There is a point to promoting diversity. But Caroline Lucas has missed it.

When Margaret Thatcher passed away, the then Labour MP Glenda Jackson said that she may have been “the first Prime Minister of female gender… But a woman? Not on my terms.”

It is hard not to feel like left-wing critics of current senior female Conservative cabinet ministers are taking the same approach. These right-wingers are not ‘real’ women. ‘Real’ women are

lefties. Obviously.

This train of thought, consciously or otherwise, clearly led Green MP Caroline Lucas to argue that we need an all-women Cabinet to fix Brexit. By which she means stop a no-deal Brexit, and

probably stop the whole thing altogether. I’m a strong advocate of female empowerment and representation, and firmly against Brexit, no deal or otherwise. But Lucas’s idea is about as bad as

her previous one to fix Brexit – a Citizens’ Assembly. We have one of those already…it’s called Parliament.

The Prime Minister did leave something of an open goal though. Having appointed a genuinely diverse ministerial team, he proudly touted his all-male ‘war cabinet’. The imagery was clear. The

women, i.e. Theresa May, had failed, so send for the men.

As I’ve noted elsewhere, Johnson is most definitely male. That is what all his talk of being bold and self-confident all comes down to, really. As Portia Berry-Kilby put it yesterday on

TheArticle – “a cabinet of men might promise a ‘can-do’ attitude, fewer concessions, and a cabinet that acts and delivers.”

We all just need to stop being timid females and be a bit more manly. Portia argues: “We have had three years of a woman reaching out and asking for cooperation. The result? Widespread

humiliation and a postponed Brexit.”

I’d suggest that Brexiteers can’t have it both ways. They can’t complain that May was stubborn and had a bunker mentality, which they did for months of her premiership, and now complain that

she was asking for cooperation.

Either way, the latter way of thinking is a large part of the reason why the current Prime Minister’s complicated love life and laissez-faire approach to detail do very little to harm him.

Theresa May is neat and tidy, but he can’t even brush his hair properly! Isn’t it hysterical?! She used to obsess over minutiae, but he doesn’t care. Brilliant! Cooperation is for silly,

weak, women, but good old Boris is going all gung-ho, whatever the consequences. Boys will be boys, eh?

Frankly, all these tropes are as unfair and damaging to men as they are to women. In modern politics we need to do better. That didn’t seem to stop Lucas though, whose suggestion played up

to these daft stereotypes. Yes, some men, particularly those in politics, are brash and overconfident. Some women are consensus builders, team players and problem solvers – but there is

obviously a whole spectrum of traits present in both women and men. The point – the benefit – of true diversity is that you get a range of views and skills. By framing things in the way that

she did, Lucas actually makes it harder to advocate for greater diversity in politics. She confirms the stereotypes instead of trying to counter them.

The crucial thing, what Lucas and her supporters’ argument really comes down to, is that real women are liberal, left-leaning Remainers who want to stop Brexit. This is why she could so

easily overlook the presence around the Cabinet table of Priti Patel, Andrea Leadsom, Theresa Villiers, Liz Truss et al. She doesn’t even mention them in the piece outlining her idea.

Where Lucas might just have a point is in the need for a government of national unity. She is far from the first person to suggest it, but truly bringing people from different parties

together might be the only thing that gets us out of this quagmire. To work, though, it will require people with truly wide-ranging set of opinions, backgrounds and genders, something

Caroline Lucas would do well to remember.

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