Not up to the job? Irrelevant: she's a woman

IT WAS bad enough being patronised by men in blazers in the 'ladies-God-bless-'em' days of my youth. It's worse in my middle age, when the offenders affect collarless shirts or Armani suits.

Recently I heard pleasant Simon Bates, the radio presenter, being accused of sexism by the right-on lawyer Geoffrey Robertson for making the unexceptionable statement that the Director of Public Prosecutions, Barbara Mills, needed to be put on the spot over the Colin Stagg affair. Mr Bates was understandably baffled; I was furious. I haven't felt so condescended to since the late Sixties, when the Conservative Research Department produced a sensible document in favour of sexual equality under the law and called it 'Fair Shares for the Fair Sex'.

At least you knew where you were with the blazers. They felt we should not trouble our pretty little heads with serious matters, and were cheerily open about exercising discrimination. But because their prejudices owed little or nothing to ideology, they were often open to change. It was entirely typical of the Tories that one minute Jim Prior was discussing with Ted Heath who should be the Cabinet token woman and the next the said token woman had led the palace revolution. She was mad, and boy, didn't she get even]

Of course, Lady T was never honoured as a feminist heroine. All through her time in power the chattering classes droned on about how tragic it was that Shirley Williams or some other caring paragon hadn't become the first female Prime Minister. They obdurately refused to see that she overturned the blazers' perception of women as soft, indecisive and incapable of leadership. Tough broads such as Golda Meir and Indira Gandhi were too foreign to rock such perceptions: England had to experience its very own blue-eyed, blonde, peaches-and-cream thug. (Of course, she may slightly have overdone it: a lot of young blazers fear that women in power will all be hard, inflexible and megalomaniacal.)

Watching Thatcher routing the blazers was satisfying and it was accompanied by the steady erosion of discriminatory assumptions and the sound of falling bastions. As women advanced widely on merit, in Britain the fringe loonies shouting for positive discrimination went largely ignored and politically correct carry- on was contained. But then the collarless shirts moved in and decided to throw their weight behind the madder element in the sisterhood. Some of them may have been trying to help; others were merely using feminism to further their own careers. Either way, they are doing women a great deal of harm.

Shirts demand women be given high-powered jobs whether they're up to them or not. On committees where academics, media types or the left dominate, male soi-disant feminists drone on about gender balance. 'Why don't we have a woman as the opening speaker?' they say. Respond with 'Because we couldn't think of a suitable one', and you are accused if you're male of sexism and if female of a Thatcher-like refusal to countenance any competition.

Some shirts just enjoy making trouble. Others get a frisson from forcing the issue so as to emphasise the lack of female talent: some shirts secretly dislike women. The most dangerous are those who push obdurately for the appointment of underqualified women, who, of course, must never be criticised for incompetence. They push, too, the full PC agenda relating to sexual harassment, hurt feelings and the rest. In other words, they treat women as touchy inferiors - a strange way of showing respect.

Shirts are either ideologues - and therefore not susceptible to reason - or apparatchiks who find it convenient in career terms to be right-on and even more convenient to encourage the appointment of people who present no threat.

Shirts get their way - especially in academia - by terrorising nervous colleagues into acquiescence. Campuses are full of wimps who let themselves be steam-rollered for fear of being labelled misogynistic. Afterwards, in private, they grumble about the unfairness of the system and ridicule inadequate female colleagues. 'Why don't women set up single-sex universities if they're so bloody sensitive?' an academic said to me recently. And when I upbraided him for not fighting against all this rubbish, he shrugged and said: 'I became an academic because I wanted to teach: I hate confrontation.'

The shirts' campaign is manifestly unfair to men done out of jobs they deserve. It is even more unfair to women. If I were a conspiracy theorist I would conclude that men pushing positive discrimination have a cunning plan to over-promote women in order to discredit them. Any clear-minded person can see that the way for women to gain more power is to ensure they earn and can handle it, and that means, inter alia, being able to take criticism, however much they hate it. There are, fortunately, clear-minded women around, and it is often they who take the lead in resisting the promotion of sisters to their level of incompetence.

There are some clear-minded and brave men around, too. It is encouraging to see Tony Blair resisting positive discrimination in the Labour Party. I hope he has the stomach to take on the shirts.