Raise your bucket of bile to the new deputy Labour leader. Here’s to Harriet Harman, “a brainwashed political Moonie, oozing superiority from every enlarged pore” ( Daily Telegraph). Because “in addition to her failings in the departments of humour, pizzazz and earthiness . . . [she] is a hectoring, bleating, finger-wagging nanny as well as a vote loser” ( Daily Mail). Let’s celebrate her character, career and lifetime of public service, which, if I may summarise 1,000 words by my esteemed Times colleague Tim Hames, is best expressed as “Eugh!”

Truly Ms Harman is the new John Prescott: resident political lightning-conductor, her name a lazy shorthand for all that is most loathed about new Labour. And yet, look! Here leaving Downing Street is Gordon’s Brown’s very best boy, Ed Balls, master of a shiny, zeitgeisty new ministry for children, schools and family. Would this department be there, intregal to the Brown mission – and to repel advance into the same political ground by our new touchy-feely Tories – without 20 years of Harriet thanklessly chip-chipping away?

The men – of every political hue – who mocked her proposals for children’s centres or guffawed at the notion that work-life balance might be the business of government or yawned through her insistence that free nursery places could lift children from deprivation are now humming the family-friendly tune. All that soft, fluffy, bunnikins stuff is now so vital, it had better be run by the guys.

The response to Harman’s election, the language used to describe her, the hydrochloric acid of hate that rained upon her, reveals – for all our incoming female Home Secretary or the outgoing Foreign one – how uneasy we remain about women participating in public life.

How retro, how Seventies sit-com for a woman politician to be judged as humourless! True, Harman is that dread thing that most women know only to whisper softly, a feminist. And a campaigning one at that, who even used the stuffy old job of Solicitor-General to get domestic abuse treated with more judicial severity and to stop the trafficking of women into prostitution. Yeah, more bloody wimmin’s issues. And it’s true, Harman is a serious person: doesn’t – on the couple of occasions I’ve met her – crack too many funnies.

Neither is she the type who flatters men by laughing at their jokes. She is a woman’s woman, not much fussed about male approval. And other women like her for it. Far from being the vote-losing, haughty, entitled patrician (if you want condescension, let’s talk about Baroness Jay), she is warm, engaging, just about the most normal Worcester-woman-wooing person in politics. Her own family concerns, raising children and, lately, caring for an elderly parent have infused her work, given her insight into others’ lives.

Hectoring, finger-wagging, bossy . . . is there any way women can hold office without being a shrew or a nag? Yesterday the Mail scrabbled around Jacqui Smith to find negative connotations from the little, as yet, known about her, finally settling upon “Headmistress of the Home Office” because she was briefly an economics teacher. Still, we are told, senior police will not welcome dealing with a woman, even an imperious schoolma’am.

Two years ago, at a preCameronian convention of Tory women, one wannabe MP told me wryly that after trailing around local Conservative associations she had concluded there was no “right” time for a woman to enter Parliament. Before 40, she was a flirty, inconsequential flibbertigibbet, around 40 she should be attending to her family, after 40 she was a sour-faced old trout. And still, for all the greater number of women in Parliament and at the pinnacle of government, a discourse of disapproval swirls around them: what the hell are you doing here?

To avoid it, a woman in public life must conform to some Fifties ideal of female behaviour. Those circling and sniffing Sarah Brown for signs of uppityness have so far conceded with satisfaction that she: a) took her husband’s surname therefore if a feminist, is not a strident one b) has put her career on hold to raise children and – most importantly – c) never speaks in public.

Super-articulate Sarah’s kabuki show of silent, wifely awe is no more real than Hillary Clinton’s early incarnation as a cookie-baking First Mommy. But it may forestall the accusations of Lady Macbethian behind-doors influence or witchy dissection of her wardrobe or swimsuit pap shots. It all went downhill for Cherie the second she opened her trap.

To some extent all politicians today are dragged into the circus of our celebrity culture, in which our default response to every public misfortune or perceived imperfection is that of Nelson Muntz in The Simpsons, a gleeful, finger-pointing “Ha-hah!” But while, say, Charles Clarke is teased for his ears, no one expects him to be a looker.

Women politicians are taken to task for their bodies and clothing as if they were starlets peacocking at the Oscars, not running ministries of state. Harriet Harman’s remarks that prime minister’s wives didn’t need dress allowances, but “could shop at Primark” and that £10,000 is a sick sum to spend on a handbag showed a brave, if hugely unfashionable, attempt to move discussion back from surface to substance.

Of course, instead, she was derided as a feminist funsucker. Although that is is better than the other available categories, such as creepy man-manqué (Ruth Kelly until her recent blondification). Or the women of a certain age (Teresa May, Hazel Blears) who dare to dress with sass and must therefore think themselves better than they are.

A friend who worked in the lobby has a theory that the only women politicians regarded with affection are the properly ugly ones: Ann Widdecombe, and Mo Mowlam, fat and wig-wearing, after her brain tumour. These desexed, dotty aunts are given a free pass because they are perceived as hardly women at all. Moreover they are – or were – men’s women, one of the lads. And childless, with no humour-sapping, matronly responsibilities to drag them home, they had plenty of free evenings to drink, gossip and demonstrate their “earthiness” and win the loyalty of male hacks in the Strangers’ Bar.

Meanwhile, Ms Harman might reflect that the recent history of family policy is like a barbecue: after the women have toiled in the supermarket, made the salads, chopped and marinated and laid the table, the men parade briefly before the heat and shamelessly suck up all credit and glory.

Times Recommends

• It’s not just about Iraq, it’s about Blair’s style
• You can’t rank hospitals like football teams
• Minarets are not an essential part of Islam