At last. I am desired. A news story this week tells me that middle-aged women are being seen as the key to winning the next election.
Ha ha! Power! Influence!
Although, as I read on through the story, I do wonder if they are they actually talking about me.
The Liberal Democrats have identified a sub-group of these middle-aged women that they are calling “The National Trusters”, who are members of the National Trust, go dog-walking a lot and care primarily about the environment.
Labour is also keen on “Take A Breakers”, referring to the readers of the colourful weekly women’s magazine, which features real-life stories such as “My girl VANISHED at best friend’s sleepover.”
There’s more! Labour has also identified the “Stevenage Woman”, who is in her forties, lives in a town or a suburb and “holds the keys to Downing Street”, which strikes me as somehow illegal, unless she works there.
One Tory MP described middle-aged women as his “bread and butter”. “Even if they think they’re not political, they have opinions about policy,” he said.
There is little more amusing in politics than parties trying to identify key voters. Anyone remember the “Mondeo Man” from the 90s? It conjures up mental images of roomfuls of earnest 24 year-old Spads, wearing lanyards and clutching coffees, who know precisely nothing about anything, making sweeping generalisations about people they’ve never met, roughly based on their aunties or the groundsmen at their former private schools. You know, real people!
But they’re not. None of these middle-aged women are me nor, I don’t think, are they anyone.
And I must say, I’m pretty bored with people trying to put me and everyone else into boxes like this.
I cast my first vote aged 25 at the 2005 election. I came into work afterwards and the man sitting opposite me said, “How did you vote?” For no other reason than a random fit of primness, I said, “That’s between me and the voting booth.”
He immediately shrieked, “You’re a Tory! You’re a Tory! You voted Tory but you don’t want to admit it!”
I was shocked. It was so aggressive. If I had voted Tory, did that suddenly make me scum? If I hadn’t, did I need to quickly protest this so that I was not thought of as scum? But that would only be on the basis of how I had voted, not on the basis of my consistent actions in real life. It was such weird bullying from an otherwise perfectly nice person. I clammed up immediately and felt uneasy around that person from then on.
I did not grow up in a politically tribal home and my university peers barely knew what day it was, let alone what party they might vote for. This, then, was my first and very unwelcome introduction to the tribal nature of politics and I recoiled from it, hard. The idea that you are such a dull person with such little faith in the “enough-ness” of your personality that you have to define yourself by political party, music choice or whether you use a Mac or a PC has always struck me as a bit tragic. There is a moment in the wine movie Sideways where Paul Giamatti’s character, Miles, screams: “I am not drinking any f***ing Merlot!” The petty inflexibility of this, Miles’s die-hard adherence to a vision of himself as a man who, above all else, does not drink “f***ing Merlot” is to me a pure metaphor for any sort of bone-headed tribalism.
Modern political people lament the bloodless management consultant-ism of politics and hanker after the old days of passion and vision. And I do get that.
But when it comes to the majority of voters, whether they are the Stevenage Woman, Mondeo Man, Ocado Lady or Pirelli Calendar dude, doesn’t everyone want the same thing? A working NHS and happy schoolchildren; a fair pension plan; safety and security; equal opportunities; a chance at owning your own home.
What else? I mean, indoor activities for the under-fives in Camden could be improved. Better co-ordination of roadworks so that for an entire month there isn’t a contraflow blocking every single exit from your postcode. And does Kentish Town Tube station really have to be shut for a whole year to fix the escalators?
What does that list of wants and desires make me? Farrow & Ball lady? Pret A Manger Whinger? Just don’t tell me it makes me a Tory. Or in fact do, go ahead. It really doesn’t matter.
