Society
The New Statesman Profile - the matriarchs
Published 19 June 2000
The backbone of the nation, they are formidably hard to fool and, above all, they hate to be talked down to. The matriarchs profiled
Forget Kate Moss. Forget the Spice Girls. In every corner of the land, for each young, cool, thin, hip chick, there are a score of tough and watchful matriarchs. Thick of ankle, broad of beam, with a penchant for patterned pastel skirts and jackets worn beneath a tightly curled perm, Britain's matriarchs are truly the backbone of the country.
We all know their public versions. Think, for instance, of Oscar Wilde's Lady Bracknell in full contemptuous sail: ". . . it is high time that Mr Bunbury made up his mind whether he was going to live or die. This shilly-shallying with the question is absurd. Nor do I approve in any way of the modern sympathy with invalids. Illness of any kind is hardly a thing to be encouraged in others. Health is the primary duty of life." That is the authentic voice of the British matriarch - tough, resolute and bossy.
Lady Bracknell's progeny lived on: in the redoubtable Bessie Braddock, MP for Liverpool during the Sixties and a famous Labour fixer beside whom Millbank's modern manipulators would seem pathetically weedy; in Hattie Jacques, the no-nonsense matron in the Carry On films, who'd always come in and spoil the fun with a knowing look and a good scolding. Then there's the Queen Mother, with her sharp, conservative opinions on life; the Speaker of the Commons, Betty Boothroyd, whose head-girlish put-downs of MPs have even the most boisterous quaking in their boots; that favourite of the TV screens, Hyacinth Buckett; and, still going strong, the Women's Institute, which gave Tony Blair such a hard time last week
They often provoke a good deal of mockery, but the mockery betokens fear: true British matriarchs leave the men in awe, anxiously tugging at their nanny complexes. This is certainly so in politics, as the endless nervous jokes about the great Tory and Liberal baronesses, Trumpington and the late Nancy Seear, and the dominant MPs, such as Janet Fookes or Ann Widdecombe, make clear. Margaret Thatcher herself was a kind of rogue matriarch, WI woman run amok on political steroids and whisky.
So who are these British matriarchs? The word is used very loosely, given that many of them are actually childless. It is more about character - grit, self-reliance, hard work, strongly expressed, socially conservative views. This is the home-grown version of the Italian Catholic matron, indomitable and devout, or the iron-willed Jewish mamma. In Middle England, but also Middle Scotland and Middle Wales, they are the mainstay of voluntary activity of all kinds: church groups, charity shops - and, yes, many local political parties, too. They may make jam, but they've lived as well - supported feckless men, cleared up after marital messes, and made something real out of the politicians' blather about "community".
They are rural and suburban, not metropolitan. They are unimpressed by ingratiating smiles, fashion, rhetoric or the latest thing. They are coldly impervious to spin. Doers, not talkers, they may not be sophisticated, but they are formidably hard to fool. Peering over sensible spectacles, through net curtains and clean windows, they've seen it all before. They hate, above all, to be talked down to - something Tony Blair presumably now knows.This is a serious matter for him, not a momentary embarrassment. Because these women matter. If new Labour has lost the Middle British matriarchs, it has also lost the people who dominate opinion in many a village, church circle and small town. It has lost a group of compulsive doers and voters - women over 55 are far more likely to turn out to vote than their younger counterparts.
A recent MORI poll for the Fawcett Society shows a Tory lead of 18 points over Labour for middle-class women over 55 - up 4 per cent from two years ago. That contrasts with a 30-point lead for Labour among similar women under 25. Older women in particular feel that the government has not "delivered". Deborah Mattinson of the polling company Opinion Leader Research has found that women's "satisfaction" rating with the government is 13 points fewer than men's of the same social groups.
Any Tory MP will tell you how much time he (mostly he) spends with his local constituency matriarchs. But up to now, new Labour has virtually ignored them. The matriarchy has been getting on with life, making the world go round, but never a political force - until recently. Blair's ill-judged speech to the WI has made the political world realise at last that the British matriarchy is something to be reckoned with. As the population ages, and as women grow in economic importance, so the rule of the matriarchs will grow stronger, not weaker. Part of Labour's big achievement at the last election was to close the "gender gap" in voting patterns right down to 2 per cent; during the 1980s, it had been as high as 12 per cent. That meant bringing on board the older women, who voted, perhaps, for a different kind of politics: less sleaze, more listening. Since then, Britain's matriarchs have been left outside Blair's big tent. Silent, arms folded, they have stood in the quiet corners of the country listening to excited rhetoric about modernity, youth, vigour, change. The ladies, frankly, are not part of this trendy, urban world where, heaven forbid, homosexuality is acceptable and nobody wants to wear suits any more. They see a government surrounded by bright young men with absolutely no connection to them. Their concerns are basic ones: for a decent health service, less crime, and pensions that can be relied on.
New Labour was not meant to be a male conspiracy and has, to be fair, tried hard at certain times to avoid being one. Its gender balancing of seats for the Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly is an obvious example. But it went wrong from the start, with the cringe-making picture of Blair and Labour's female MPs, insultingly labelled "Blair Babes" as they smirked for the camera before being led off into bondage by the whips.
Not enough was done to ensure that younger women with children were able to function properly as new Labour politicians. Those who were at the top of the party hierarchy, such as Mo Mowlam and Harriet Harman, were briefed against and, in different ways, dumped. Others, such as Tessa Jowell and Margaret Beckett, have survived, but at the price of being super-loyal and keeping their political personalities out of sight. Among the "rising stars" of the government benches in the Commons, few are female. Patricia Hewitt, tipped for promotion in the coming reshuffle, is an exception. Yes, Downing Street has tried to balance things a bit by promoting women from the Lords, such as Baroness Scotland. But, after all, unashamedly male-chauvinist Tory governments did exactly the same thing. It doesn't really wash.
It is too readily assumed that "new Labour women" are somehow the opposite of the matriarchy - just a lot of well-off metropolitan careerists with extreme liberal views and Sixties skeletons in their cupboards. If one looks at the agenda of the WI, however, with its interest in poverty, GM foods, rural post offices and community, there is a strong crossover: these are people who ought to be able to find some fellow feeling with female Labour politicians.That they can't is a problem of new Labour culture and the small group of men who dominate it. The real question is whether, even at this late hour, the government can think through a more credible policy for those millions of women who are struggling to juggle real lives and who feel that their daily existence has been not much improved by three years of Blair. Nobody supposes that such a policy would win over the WI en masse - a good number of them are signed-up Conservatives. But if the party has nothing exciting to say to ordinary middle-class women, then the slow handclapping and mild heckling will seem nothing compared to the electoral penalty. Enter a lone and rather unexpected, although undeniably middle-class, voice - that of Harriet Harman, who was sacked after just a year in office. According to Deborah Mattinson's polling, Harman remains, along with Mo Mowlam and Clare Short, one of the very few Labour politicians whom women voters know and like. Contrary to the usual pattern of ditched politicians getting their own back by making trouble, Harman has put her head down and got on with the job of winning women for Labour. In fact, Winning for Women is the title of a new Fabian Society pamphlet, written by Harman, which tracks women's views about political issues over the past 20 years.
Harman has been patiently reminding Blair and Gordon Brown that they've been ignoring a rather large chunk of the electorate. Suddenly, with the election in sight, they've been listening to her. It was Harman who spotted early on that the 100-plus "Blair Babes" could be reduced to half that number after the next election because no effort was being made to ensure that women were selected in safe seats.
Harman is not exactly a matriarchal figure; she doesn't have enough ballast, for a start. But in her determination not to be beaten, not to disappear, she has many of the qualities of the matriarch. Her view of women is of fully fledged members of society, part of the economy as well as the family, independent, tough and equal. Yet these women also feel under-represented and undervalued in the new, Third Way scheme of things. Perhaps, even if it's too late for the Blairites to win back yesterday's matriarchy, they can have an eye to tomorrow's.
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