Jess Phillips: Where are all the senior women in Rishi Sunak’s cabinet?

Rishi Sunak has been crowned. For a man with many homes, he has now moved into another one at 10 Downing Street. Thank goodness he has a des res in California to escape to when working from home gets too much.

He won his crown after 200-odd people just like him decided he should be in charge of our country. Now they must be rewarded for their help in his rise to office. Sunak couldn’t beat Liz Truss and she was beaten by a lettuce, so I imagine he is very grateful to those who got him the gig.

The dishing out of cabinet positions was the biggest prize he had to offer those who delivered him a job for which he had failed the interview. And dish he did. By and large, his cabinet is made up of the same people who were in the cabinet when he served as Boris Johnson’s chancellor. And we can all agree that that administration covered itself in glory.

The Tories are cock-a-hoop in Westminster this week, which I guess is because they have such low expectations. Liz Truss, whose time in office was so chaotic and poorly managed, has allowed Sunak’s cabinet to appear as if it’s a grown-up one to Tory MPs, aside from the fact that it is largely the same Johnson cabinet that collapsed in total moral disgrace.

Sitting around Sunak at the cabinet table are a lot of people who defended both Cummings and Johnson’s rule-breaking in order to keep their feet firmly under that table. How they cannot see that what came before was the exact reason we ended up with the Truss premiership is beyond me. They have all been taught that they can do what the hell they like, regardless of the facts. Truss was forged in the environment of that cabinet room. We’ve got to a point where if people don’t run out of voting lobbies screaming and crying, they think they’ve had a good day. The bar couldn’t be lower.

Sunak has made the cabinet a little different, in that he’s reduced the number of women in it. Seven women sit in a cabinet of 24. Seven! The only great office to go to a woman goes to Suella Braverman, who was sacked for impropriety and a security breach six days before. I guess Sunak only gave her the job because she helped him get his and, let’s face it, he has also been groomed in a government which felt the rules didn’t apply.

Whilst re-elevating Braverman, he has also elevated two of her male home office ministers, presumably because he doesn’t much think she can do the job on her own. Now he has the security minister and immigration minister in cabinet too, primarily to keep an eye on Suella. He will argue that it is because they are both very important positions, which does suggest the home office minister who leads on the issue of violence against women isn’t as important. Girly stuff, you see.

So one compromised and babysat woman in a great office of state is no reason to celebrate. The six other women will have to work doubly hard to make sure that 51 per cent of the population is not forgotten in policy-making.

Sunak, I’m afraid, has some pretty bad form in this regard because when Covid-related support was handed out, it felt very much as if no women had been in the room when decisions were made. Childcare was left in a total state of disarray, women were left poorer after the pandemic than any other group and women’s economic productivity seems to have been entirely missing from any of the industrial or economic strategies of Sunak’s time at the Treasury.

Representation isn’t just tokenism, despite what right-wing commentators might say. It matters that the life experience and economic pitfalls of the population are considered when policy is created. If the government wanted growth, as they keep telling everyone they do – regardless of the fact that they have ruled for 12 years of stagnant and low growth – they would seriously be considering how the productivity of half the population might be able to help with that.

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Access to broadband and fast trains (chance would be a fine thing) doesn’t help if the infrastructure around care isn’t considered. I can’t get on a high-speed train to work if I’ve got two kids to occupy and my blind father has had another fall.

I have seen again and again how women’s lives are considered a niche issue rather than the main event. If there are no powerful women in the room, it will continue to happen. I can already hear the rebuttal that Liz Truss was a woman and she was dreadful, but that argument only holds if you think that Liz Truss is the embodiment of all women and her failure belongs to us all.

Liz Truss didn’t fail because she was a woman, she failed because she was a right-wing ideologue who was unfit for the job. I can see plenty of those left around the cabinet table so they can’t be too fussed about that.

Half of my job in Westminster is just being in the room to remind people that women exist and that maybe our policies should reflect that. I can guarantee now that when Sunak finally does announce his budget, within 24 hours we will be treated to a graph that shows that those being hardest hit by any decision will be the poorest women in society.

No one will be surprised when poor and vulnerable women are once again told that it is they who must bear the brunt of tough decisions, because of mistakes made and cheered by many of those around the cabinet table. Sunak won’t suffer, his cabinet won’t feel even the tiniest of pinches. He’ll jet off with his family to one of his many homes and congratulate himself on making the hard choices.