The Sketch: Politicians to watch, perhaps, but certainly not a pleasure to listen to

An all-woman front bench was welcomed, saluted, celebrated, paid tribute to, by various MPs yesterday. It seems rude to point out how pedestrian, how stumbling, how stupid it was. And boring? Oh yes, oh yes. Exquisitely boring.

Helen Liddell welcomed "everyone's positive involvement". You have to harden yourself against remarks like that or it's easy to feel demeaned by them.

Mrs Liddell's fractured mezzo is only slightly preferable to hearing her dragging her front teeth down a blackboard but wholly preferable to Anne McGuire's angry monotone. That carries all the power and passion of Stephen Hawking's voice machine. She was reacting to a charge that the Royal Scots Dragoons had the worst recruitment record in the army.

Mrs McGuire is worth quoting in full for readers to determine for themselves whether inanity predominated over vacuity. "When I was talking to Brigadier-General Robert Gordon last week," she said, "he was actually stating that they were putting all their resources into recruitment and in fact the recruitment figures were comfortable enough given the fact that recruitment is taking place in a situation of other economic choices for people." Mrs McGuire is a minister, remember.

Then there was Ruth Kelly, up to make a statement on pensions reform. This second-term MP is the result of the same affirmative action campaign to put more women on the bench. She was recently chosen by The Spectator as politician-to-watch. Why? Because she doesn't bear being listened to. She has one of those socially conscious accents that reveal how greatly she strains for acceptance by a class she wasn't born into. Her estuarial affectation says "nointeen nointy" ­ not in an attractive West Country burr, but in a way that makes you think of ugly words such as "groise" and "ointment" and "hoik".

She simply hasn't the breeding to carry it off. For all her social aspirations she sounds as though she was educated at Westminster and Oxford. Which indeed she was. There's no room for all the boring, unintelligible rubbish she gave us. She was like a concrete poet talking about concrete poetry, assuming that as no one can understand her she needn't make an effort to be understood. What do we know? Savings have never been lower (which she denied), politicians have voted themselves the best pensions outside a bent boardroom (which she didn't refer to), and the mind-numbing complexity of pension regulation she wants to simplify was all her Government's doing (which she didn't acknowledge).

Vincent Cable asked how the Government would address the 20 per cent savings gap without compulsion to tax credits? She thanked him for his "serious", "thoughtful" and "considered" remarks and sat down. Andrew Tyrie told us about "the morass of legislation, the leviathan of the Financial Services Agency". He went on: "But within two years of the introduction of that system ­ billed by the Government as essential for the protection of small savers ­ an independent review says we need to bypass it because it has become prohibitively costly. Isn't that a savage indictment of the Government's efforts?"

Andrew Tyrie was recently a backbencher of the year, and he probably still is. Oh, if only he were a woman.

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