Letter From the UK (Where Appearance Matter Most)

Stale, Male MP's Are Sometimes the Best Choice

Peter Hitchens
Daily Mail

Does anyone really think a government is better because of the way it looks?   Anyone who actually believes this surely deserves exactly what he or she gets.

The Blair and Cameron governments, among the worst in living memory (and in my view longer than that), were crammed with youthful idiots who looked reasonably good on TV, and great fusses were made of the numbers of women MPs (regardless of whether they were any good).

Yet here we go again.   We have just had a reshuffle openly based on the fatuous idea that the way the Government looks is what matters.  The slogans never change.

Theresa May recently reshuffled her cabinet - Justine Greening (left) resigned as education secretary rather than taking a new role at the Department for Work and Pensions. Boris Jonhson (right) remained as Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs

Old-fashioned organisations are called ‘male, pale and stale’, even if they are headed by women and contain far more women and ethnic minority members than at any time in history.  Sometimes we are told that the Cabinet, or the fire brigade, or the police should ‘look like the people they serve’, or even that they should ‘look like Britain’.


In fact, this generally means that they should look like the population of London, now one of the great multicultural and multi- ethnic city-states of the world, but completely unlike most of the rest of the country.  Almost all media types and politicians live in London, so they don’t know this.

But I could not care less what they look like.  I care only whether they know what they are doing, have the necessary experience, can think, and possess competence and courage.  Does a member of an ethnic minority really want to be saved from a fire by a member of the same minority?  Does a woman threatened by a rapist insist on being rescued from her plight by a female officer?

You only have to ask the question to see that the whole idea is garbage.  The public, unlike our governing elite, are not obsessed by race and sex.  They are rightly interested only in the contents of the person’s character.

And so it is in politics.