Shirley Tart: It should be best person for the job
It’s that old acorn again. A woman in government gets moved and the cry goes up that the female role is rubbished again by men with all progress lost in one minor reshuffle. Rot.
I have no real idea how most of the men moved around in Mr Cameron’s pack of cards will fare. Nor whether all the women who have lost premier jobs, deserved it. But how patronising to suggest as campaigners do, that any woman in a top job is better than any man, whatever their respective skills. Sorry, sisters, I’ll insist on equal opportunity, after that, it’s simply the best person for the job.
People who struggle with weight are likely to eat more unhealthy meals if they are with someone also overdoes it on the wrong foods. Likewise, says a new (and doubtless expensive) study by psychologists at the University of Birmingham, dining alongside a lean and healthy eater is likely to influence you to eat likewise. Get away, who’d have thought that!
And here’s another breathtaking move. More than 300 House of Lords employees are on equality and diversity courses to help them avoid giving offence. Oh dear, dear. Wouldn’t you have thought whoever interviewed them in the first place might have sussed out their likely people skills before taking them on? Still the consultancy now running the courses was only paid around £118,000, small fry in terms of Westminster waste.
Little girls have always dressed up. I was in Mrs Munslow’s dance troupe from about the age of three and was variously a forest-green elf, a tiny drum majorette without a proper drum and the dwarf Grumpy, played to startling likeness because I dearly wanted to be Snow White instead. All these roles demanded dressing up in strange costumes, sometimes wearing great blobs of facial colour when playing a clown and so far as I know none of us was damaged – not by that experience at any rate.
But even so, this current preoccupation of slapping mascara, lipstick and body glitter on kiddies not much more than toddlers and sending them down catwalks, beauty pageant style, is more than a bit uncomfortable. The US trend for these occasions has been picked up in this country big time and a little girl called Ocean (yes, really) has just won one of the first such pageants here. Ocean is four while a fellow competitor tottering along beside her and also complete with make-up and shimmer, was under the age of two. The winner’s glamorous mum calls her daughter ‘The Vivienne Westwood of the toddler world.’ That’s why I feel so uncomfortable at the mega move from Grumpy the dwarf on stage in the chapel schoolroom, to tiny girls parading alarmingly like mini starlets and open to attract quite the wrong type of attention.
There’s nothing else you can say about the Paralympic Games as they wind down and competitors go home except quite magnificent, humbling and inspiring. Their chairs, prosthetic limbs, adapted gear and of course, their medals now leave our shores for all parts of the world. But what they have left behind and which is something we shall never forget, are the memories of skill and fortitude, of grace and grit, of meeting with triumph and disaster and treating both of them just the same. They have rounded off a quite spectacular sporting summer.
By Shirley Tart
Comments for: "Shirley Tart: It should be best person for the job"
Roger
It is the strangest reshuffle I can remember. The biggest failure in the government is Osborne. His policies are clearly failing and he spends most his time in hiding. He has the charisma of a toilet bowl and has been left in place. He is saying more of the same whilst everyone is going for growth. His retention is a sign that nothing is really going to change.
The second most discredited member of the government is Hunt. To put him in charge of the NHS is certain sign that the government is wholly intent on destroying the NHS as we know it. Hunt has no credibility so that is clearly a move for disruption demonstration and possibly riots.
May has been left in place despite the failure of the home office policies of G4S in the police, Olympics security, police cuts and the gross mismanagement of the Border Agency by unconsidered and unnecessary cuts.
The changes at Transport are equally odd. Why demote a promising female high riser if the Heathrow third runway has been kicked into the long grass? Or are we expecting the Judicial Review on the West Coast Main Line to be highly politically embarrassing. She has been replaced by a MP who they say has no axe to grind but in fact represents Derbyshire, where last remnants of our railway train construction industry survives?
As much as they are trying to get away from it I suspect they have just up’ed the anti on the "Omni shambles".
Moving this way I can not see them lasting until 2015, they may have changed the law to require a two thirds majority on a vote of no confidence, but that will not save them from the disgrace of rioters on the steps of the Palace on Westminster, they will be forced to resign.
James
I wouldn't disagree with the general principle but this article would have more credibility if it had examined the reasons for some of the sackings/non-appointments.
Let's have a look at Justine Greening, moved out of her job as Environment Secretary and replaced by the Star's current hero, Mr Paterson.
Among the reasons for this change is that Ms Greening opposed the third runway at Heathrow while Mr Paterson wants to build it. But do you know what? The Tory manifesto - that document they were (nearly) elected on the basis of - itself opposed the runway.
I suspect Ms Greening won't be citing her sex as the reason she's been shunted out. She'll be saying it's because she stuck to her party's policy.
doubter
Best sacking was Varsi who as party chairman sat in goverment despite being un-elected to do so a bit like the Fib Dems !
Steve
It's same old, same old & it matters not who's party is involved!! Cabinet reshuffles have been the same rubbish for as long as I can remember, you get a bunch of people that suck at their jobs, moved on to other jobs they can do equally as bad at & the cabinet gets filled with new blood that we know very well before they start are going to be just as incompetent as the people that have just left.
Out in the real world it isn't like that as we all know for example, I'm a welder & if my boss came to me one day & said "Steve, you suck so we're having a reshuffle & you can have the managing directors job as of monday" I'd be looking at them like they were crazy!
The point being we don't know if these people getting moved around the government even have the qualifications to be there as there is an abundance of incompetence all through government today....