WHO WILL HANDBAG FOR LABOUR?

Alexandra Artley discovers

the feminine spirit of Barbara Castle at work again among Labour women

A FEW weeks ago I stood in a flower- banked marquee in Hampshire at a very jolly wedding party. A small wind and string band piped above the lashing rain outside and champagne flowed. With the friendly directness of professionals, two fashion editors from rival glossies assessed the clothes (`That's nice. Bill Blass?'). We got on to the fact that the French still make the best silk flowers in the world. (That morning I had revived my one nice pale pink silk rose by holding it upside-down with tongs in the whirling steam of a kettle.) Gradually, another conversation drifted across from a group of BBC men clustering round a pretty black actress. `Gouldism is working. There's a nice light image coming out. . . . Gould appeals to women.'

Women as party members, potential politicians or winnable voters seem more im- portant in British poli- tics. By 1991 there will be almost 20 million women eligible to vote in Britain (52 per cent of the electorate and, for the first time, a preponderance of the work- force). It is not only Margaret Thatcher's three terms as Prime Minister that have leminised' politics, but also the wave of glamorous Seventies 'media-feminism' that has now filtered through to all age groups of women voters. Suddenly, women voters are beginning to appreciate that a success- ful female politician may not necessarily be of benefit to the female voter. We are more acutely aware than ever before of what different political parties can offer women . . . and take away.

This week at Brighton the chatter before the Women's Debate (`Labour cares for women') centred on progressive funding of the NHS (family health is a prime feminine anxiety), possible tax deductions for domestic help, increased child-care facili- ties for working mothers (now a major force in the new service industry work- force) and secure social benefits for mothers and children. It is the first step in making Labour attractive to middle-class as well as working-class women voters. On the morning of the Women's Debate it was no coincidence that Mrs Thatcher appeared on the cover of the Express promising a drive to involve more women at the Tory grass-roots.

One warm autumn afternoon, I walked through the diminutive Queen Anne streets of Westminster to visit Jenny Jeger (niece of the Labour peeress Baroness Jeger). Recently she has launched a rather more subtle campaign to attract women `high-fliers' into the Labour Party. They might well be the female equivalents of Sam Galbraith, the young consultant neurosurgeon who this year took a £10,000 cut in annual salary to turn a Conservative majority of 3,700 into a Labour majority of 2,400 in the Glasgow fringe seat of Strath- kelvin and Bearsden. Miss Jeger became the youngest chair- man of the Fabian Society in 1983 when she was 31. Today she is a partner in the firm of political lobbyists, GJW. Her drawing-room was a blaze of near-white `connoisseur modernism' with acres of cream carpet, a huge very soft cream sofa and trim little blinds covered with blue zig-zags. A small table in the room was stacked with General Trading Company- style playthings, includ- ing a plate of ceramic jam tarts.

The idea that energe- tic and 'glamorous' peo- ple are all on the Right seems to be one of the optical illusions of Mrs Thatcher's ad agency approach to political power (in the last two During the recent election, Jenny Jeger toured the country and was disappointed by the appearance of many Labour candi- dates. 'They didn't look well turned-out and that's important to inspire confidence. In London it may be sometimes fashion- able to look as if one's mind is above one appearance, but people in the rest of the country are very old-fashioned. They like their women to dress up on a Saturday night and look glamorous.' A woman at a local selection conference (`They can be terrifyingly abusive') congratulated her on not being 'a smelly armpit and hairy leg' sort of woman'.

Traditionally, Labour has been a mas- culinised party, not out deliberately to woo. Nevertheless, Labour's post-war leg- islative record (and Barbara Castle's Equal Pay Act) still firmly underpins the lives of most modern women. Ironically, the lemi- nisation of Labour' is taking place almost a century after it happened in the Conserva- tive Party. In the first volume of her autobiography, The Tamarisk Tree (Elek 1975), Dora Russell remarked that in the early days of the party a Labour Woman Organiser existed, 'not so much to support the demands of women, as to keep them in order from the point of view of male politicians.' In contrast, when Lord Arthur Balfour founded the Primrose League in 1883 (named after Disraeli's favourite flower) he created a psychologically more involved 'domestic sphere' within his party for women (and men) at the lower end of the Tory social scale. (`Every couple of years people are terrified we're running out of old dears, but then a new load of old dears comes in who all roar with approval when Michael Heseltine speaks.)' The way British political parties of Right and Left treat women as aspiring politi- cians is a subject of acute interest to American feminists, still amazed at how few of them get anywhere near the White House. Gloria Steinem's Old Etonian theory sounds v. convincing. Accounting for Mrs Thatcher's rise to power, she claims that Britain's sharply defined class structure may paradoxically provide the best springboard for a woman politican seriously aiming at the top. She claims that in normal circumstances, no male politi- cian of Right or Left would willingly give a woman a powerful job, but if absolutely no man is to be found, the OE will pull in a brilliant woman of any class to keep his own team ahead.

One morning I set off for Pimlico to try out these notions on Anne Strutt, who stood as Conservative candidate in the overwhelmingly Labour seat of Govan in the last election. In her first-floor drawing- room I sat on an apricot sofa piped with blue opposite blue chairs piped with apri- cot. When a woman favours a certain type of box-pleated valence on her chairs it always indicates a fairly dry approach to political thinking.

Miss Strutt explained that the selection committee just wanted 'someone quite jolly' for the electorate to have fun with and that women in both major parties are usually sent to hostile seats in the hope they will draw less flak than a man. 'They also wanted someone good at raising money because Conservatives always lose their deposit in that seat.' After a particu- larly gruelling appearance on a Scottish television election show, 'people were talk- ing in the street next day about how appalling I was'. But 'a nice wee guy got up in the studio audience and said, "I think she has a lot of guts tae come here." ' A visit from her rather English mother also proved not to be an electoral advantage ('WHAT A LOT OF GREENERY YOU HAVE HERE').

Anne Strutt's grandmother Lady David- son was the Conservative MP for Hemel Hempstead from 1937-1959. 'She was very stylish and used her femininity, but she wouldn't survive in today's politics.' She only had one speech, 'but it was a cracking good one'. Public speaking for women is a major hazard. 'Lack of confidence holds you back. My boyfriend says, "You're just as good as any of those apes. If you say all this at home, get out and say it out there." ' Any woman who has ever considered entering politics must surely 'sympathise with Nancy Astor when she said, following a burst of after-dinner invective, 'There! If I can do that on lemonade, what couldn't I do on gin?' One advantage that patrician Labour families have over patrician Con- servatives families is the fact they give their children a head start in public speaking. Jenny Jeger (a fairly fearless public speak- er) puts this verbal ability down to the way traditional 'intellectual Labour' families behave. 'I have never been nervous about public speaking at any time. If you come from a family background where you argue and discuss absolutely everything, it's easy to quickly formulate your views in speech.' Barbara Castle, perhaps the most naturally gifted woman public speaker this century, wrote her first infant election address at the age of six (Note for me and 1 will give you houses'). Her father kept the tattered piece of paper in his wallet until the end of his days.

Barbara Castle's voice, still bright and distinctive, came out of my telephone this week. We were talking about clothes. Mrs T's mother was a dress-maker and by a strange coincidence, Mrs C's mother was a `diminutive' milliner who made clothes to her small daughter's precise instructions from an early age. I suddenly remembered the very well defined little Courreges suits she wore as Minister of Transport, the hexagonal Charles Jourdan handbags and the comment of an old friend, Mary Clark, (`the only good thing about being a Cabinet Minister is that now she's got someone to iron her blouses to her taste').

At this moment in its history, the spirit and advice of Barbara Castle seems to me to be floating over Labour (`The quickest way to damn one's principles is to refuse to modify the ways in which they are ap- plied').

`Long before I became a Cabinet minis- ter I liked clothes and dancing. I'm a better politician because I think these things are lovely and feel, Why shouldn't everyone else have a right to them?' Perhaps refer- ring to the grimness of hard left London Labour groups Mrs Castle added, 'I'm a better politician because I'm not reacting from some deprivation I've had.'

This is a principle of Gouldism, and it is particularly important for the women in the Labour Party. The most politically far-sighted thing modern Conservatives must bear in mind about the British Labour Party is that in it there is, and was, grace.

`Is there something you want to tell us, son?'