How magnanimous. Harriet Harman, the acting leader of the Labour Party, has granted Diane Abbott a mercy nomination. They don’t agree with each other politically, but, heck, they’re both women. That should obviously override any and all other considerations, right?

Despair, thy name is tokenism.

Ed Balls has joined in too, eager to prove his pro-diversity credentials. He’s already got his 33 nominations, so he’s asked MPs intending to nominate him to nominate Diane Abbott instead. I think this demonstrates not so much good sportsmanship on Ed Ball’s part but rather just what sort of threat he considers Diane to be. That’d be “absolutely no threat whatsoever.”

Perhaps I’m being a little cynical. Perhaps after yesterday’s piece about the uncomfortable morality of positive discrimination I’m being overly sensitive to this rather public determination to ‘get a black woman on the ballot’ to make Labour look like a more woman and ethnic minority friendly party when the truth is that Labour’s parliamentary party have done little more than pat Diane on the head for standing and then utterly disregard her presence in the contest.

There is, after all, another left wing back-bench rebel trying to get on the ballot. This candidate has actually got more nominations, so in terms of ensuring there’s a broad spectrum of political opinion in the contest, this candidate might actually be the sensible one to pick. But this candidate is a white male. An old one, at that. No-one’s asking other MPs to give John McDonnell a nomination. He’s left to stand – and fall – on his own two feet, and if you want people to be truly equal that’s how things should be for Diane Abbott too.

I don’t think I’m ever going to understand this sort of logic, but then I’m not the kind of person Labour is trying to appeal to with this sort of highly public display of some-of-my-best-friends-are-black-ism.

So, my message to Labour MPs is this: Don’t you dare. Don’t nominate her just because she’s a woman. Don’t. You won’t be helping. Not really.

I don’t envy you. You’ve set yourselves up as the party that reflects the diversity of the nation, but when it really counts, when it really really matters you’ve looked to Oxbridge educated White Males to lead you, and that’s just plain embarrassing isn’t it? Would it really be so unthinkable to simply assert that Diane hasn’t been nominated because, well, she’s a bit crap?

Would that be so, so, so unthinkable?

You know what I’d love? I’d love to be able to write something along the lines of “every single woman who’s a minister or cabinet minister is there out of merit and ability to do the job, rather than tokenism. That matters more than the numbers.”

I’d love to be able to write that… but I’d have to be a fool to believe it. For it to be true, it’d have to be true of every single minister – not just the women. The exception that disproves it, quite obviously, is George Osborne, someone who’s as qualified to be Chancellor as I am. From Wikipedia:

Osborne’s first job was to provide data entry services to the National Health Service to record the names of people who had died in London.^[8] He also briefly worked for Selfridges. He originally intended to pursue a career as a journalist, but after failing to become one at a national newspaper, was informed of a vacant job at the Conservative Central Office.

Quite the impressive CV, I’m sure you’ll agree. But perhaps Osborne’s monumental over-achievement is a good thing for those of us with similarly uninspiring CVs? But where’s the evidence of the merit that justifies holding arguably the most important job in the Government? You can’t argue he’s got good leadership skills that make him the kind of person who’d be good at running the Treasury. You can’t argue that he’s a good media performer. You can’t, in fact, argue that he inspires trust in the electorate on his ability to steward the Government’s tinkering with the economy.

So why is George Osborne Chancellor? Why does he have the Number 2 job? The only possible explanation is his relationship with David Cameron. David Cameron, after all, gets to pick the Cabinet and like most (all?) other Prime Ministers before him he’s chosen to reward his closest, most trusted friends with the top jobs, then populate the rest of the spots with people he thinks capable of doing the job. New Politics? My arse.

We could, of course, change this. We could insist that the Government tries to seek a gender balance and, in all likelihood, we’d probably be no worse off then we currently are in terms of quality of Government, but women would be worse off, I think. It’s not enough just to see women in power, achieving great things. To really count, to really make a difference to young women who might aspire to such things, they need to know that women in power got there by being superb, unmatched in skill and talent – and not by schmoozing their way into the Prime Minister’s Inner Circle, or worse because there’s some arbitrary quota to create the illusion of meritocracy.

The call for gender balance for the sake of it is just another version of the same fucked up, un-meritocratic system we already have. In politics, it’s all about Prime Ministers wanting to make sure they can trust and work with the people who run those key departments far more than it’s about how good these could-be ministers might be. What the lack of women in the cabinet reveals is how few women have been able to penetrate Cameron’s inner circle to become essential to him – except, perhaps, for Theresa May. This may indeed be true of Clegg too, who’s rewarded HIS inner circle – another sausage fest from what we can tell.

We know how Brown regarded women in his Government – Window Dressing. So, perhaps, let’s look at this seeming reversal as progress, instead. We’re seeing the real underlying truth for once and can see how much work really needs to be done. No fig leaves, no window dressing, just the cold, naked truth which I’ll take over a pleasant fiction at any time.

As an aside, I looked at Theresa May’s Wikipedia page and found this:

From 1977 to 1983 she worked at the Bank of England, and from 1985 to 1997, as a financial consultant and senior advisor in International Affairs at the Association for Payment Clearing Services.

A natural fit for the Home Office, I’m sure you’ll agree.