Society
The New Statesman Profile - Politicians' wives
Published 21 January 2002
Classy professionals, pushy go-getters or sad stay-at-homes: none of them has as much fun as footballers' wives. Jackie Ashley profiles politicians' wives.
Who would want to be a political wife? Suddenly there are reminders aplenty of just how gruesome a life it is, from the unauthorised holiday snaps of Cherie Blair in her not very flattering snake trousers to the public re-airing of every twist and turn of the Cecil Parkinson/Sarah Keays affair two decades ago - this time in a television documentary for Channel 4. Whether your sympathies lie with Keays or with Parkinson, the big questions left hanging in the air at the end of the programme concern Parkinson's loyal wife, Ann: what was it like for her? Why did she stick by him?
ITV's new blockbuster Footballers' Wives may be fictional, but seems to portray the soccer-star lifestyle accurately enough, with "more arses per minute than An Evening with Johnny Vaughan and Friends . . . more cocaine than in a Yardie's knickers and more stiff nipples than four hours of Shackleton", according to the Guardian TV critic Gareth McLean. If you have not seen the show, that just about sums it up.
Life for a political wife is not half such fun. In politics, there is less money around than you find in footballing milieus, and, if I were to be very unkind, I might add that the male physiques are not quite so honed. But politicians do have one attribute that footballers lack: power, supposedly the biggest aphrodisiac of all.
Should we bother for a second about politicians' wives? (Politicians' husbands are still, I fear, such a small group that only PhD students need notice them.) I think we should; a politician's choice of partner in life tells us a great deal about the politician.
There are four categories of political wife. The most prominent of these is now the Modern Woman, who has a certain independence of spirit, and usually her own career. Think of Cherie, for a start. Then there is the Warrior Wife, who is really the driving force behind her husband's public advance - Christine Hamilton. And then there are the much more common types: the Surrendered Wife, left alone to read about her husband's affairs, struggling to be loyal and smiley; and the Good Old Girl, the loyal, dogged spouse who brings up a family while her husband is working at Westminster, being both father and mother to the children.
Any self-respecting new Labour man wants a Modern Woman, whether as a partner or as a wife, like Cherie. With her substantial personal income, high professional reputation and strong private views - generally a bit to the left of her husband and strongly pro-European - Cherie is the classic Modern Woman. Having a semi-independent, successful wife suggests that you are a modern, self-confident and emotionally mature man who grew up in the era of feminism and has learnt a few lessons. These are the men who can boast about their speed with disposable nappies and their cookery skills. They can reassure voters that they are modern men, less cut off and dysfunctional than the politicians of past eras.
The people close to Blair are mostly like that. Jonathan Powell, his chief of staff, is the partner of Sarah Helm, a journalist with her own career and interests. Alastair Campbell's partner, Fiona Millar, is a very strong and independent-minded character who is Cherie's adviser, organiser and protector, in the same way that Campbell is Blair's. There is Derry Irvine's wife, Alison, though from a different generation, who is an art historian. Jack Straw's wife, Alice, is a high-flying civil servant. Jan, Stephen Byers's partner, has been working on a dissertation.
Then there are the Warrior Wives. Some put Cherie at least partly in this category, seeing her as almost equally ambitious to her husband. The best-known example is from the wilder edges of British political life - Christine Hamilton, far tougher than poor, smirking Neil. In her own way, Glenys Kinnock is a Warrior Wife who could easily (like Cherie) have been a Labour minister in her own right. The main difference between the Warrior Wife and the Modern Woman is that the WW is in some sense in competition with her husband, operating in the same world and profession, and therefore, perhaps, eventually some kind of threat - as in the Hamiltons' case, where Neil was outshone.
Much more common is the Good Old Girl. To pick a GOG is to show yourself a real traditional politician, like John Prescott, with his ever-loyal, heavily coiffed Pauline, or Iain Duncan Smith and Betsy, who still wears Alice bands and says very little in public.
The Tory party may be modernising itself in all sorts of ways, from its attitude to homosexuality to its plans for turning the House of Lords into an elected senate. But the armies of GOGs that tramp beside its male MPs send another, more reassuring, message to the shire Tories: this is still the party of family and traditional values.
Don't get me wrong. I am not sneering. The Good Old Girl is a very impressive person. She copes with the loneliness of her husband being absent. She is father to the children. She takes the late-night phone calls from bores, nutters and the desperate constituents who plague so many MPs at home. She is always on a platform when needed, though she often loathes the public side of the job. She campaigns, knocks on doors and characteristically hates the press even more than her husband. Without her, a large part of British democratic life would slowly collapse.
Sadly, however, many GOGs face becoming Surrendered Wives at some point, too. All too many of them know perfectly well that "late at the House" can mean "late at somebody else's house". There is still an amazing amount of extra-curricular shagging going on in British politics, including among ministers. Hardly a dinner party goes by without an exchange of the latest gossip: "He's not! With who? No . . ." But yes, all too often he is.
Nothing new in that, of course. Surrendered Wives only become surrendered when they go along with it. Some, like the first Mrs Cook, rebel and spend years getting their revenge in print. Many grin unhappily and bear it. It may have been 20 years ago that Ann Parkinson stood by her man, but things haven't changed much with the times. Remember Judith Mellor, posing for a "happy family" pic, while mock-up photos of her husband David in his Chelsea football strip, waiting to have his toes sucked by Antonia de Sancha, were plastered over all the papers. Then there was Piers Merchant's wife, Helen, standing by hubby in front of the photographers after he had confessed to serial adultery. Worse still, Jane Clark, happily married for years to Alan Clark, the late Tory minister, seemed to treat her husband's rampant lechery as if it were just an annoying little habit, rather like leaving his toenail clippings on the bathroom floor.
Adultery, in one sense, is the least of it - simply the inevitable consequence of the weird lives that politicians and their families are forced to lead. For many MPs there is no choice but a sad bachelor pad in the environs of Westminster, while the wife and kids stay back home in the constituency. Many local parties insist on it - maintaining the fiction that the MP "lives" in his constituency although, strictly speaking, it is only his family that does, while he spends the greater part of each week in London. As the daughter of a former MP who lived within commuting reach of parliament, but was still away in his distant constituency most weekends, I wonder whether the local parties really know what they are imposing on spouses and children today. It leads to the MP becoming a part-time husband and father - what Alistair Darling, the Social Security Secretary, described poignantly a year ago as being like "having access" to the children only. Geoff Hoon, the Defence Secretary, also returns to his wife and family at the weekend, while others such as Jack Straw try to maintain a more conventional family life by keeping their main home in London.
A television series entitled Politicians' Wives would tell an interesting story about our culture. It would describe relationships in transition and straining at the edges, torn between an old ideal of the traditional family even though the pressures of modern political life put almost impossible strains on it and, on the other hand, new, feminist-influenced ideals, which are fine for well-educated, successful couples with no kids, but harder for everyone else.
It is, perhaps, a paradigm of British marriage as a whole. On the one side, the faded romanticism of old ways, where the wife is inevitably the one to make all the sacrifices. On the other, a balancing act of partnerships based on two careers and a certain independence, with children struggling for their parents' attention.
Politicians' Wives would be a less-than-glamorous affair. After all, in the end, politicians and their families are pretty much like the rest of us - only more so.
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