There are moments in life where you just have to set aside politics and remember that, at the end of the day, we are all human.
I thought that years ago, when Margaret Thatcher’s eyes welled up as she left No 10 for good. It wasn’t the first time we had seen her cry – back in 1982 she had lost her composure after her son, Mark, went missing in the desert.
This time, though, people seemed to delight in the sight of her reduced to tears; but the truth is that in that moment she was not the Iron Lady at all, just an ordinary woman. You would have needed a heart of stone not to feel sorry for her.
It was the same yesterday in Parliament as a big fat tear rolled down the Chancellor Rachel Reeves’s anguished face during Prime Minister’s Questions.
Her bottom lip trembling uncontrollably, she struggled visibly to contain her emotions. Her body language was meek and defensive, her legs tightly crossed, her shoulders hunched as though braced for a blow. It was, quite honestly, heartbreaking to watch.
In that moment she wasn’t ‘Rachel from accounts’, or the woman whose CV has more embellishments than Elton John’s glasses, or the person responsible for some of the most disastrous policies since Liz Truss played fantasy fiscal football with the economy; she was just a very sad lady who obviously needed a hug, a cup of sugary tea – and very possibly a nice lie-down in a darkened room.
In that moment she wasn’t ‘Rachel from accounts’, says Sarah Vine. She was just a very sad lady who obviously needed a hug, a cup of sugary tea – and very possibly a nice lie-down in a darkened room
It wasn’t an especially gladiatorial session, although Badenoch was somewhat on the front foot, skewering the Prime Minister – as is her job – over his disastrous Welfare Reform Bill.
There was, as there often is, a bit of laughing and pointing, at which point Badenoch challenged Keir Starmer to clarify Reeves’s position.
‘She looks absolutely miserable,’ said Badenoch, adding: ‘Labour MPs are going on the record saying she is toast. The reality is that she is a human shield for his incompetence. In January he said she will be in post until the next election. Will she really?’
All he had to do was stand up and say: ‘Don’t be ridiculous, of course she’s not toast,’ or words to that effect. Instead, he started droning on about northern infrastructure and children’s breakfast clubs, while poor Reeves stared beseechingly up at him, no doubt waiting for him to back her up. As he pressed his points with characteristic turgidity, the realisation visibly dawned on her face that he was not, in fact, going to do so. Her expression crumpled; her composure buckled.
By the time he sat down, apparently triumphant, she looked like all the air had been sucked out of her. Badenoch’s response was brief yet devastating: ‘How awful for the Chancellor that he couldn’t confirm that she would stay in place.’ How awful indeed.
His response might have been his chance to remedy this oversight. But once again, he set off on the same track, droning on about Labour’s ‘achievements’.
This is politics, the most brutal sport on the planet, Sarah Vine writes, a world where to be human is not only to err, but also to make yourself a target for even more scorn and derision
Her body language was meek and defensive, her legs tightly crossed, her shoulders hunched as though braced for a blow, says Sarah Vine. It was, quite honestly, heartbreaking to watch
Gamely, Reeves nodded along but the distraught expression on her face said it all. She wiped away a tear. Two stops to her right, an inscrutable smile caressed Angela Rayner’s lips.
Why the person sitting next to her didn’t just put her arm around her I honestly don’t know. Not Rayner, obviously, who was giving off serious Cruella vibes in her power puff sleeves. But whoever was on her left – the education secretary Bridget Phillipson, I think – might have offered her even just a gentle hand on the shoulder. Instead, nothing.
But then what do you expect? This is politics, the most brutal sport on the planet, a world where to be human is not only to err, but also to make yourself a target for even more scorn and derision, where even the slightest glimmer of weakness is interpreted as an opportunity to wound and where, when the chips are down (and they always are), it’s every man, woman and special adviser for themselves.
What we saw played out in Parliament yesterday – that absolute lack of common decency or community or even just basic concern for a colleague – is the kind of thing I remember so clearly from all my years spent in close proximity to this environment via my ex-husband Michael Gove’s parliamentary career.
The way the entire house just sat back and watched this poor woman fall to pieces before their very eyes; the way they all just kept going, as though she were nothing more than political roadkill. Monstrous. Inhuman.
But that is the nature of the game. It’s what goes on behind closed doors and in the corridors of Westminster every hour of every day. It is the reason good people, nice people, kind, sensitive people don’t survive or thrive in politics, and it’s the reason the ones who do are such unutterable bullies and, frankly, weirdos.
‘If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen’: isn’t that what everyone always says? But that depends what kind of kitchen you want. One where everyone’s got third degree burns?
To survive in politics you have to grow a skin so thick nothing, not even an armoured tank, can penetrate it.
You have to understand that it doesn’t matter how low you are feeling, or how many personal issues you are dealing with (that is the official explanation for Reeves’s distress). Or whether you’ve just had a stand- up row with your partner or fallen out with a colleague (again, this also has been posited as a reason, the suggestion being that Reeves had a bit of an altercation with the Speaker, Lindsay Hoyle – but by all accounts he is not an especially combative fellow and certainly nothing like as unpleasant as his predecessor John Bercow). No one cares. No one.
In particular, if you are a frontline politician tasked with a particularly difficult set of policies, you are seriously deluded if you believe for one second that the political capital you expend will be shared equally among your colleagues.
In the case of Reeves, she is – as Badenoch says – paying for the Prime Minister’s mistakes. But instead of putting his arm around her and absorbing some of the blows, he is doing the opposite. He’s a political vampire, sucking her dry to shore up his position.
Of course, it doesn’t help that she’s a woman. It’s not just that Labour is an old-fashioned boys’ club which has never even contemplated a woman leader (indeed Starmer himself – who once said ‘99.9 per cent of women don’t have a penis’ – doesn’t even know for certain what a woman actually is).
It’s also that women are just more open emotionally than men generally. We can’t help it – it’s part of what makes us mothers and nurturers.
Men may feel emotions just as deeply – but women are more able to express them.
And yesterday Rachel Reeves showed the world exactly how she feels about being Starmer’s whipping boy.
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