Cabinet feuds between Patricia Hewitt and Tessa Jowell or Valerie Amos and Margaret Beckett. No, all the jostling, the backstabbing and the bitchy briefing stems from the men.
No surprise, then, that the most recent Populus poll for The Times found women more disenchanted with Labour than men. This is partly because women are more opposed to war in Iraq. But they also judge the party more harshly on other measures. For instance, asked whether Labour had a good team of leaders, 2 per cent more men answered “yes” than “no”. Twelve per cent more women answered “no” than “yes”. Women are just as likely as men to believe that Labour shares their values. But they are less likely to see the party as competent and more likely to see it as divided. Overall, women are less satisfied than men with the Government.
It is Iraq that explains most of their disillusion. Many instinctively opposed the war in the first place — women don’t get excited as many men do by missiles and bombs and troop deployments. I have witnessed the whoosh of testosterone in male journalists and politicians when war is imminent and, believe me, it isn’t pretty.
Other women, though, supported the war reluctantly because they trusted Blair’s assurances that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and had to be stopped. Now, understand-ably, they feel let down.
So did Blair’s conference speech do anything to mitigate their sense of betrayal? On Iraq, he went halfway to an apology, enough to make some in the audience feel that he was sincerely misled by poor intelligence. But he did not address the question of why he failed to pass on the caveats that were attached to the intelligence. And he disingenuously tried to link Saddam to Islamic fundamentalist terrorists.
On domestic policy, Blair went further in addressing women’s concerns, particularly in his promise to offer longer maternity leave and childcare to all parents of children aged between 3 and 14. It is good at last to see male politicians — Gordon Brown did it too — putting women’s issues at the heart of gov-ernment policy. But it won’t be enough for the manifesto to be female-friendly: the election campaign will have to be, too.
The 2001 campaign was depressing for women. Not only was it poisonous, vindictive and distorting of other parties’ positions; it was also overwhelmingly male. At Labour’s press conferences, women more or less vanished. If Tony Blair wants to woo women back, to be friends with them now, he will not only have to put the right policies in the manifesto. He will have to show how the party has changed by giving ministers such as Patricia Hewitt, Harriet Harman, Ruth Kelly, Yvette Cooper and Tessa Jowell their rightful roles in the campaign.
maryann.sieghart@thetimes.co.uk
Clappers bored
IT IS AMAZING that Blair got through his conference speech at all on Tuesday. Almost everything that could have gone wrong did so. First, there was supposed to be a video before the speech, which failed to work. Then a woman from the National Executive Committee was supposed to introduce a list of manifesto promises delivered, which would pop up on the giant screen to the accompaniment of some mood-lifting dance music. Instead, she insisted on introducing Tony Blair himself.
So the poor audience leapt to their feet and stood clapping in time for the music, waiting for him to appear — and waiting, and waiting. The interminable achievements were projected on to the screen, but of the Dear Leader there was no sign. Blair, meanwhile, was waiting in the wings asking his aides what on earth was going on.
By the time he finally made it, the poor delegates’ hands were stinging. But at least they had some reward this year. For the first time, Blair, rather than Alastair Campbell, wrote the speech. And we welcomed back to conference a long-lost friend: the verb!
Zero tolerance
MANY THANKS to the readers who e-mailed suggestions for zero-calorie food. By far the most popular was broken biscuits. Apparently the calories leak out of them. But I particularly liked “other people’s chips”. And if you’re greedier still, Janet Mathers will console you that fish and chips eaten outside, straight from the paper, contain no calories — and if you walk when you’re eating them, they become a health food.
Another reader asserts that food eaten standing up is calorie-free, particularly if it’s illuminated by the light of a fridge after midnight. And I was relieved to hear from Ross Welford that nothing coloured green contains any calories, even if it comes in a Quality Street wrapper.
Most of all, though, I liked John Roch’s ten commandments of dieting. They include: popcorn and chocolate-covered nuts should be thought of as part of the “cinema experience” and don’t count as food; things licked off cooking implements are calorie-free; and you can eat as much chocolate as you please, as long as you hide the wrappers really well (the calories are all in the packaging, but not many people know that).
