SHARED OPINION

A feminist upbringing is fine if you want to become an engineer or chairman of the Tory party

FRANK JOHNSON

Female models, responsible for draping themselves over new cars and appearing in their underwear in advertisements to promote this year's British International Motor Show in Birmingham, would describe as 'out-of-date' and 'pathetic' the government's stereotyping of women into becoming politicians. It follows the case of Miss Estelle Morris who was browbeaten into becoming secretary of state for education when she would obviously have been happier reclining across the bonnet of the new Mini.

Nonetheless, 'out-of-date' and 'pathetic' was how Mrs Patricia Hewitt, the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, in an interview, described those girls. She called for more women engineers in the car industry. But the models would take the view that Mrs Hewitt's attitudes go back to Miss Germaine Greer, and early 1970s feminism. Women have moved on since then. They want to spend a few years having a good time with Latin American polo players, Old Etonian wine merchants, and the occasional plebeian Formula One driver. Then they intend to settle down in their early twenties and have babies with a rich, idle, preferably titled landowner — instead of becoming design engineers in Coventry, as their mothers would have done before them.

Mrs Hewitt thinks all that is unnatural. Perhaps it is — compared with the restricting way in which she was brought up in the 1960s. In those days a girl was supposed to aspire to a degree in environmental studies at a plate-glass university, leaving her books only to participate in sit-ins to prevent Thatcherite historians from lecturing on the Soviet Union's responsibility for the Cold War. There were few other opportunities open to women.

Inevitably, Miss Morris eventually decided that she hated being secretary of state for education, and resigned. She had been ruthlessly exploited by men, notably the Prime Minister, in an antiquated attempt on their part to curry favour with a feminist-dominated society. A trim 50-year-old, with a pleasing personality, it is not too late for Miss Morris to take up modelling.

Another case is that of Theresa May, the Conservative MP. Mr Ben Macintyre, the Tinies's parliamentary sketchwriter, described how she looked in the Commons this week: 'Theresa May had dressed for the occasion as d'Artagnan's Mother, with red handbag, red jacket with epaulettes, shoes sharpened to

red rapier points, red lips and slightly red eyes.'

This suggests that the girl is a born poledancer, Her natural habitat is leaping on to tables at Stringfellow's before groups of noisy, amiably tipsy, male City traders, Yet a feminist upbringing has fitted her only for such work as chairman of the Conservative party, babbling for more women on shortlists, and losing her party thousands of votes by chattering about the Tories being the nasty party. Our daughters deserve better than this.

Doubtless the liberal Establishment — and the rest of the Establishment, if there is now any other kind — is right constantly to tell us how to equate Islam with antiWestern violence or terrorism. But we are also being bullied into denying our own civilisation.

In an attempt to be decent about Islam, officialdom and its spokesmen are in danger of overdoing it. They are forever telling us that there was a time, comparatively recently — the Middle Ages or possibly the Dark Ages — when Islamic civilisation was more advanced than Christendom or the West. Why, Arabian scholars gave us back Greek philosophy, and so on.

Islam. the books tell us, emerged during the first quarter of the 7th century. By AD 713 Islamic conquerors were masters of Spain, all of the shores of the southern and eastern Mediterranean, and were pressing upon France and Italy. The thought occurs: what was the civilisation — the arts, sciences and letters — which these conquerors brought with them out of what is now Saudi Arabia? Was it more 'advanced' than that of Europe and Christendom?

Had not the lands which it conquered around the Mediterranean been previously conquered hundreds of years before by Alexander, the bringer of Hellenic culture, and later by Rome, which perpetuated Hellenic culture?

It is important to know how Greek, and therefore Western, civilisation reached and flourished on the southern and eastern Mediterranean shores which later became Islamic, and still are. Most of the Gospels, though about events, or alleged events, in a land many miles across the sea from Greece, were written in Greek.

The other day I needed to look up some

thing in Creasey's Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World (1851) — an old favourite of some of us, in the Everyman edition still in print as recently as the 1970s. Flicking through, my eye fell on his chapter on the battle of Arbela (331 BO. There Alexander the Great defeated the Persians.

Alexander's victory, he says:

... not only overthrew an Oriental dynasty, but established European rulers in their stead. It broke the monotony of the Eastern world by the impression of western energy and superior civilisation; even as England's present mission is to break up the mental and moral stagnation of India and Cathay, by pouring upon and through them the impulsive current of Anglo-Saxon commerce conquest.

Creasey describes how, in every part of the east that he conquered, Alexander founded Greek towns and cities: 'Such was the ascendancy of Greek genius, so wonderfully comprehensive and assimilating as the cultivation which it introduced that, within 30 years after Alexander crossed the Hellespont', Hellenism predominated in every country from that sea to the Indian ocean. Also, 'the language of Pericles and Plato became the language of the statesmen and sages who dwelt in the mysterious land of the pyramids and the sphinx'.

Finally:

The learning and science of the Arabians were in a far Less degree the result of original invention and genius than the reproduction in an altered form of the Greek philosophy and the Greek lore, acquired by the Saraccnie conquerors together with their acquisition of the provinces which Alexander had subjugated nearly a thousand years before the armed disciples of Mohammed commenced their career in the east.

Creasey accepts that 'Western Europe in the Middle Ages drew its philosophy, its arts and its science principally from Arabian teachers.' But from that he deduces different evidence from that of today's multiculturalist Establishment. The 'intellectual influence of ancient Greece, poured on the eastern world by Alexander's victories', was 'brought back to bear on Mediaeval Europe by the spread of the Saracenic powers'.

Creasey's tone may not earn him a place in today's core curriculum. But he would also have argued that we Britons were rather backward before being Hellenised by Julius Caesar. Not that today's Establishment objects to anyone who says that.