Long ago, just before Tony Blair’s victory in 1997, I went to the same dinner party as a well-known Labour politician, a woman whose subsequent career has been successful. What astonished me about her that evening was how sketchy her understanding of the ordinary world seemed to be. In particular, she did not know – it became clear in the conversation – the difference between a high street clearing bank and an investment bank. How long ago that all seems. I am sure she knows now.

That was not the only surprising blip in her general knowledge and I went away feeling sad and angry that such an unselfconsciously ignorant woman was a high-flyer in public life.

I have always passionately wanted women to succeed, just as I always hoped for a chance of success myself, and I have always longed for women to keep proving that we can do things just as well as men. And while there are quite a few heroines to cheer us on, both in private and in public, I have been constantly disappointed in women, particularly in politics. With a few shining exceptions, women in this government just aren’t much good. Everyone knows that, but most women are too sisterly and most men are too henpecked to say so.

The Blair Babes are a constant shock to the self-esteem of any sensible woman. When one of them comes on the Today programme, twittering and wittering like a flustered schoolgirl, unable to answer a hard question but equally unable to deflect it with any skill, merely gabbling irrelevantly another text that teacher taught her, my heart sinks. Even Harriet Harman, the deputy leader of the party, is an offender.

Now Harman has succeeded in driving through her cherished equality proposals, which in the name of equality will make it possible to discriminate against individuals on grounds of sex or race. If Hattie has her way, the Equality Bill she unveiled last week will make it legal for employers to discriminate against white men in favour of white women and black people. This horribly muddled thinking gives meaning to the misogynist’s phrase “feminine logic”.

The depressing 1997 picture of Blair surrounded by his babes tempted people at the time to mutter that quite a lot of these women were overpromoted for political purposes. Twelve years of Labour incompetence have done little to prove otherwise. Whether Harman herself is a beneficiary of aggressive tokenism would be unsisterly of me to speculate. However, positive discrimination is a cause she passionately believes in, to judge from her bill. How odd it all is, given that she is passionately committed to equal rights.

Labour and new Labour were supposed to stand for certain very clear ideals. High among them were decent moral standards in public life, equal opportunities for all (including women) and a hatred of the privilege and cronyism that stand in the way of equal opportunities.

Yet now we have the strange case of Georgia Gould. She was born to new Labour privilege, with parents about as rich and important in those circles as anyone could hope to be. Lord Gould, Blair’s former pollster, is her father while her mother, Gail Rebuck, is the moving force at Random House, publisher of Alastair Campbell’s diaries. Newspapers say Georgia always expected to be given a safe Labour seat and after graduating from Oxford she now, at only 22, is on a women-only shortlist for the safe Labour seat of Erith and Thamesmead.

Women-only shortlists are bad enough. What makes Gould’s story particularly depressing is that Tessa Jowell, the Blairite minister, went to the constituency to speak in Gould’s support. This lucky girl also has the support of Campbell and other new Labour heavies. Top party nomenklatura have gushed about Gould’s qualities, but what about the other candidates? What is this if not cronyism and an unselfconscious sense of entitlement that the Conservatives at their worst only dreamt of?

Here we have a spectacle that is about as bad for women as it gets. Female politicians, many promoted above their ability, seek to promote another woman above her democratic entitlement and against their own principles and meanwhile legislate to promote working women over men. With supporters like Harman and her crew, we women do not need enemies.

There are plenty of reasons very able women have not risen to the top in many fields. That is no reason to insist on pushing less able women to token positions near the top. That is demeaning to those women and unfair to everyone else as well. Many very able women would not consider standing for parliament during their family-centred years. The unavoidable result is that there is not a rush of very able women into politics to provide a lot of good candidates to choose between, compared with male candidates.

Admittedly the men in politics are not always impressive. I entirely agree with the feminist wit who said that women will not have achieved equality with men until there are at least as many third-rate women at the top as there are men. But politics is, or ought to be, a serious matter. What we need, more than anything else, is MPs and cabinet ministers of the highest possible quality, regardless of anything else. We are in the middle of a national and international crisis, in which we desperately need the most intelligent and experienced people of any kind, not the best possible representation of numbers of women and minorities.

There are many reasons such people don’t present themselves for office in proportion to their numbers, just as some minorities are overrepresented. And in any case, it is a piece of modern cant, driven by misplaced guilt about the sexist and racist past, that voters can be represented only by people just like themselves.

I don’t need a white woman to represent my views and wishes, even though I am a white woman. I need an intelligent, responsible person of any colour or sex, someone of experience and broad understanding. After all, most of the greatest novels about the female psyche were written by men – evidence that women do not have a monopoly on understanding what other women think and feel.

David Cameron, who may lead the next government, is a man who appears to like and respect women. I hope he doesn’t feel he has to prove it by descending into tokenism or by promoting anyone but the best.

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